Day 2187

I spent the day trying to solve a series of vexing technical problems. I still can't figure out why the camera I normally use to take Santa pictures fails to trigger the strobe lights when I press the shutter button. It didn't used to do this. I think it an auto-focus problem with the lens. I could be wrong. Whenever I hear a beep confirming focus, everything is fine. When the lens starts hunting and fails to focus, the shutter won't fire. I tried a variety of different lenses and metering styles trying to isolate the problem, but I didn't have much luck. Nothing I did made the problem go away. Oh, well. I guess I'll have to use the back up camera again tomorrow.

I want to upgrade the system of my desktop computer so I can run the current version of Pro Tools.  The problem is that a lot of software I use everyday still needs my much older operating system. I'm not touching any of the Apple operating systems after they stopped naming them after cats. If I installed El Capitan or Yosemite, nothing would run. My software is all too old. There's got to be a system that's new enough to run Pro Tools 12 and old enough not to crash everything else. Maybe Mountain Lion is what I need. This OS may already be obsolete to most people, but it's still new to me. When I tested Mountain Lion on my laptop, everything seemed to work. When I tried running my desktop computer with an external boot drive with Mountain Lion installed, there were all sorts of problems. Sure, I guess I could upgrade all my software, but the newer versions of Adobe products are all subscription based now. I prefer to own software instead of rent it. At any rate, I still don't know if Mountain Lion will run the software I need and I don't have the nerve to install it just to find out.

Janet thinks the dehumidifier still isn't getting her closet dry enough, so I decided to move it to the bedroom today and see if that made any difference. The only difference I noticed was that the bedroom quickly became warmer than the rest of the house. There wasn't enough air flow through the room and the warm exhaust air from the dehumidifier gradually made the bedroom five degrees hotter than the rest of the house. Basically, my experiment with moving the dehumidifier failed. My search for the perfect operating system for my aging desktop computer failed. And my attempt to discover what was wrong with my camera failed. I'm three for three today.

At least breakfast was good. Actually, dinner was pretty good as well. I've started using our little George Foreman Grill to cook burgers and pork chops. It's quick, it tastes almost as good as cooking on the grill outside, and there's virtually no mess.  In six minutes I had a tasty, perfectly seared burger without any pots and pans to clean. That's my kind of cooking.

All the photo equipment is packed and ready to load in the car tomorrow morning. If I can make it through the next two days, I will have survived another year of Santa pictures. Maybe when things settle down, I'll finally get around to putting up a Christmas tree. It's hard to say this year. I'm so tired that I could easily imagine waking up Christmas morning and not even remember what day it was.

Emmitt is today's Dalmatian of the Day

Watch of the Day