Equipment failure

If it hasn't been one thing with regard to this trip, it's been another. Needless to say, I still don't have my writeup of the camp, and I don't have pictures up yet either. Camera, car and computer -- all have had problems.

Camera: My camera (Nikon D70 digital SLR) quit on the drive down to California. It took a picture Thursday morning, but by Thursday afternoon something had quit and instead of pictures all I got were what looked like error indications. Fortunately I had a PDF copy of the manual on my laptop so Thursday night I confirmed that something had failed.

Friday morning we went to Leo's Camera Shop in Klamath Falls where I learned that a replacement camera body was out of the question: the newer cameras won't use my "older" lenses. This Nikon guy wound up with a Canon S3 IS (nice camera, btw) and a bit of a learning curve to climb up fast, but at least I had a camera to record the event. (The D70 went to the camera repair shop yesterday -- but as soon as it was in the door, it started working again.)

Car: On Wednesday the alternator bearings failed. It was fortunate that it happened here within driving distance of the auto repair shop and not, say, on Mt. Lassen, a very long tow to the nearest repair shop (not to mention in an area with no cellphone signal). Fortunately the car was fixed yesterday morning and is now back on the road.

Computer: I'd known for some time that there were a number of updates available for my Kubuntu Linux 6.10 system, but there never seemed to be time to install them. So in a foolish move, I decided to let the computer automatically update everything during the day yesterday, figuring it was a three or four hour task.

Got home in the afternoon ready to finish the pictures and post them... only to find the machine had gone about 1% of the way into the upgrades and quit: the Java Runtime Environment wouldn't install. D'oh -- I'd run into that before and forgot! But worse, the incomplete upgrades had left it in a state where it wouldn't boot into the graphic user interface. All I had was command-line operation, which was no good for processing photos!

Couldn't find my Kubuntu 6.10 CD (it was misfiled), but found a Linux LiveCD (lightweight Xubuntu 7.04) that let me access the machine through a GUI, pack up my files, and transfer them to the house server machine (Win2K) in advance of a new system installation -- only this time I would finally upgrade to Kubuntu Linux 7.04. Except I didn't have a Kubuntu 7.04 CD. So I turned the server machine loose to download the CD overnight, and burned it this morning (after scrounging around for and installing a Windows CD-burning utility I'd had). So this evening I plan to install the new system.

So maybe tomorrow I'll finally have pictures and prose posted.