Chiriquí Chatter

I received the following notice from Giovy.

READ & RELAX BOOKSTORE

BIG SALE!!

This weekend (Sat 17 and Sun 18)

USED AND SELECTED POCKETS (more than 50 tittles)

ONLY $3.00

The rest of our pockets (paperback) remain at cover price.

We open 9am to 6pm

Giovanna Mariela
Read & Relax Boquete Bookstore
1st Bookstore in Boquete - More than books!!
Plaza Los Establos
202-2158
info@readnrelax.com
giovy@readnrelax.com

Tags: Books, Boquete, Businesses

I posted that I had replaced my old Canon printer and still have this ink cartridge. It is yours for the asking. I will wait another week and then I am going to drop it off with Alex at INFOX and he can give it away.

You may be wondering why I would buy a cartridge before I really needed it. Well, in Panama, you can never be sure that a store is going to have cartridges when you need them. Many times I went to buy one, only to find that they were out of stock and the store had no idea when the next batch would be in.

After Wendy’s review, I had to stop in Renagado’s and see what everyone is talking about.

Arroz negro isn’t something that I would typically order, but I will try anything once. Following is a photo of a standard order for two. It may be listed for two, but it fed three with one large helping left for another meal.
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Tags: Restaurants

Yesterday prices for gas went up.

It was just about a year ago that I bought an Olympus 550 UZ camera. In only one year’s time Olympus has released two models to replace the 550. Technology, whether it is in computers or cameras, doesn’t have that long of a life cycle anymore.

While, in general, I have loved the Olympus 550, when Casio announced the EXILIM Pro EX-F1, I got the bug. Then as the Casio reviews started coming in, I saw that it had too many flaws in the initial release and that it would take a couple of generations, before it might be worth the money. Plus, it appears to be as large as a SLR.

As I was reading the Casio reviews, I saw Olympus release the new 570. It had changed several items that I interested me. While I thought the 560 changes were minimal. the 570 had made major improvement. I was hooked.

In general, all functions of the camera have been refined. It feels solid. The zoom ring was one thing I wanted. The manual focus has improved. It now accepts an external flash. It has face detection. It went from 7.1 to 10 mega pixels. The lens cover snaps in place. Many more items can be seen on the Olympus site. The one thing that Olympus didn’t change is that it still used xD memory. If Olympus would move to the the SD memory, I think they would increase their sales.

While it is smaller than a SLR, it gives me most of the capability of a SLR without having to change or carry extra lenses. It is larger than most point and shoot, but still small enough to be carried around, which I do all the time.

I am going to send my old flame, the 550 UZ, to my son. I know that he needs a good camera to send me photos of my McKinney grandkids. Think he will get the hint?

Tags: Cameras

Back on the 12th, I received an email from my monitoring service that CC was down and posted the event on the CC Status Blog.

The following day, I learned that my webhost had moved CC to the web host’s new Clustered service. I can see what appears to be several improvements by this move, but I have also had a couple problems afterwards also.

I believe that my Web host is trying to improve things, but there are still a few ruff edges.

CC was also down in the morning of the 14th and I submitted a trouble ticket. After several hours, I received a response from the web host saying that everything appeared up from their end. The implication was that I was mistaken. However, there is evidence of a problem, because all of the AWSTAT history was cleared for the month. The past two days history also seems very low, so I can’t be certain that it is recording correctly.

Since the move to the Clustered Environment, WordPress has failed to post two scheduled posts. This may mean that I need to re-install WordPress, but I will wait to see if tomorrow’s scheduled post goes. I usually post the “one-liners” as a scheduled post as an indicator that I am here. If the last post was one of the One-liners and it stays for more than one day, I may be away.

The new Clustered Environment now has Fantastico. This is a product I wanted in the past and was told that I could not have it because I had been moved to a “Last Hope” server. Now that I have it back, I no longer need it since I can keep up with WP upgrades faster than the outdated Fantastico scripts.

I guess the real purpose of this post is to let you know that if CC is down, you can go to the CC Status Site to see if there is any information on what is happening.

Tags: Blog, WordPress

I had a friend ask me to look at his PC the other day. His children need it for school work and Windows was taking forever.

I looked at his aging PC and told mim my recommendation was to replace it. He asked for a recommendation. I told him that he should get one similar to THIS. He got on the Internet and placed the order.

Yoytec sent him an email giving him the price and an account number in Global Bank to deposit the payment. Then he faxed the deposit slip to Yoytec. In two more days he had the PC delivered by Fletes Chavale for about $4.00.

He was interested in a dual boot system with Windows XP and Linux. I told him I would install Linux after he had Windows installed. I was interested in seeing the system, since I had suggested that he consider it.

I opened it up to see how well it was put together. The DVD write and the Maxtor HD were both SATA, which kept the cabling minimal and airflow better.

All in all for $398, I still think it is a pretty good deal. Linus installed without a problem, recognizing both the integrated audio and video. For a cheap PC, it runs very fast. This system included a flash card reader so that moving photos to the PC is easy and fast. The reader didn’t support the xD format, so it would not work for me.

I took the following photo before the XP installer came. It took about 2 hours for him to install Windows XP, Office 2007, Kaspersky AV and a few other items. Linux installed in about an hour. It took me a little longer than normal. I still get confused with some Spanish installation instructions.

When I left the students were trying out Linux and speaking pretty favorable about it. It will be interesting to see in a month or so which system is getting the most use.

Tags: Linux