Manual Overload

There comes a time when all people break down and do the unthinkable: They read the manual.
- Author Unknown -

In our family – I read the manual before I push any buttons, turn any knobs, plug anything in. The Car Guy doesn’t. (This post, How to Boil Water, is a good example of the way we approach these things.) What about your family? Is Manual Reading a ‘Pink Job – Blue Job‘ thing, or do you think it is non-gender specific?

I have a New Camera (Canon PowerShot SX50 HS).  New buttons, new dials, new printed manual. No, not a big manual. A mini-manual – the one that says ‘Getting Started’. This showed me how to insert the battery and memory card and warned me, in 3 pages of tiny type, of all the safety precautions I should follow. ‘Getting Started” assured me that I could take my first few pictures without knowing what all the buttons and dials will do – so I bravely went where I would not normally go, and I took a few pictures. Then I removed the battery and put it in the charger because it was dead. I took that as a sign – the ‘Getting Started’ Manual didn’t really think I was ready to use this camera.

The real manual is a 286 page document stored in a PDF document that is password protected. A password protected document often severely limits certain useful features of a PDF document, and so it is with this one, as you will see in a moment. The document is set up so you can view two 5.5 X 8.5 inch pages at a time on your computer or a single page on iPad or iPhone like devices. So far, so good (though trying to read the manual on a phone is a chore of immense frustration.)

I wanted to print parts of the document and I believed that each two page spread  would print quite nicely on an 8.5 X 11 sheet of paper. The document believed otherwise, insisting that each half a page deserved a full page of paper. End of discussion – for now.

Here is my new camera. The only button that I am very sure about is the one that says ‘ON/OFF’. The rest are a bit of a mystery right now.

Here are the two pages in the manual that explain all the dials and buttons.

This is the same two pages, but edited to show what I understood by the time the battery was charged.

This is one of the more interesting things in my yard right now – dead things from last year. Maybe by the time there are green things and flowers, I’ll have mastered the macro feature!

There Be Pirates

The average man will bristle if you say his father was dishonest, but he will brag a little if he discovers that his great-grandfather was a pirate.
- Bern Williams -

I’ve been drawing again. The Draw Something app on my iPad is letting me express my creative talents. Okay, I realize I am rather talentless, but I’m having a good time drawing.

Can you guess what I was drawing? The category was ‘There Be Pirates’. Does that help? The word was 5 letters long.

There are many very talented cartoonists on the internet – here are a few that I have discovered:

• Mark Armstrong

• Doodlemum

• Mike Smith

Aren’t these people good? They can draw clothes!

Since my last post about Drawing (A Drawing Game) I’ve earned enough ‘coins’ to buy colours – including green, which the Draw Something app doesn’t include when you first start playing.

Now I can draw grass. A green squiggly line is grass. A similar squiggly line, only in blue, is water. You can see from my drawing above that I’ve drawn water – and not just plain water, but waves. Can you see the shark in the water? I hope not because I didn’t draw one. I think it would be very hard to draw a stick shark…

Life is the art of drawing without an eraser.
John W. Gardner -

A Drawing Game

Third Daughter and The Car Guy have been playing Draw Free on their iPads. They invited me to join, so I downloaded the App a few days ago. The premise is simple enough. Player 1 chooses one of 3 supplied words -  which they then illustrate. They send the resulting drawing to Player 2 who tries to guess what the word is. Player 2 is told how many letters are in the word, and they are given a selection of letters to choose from.

It is an odd game for us to play. None of us seem to have the artistic gene. Then, there is the issue I have with the colour palette. They only give you four colours: black, red, blue and yellow.  They don’t give you green. How can anyone draw without green?

Correct answers earn you some points and once you have enough points, I think you can trade them for more colours. Or maybe not. I’m not too clear about that part. But it doesn’t matter, because when three people who can’t draw very well play a game like this, it will be an awfully long time before we earn very many points.

Here is one of my very best drawings. Can you guess what word I was illustrating? It is 8 letters long and it has a ‘k’ in it.

Here is another one of my iPad posts: What My iPad2 has Taught Me – as you can see, I haven’t progressed beyond stick men and I can’t draw clothing yet.

A Responsive Theme

It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change.
- Charles Darwin -

Mooch

This is Mooch. He is a very large cat (see story The Cat Compendium) that may not be the brightest bulb in the box, but he certainly was extremely responsive to change. It took him about a nanosecond to accept that he no longer lived at our house and had been adopted by the people next door.

But Mooch isn’t what this story is really about. This is about my blog, and your blog, and how everyone reads our blogs. Did you know that more and more people are using their phones or digital tablets to view our ever so entertaining stories? And did you know that a blog that looks just fine on a computer screen can be much more difficult to read on a tiny phone screen if the theme of the blog hasn’t been taught to be Responsive?

My blog uses a WordPress.com theme, and WordPress has recently introduced a number of themes that will morph into whatever shape works best for the machine that is being used to look at the blog. (You can see that your WordPress blog is already a shape shifter by looking at your WordPress Dashboard under Appearance.  ‘Mobile’ and ‘iPad’ are two of the options that set you on your way to being Responsive – if you turn them on!)

Which WordPress.com themes are fully Responsive? Hop over to the responsive width Theme filter to find one that appeals to you. For now, I am using a responsive theme called ‘Bouquet’, but I’ll be test driving a few others because, really, how often do you get to move to a new abode (where the food is better and you get to sleep on the bed) with the simple click of your mouse?