Early morning walk

This morning I woke up at 5am by someone slamming a door, probably L who had run out of his bedroom because a bee had come to visit him.

After having a shower etc. I was about to go out at 6am, but blew my nose (am suffering from hayfever quite a bit at the moment), and my nose started bleeding. Thankfully it only lasted about 5 minutes, then I went on a walk down the old railway line.

I saw a female Scorpion fly, a couple of snails, and a bug, all of whom were quite co-operative for taking photos of. After 7am I saw a couple of Skippers but they were already quite active and wouldn't allow me to take their photo. I filled my memory card up so I came back home.

I browsed the WAB photography forums a bit, and copied the photos from my memory cards across to my PC. I thought I might be able to sort my photos a bit, but first I needed to be able to see them, so I tried downloading the Fast Picture Viewer Codec pack. But I couldn't see the free version on there at all.

I read the info about why they don't offer the free version, and so begrudgingly paid for the licensed version. I don't begrudge paying the software writer for their hard work, but I do begrudge the camera manufacturers (Nikon and Canon in my case) for not making 64bit compatible RAW codecs available for free.

After installing the RAW codec pack (and restarting my PC), I did some more work on my morfa style diffuser. The mealworm tub I was using for the diffuser had a large rim near the top that was part of the original plastic seal of the tub when it was new. I thought this rim would make covering the outside of the tub in foil more difficult, and so decided to cut the rim off.

This was more difficult than I thought it would be, as the plastic was quite tough. I did manage to cut it off eventually, albeit in little bits, making quite a mess of the floor. It also made the tubb a bit dirty as I used a knife covered in old sticky vegetable oil (meant to stop the knife from rusting, but the knife was still a bit rusty).

I washed the tub to get rid of the sticky vegetable oil marks, and decided I might as well remove the labels from the tubb as well. But this was actually quite difficult and took quite a while due to the glue they'd used on the labels.

I did some vacuuming, and hoovered up all (maybe) the bits of plastic from my diffuser creating. Then I wrapped the outside of the mealworm tub in kitchen foil.

After that I wrote yesterday's blog post, which involved installing Irfanview so that I could save a photo of the flash mount for the diffuser as a JPEG. (I could have set the camera to save JPEGs instead of RAWs, but I didn't think of that until just now). Then I wrote today's blog post so far.

I cleaned some tea stains from the carpet, then had lunch.

After lunch I finished off my morfa style diffuser. I checked my emails and sorted the morning's photos a bit, before uploading some to the WAB forums in the hope of getting/confirming IDs. I went in the back garden, but there didn't seem to be much insect life around. I did see a sawfly, but it didn't hang around long enough for a photo.

After Ben came home from school I played on Mario Galaxy 2 with him for a bit.

Before dinner Mauser returned with my copy of Windows 7 (he had ordered it from his work for me), so after dinner I got to work with installing Windows 7. While it installed I watched the first half of the Ghana vs. Germany match, which was very good (though not as good as Brazil vs. Ivory Coast).

By the time the second half had started Windows had finished installing, and so I spent the rest of the evening downloading and installing drivers.

I did have a problem with the wireless driver for my ASUS P5B Deluxe Wi-fi/AP motherboard. The Windows 7 compatible wireless driver from ASUS' website for the motherboard installed okay, but didn't work. In device manager the wireless adapter was still listed under unknown devices.

So I tried installing the Vista compatible wireless driver from ASUS' website for the motherboard, but just got a message that it was only for Windows 98, XP and Vista, and it refused to install. So I went back to device manager and went to update/install drivers for the Wireless adapter. I told it to look for the drivers in the folder containing the Vista compatible driver, and it subsequently installed the drivers and set the wireless adapter up correctly.

There was a pretty nice sunset with hazy cloud lighting up a nice orange colour.