The month started out on a sour note that I would not even realize had happened until roughly halfway though the month when I discovered that it had resulted in unexpected overdraws at the bank. Not good.

I won’t go into details here on everything that happened, but I will say I was not surprised that the month ended with me getting growled at for no reason other than the growling party was tired and another overdraw at the bank because the bank failed to make an automatic deposit from another bank until today, but cleared the cable bill payment during the weekend. And those were the good events of the month.

So, yeah, I am so glad to see May leave. One of the few good things that occurred was the verification that Misha Collins is going to be back on Supernatural in his role as Castiel for Season 6. I just hope that he gets a lot of screen time, that’s my favorite character.

So, now for June. We’ll see how this month goes.

I contacted them to find out what additional shipping to Alaska would be. No response. Ah well. They said RIGHT THERE that they would ship to Alaska, so, I felt safe in bidding on the item and we could work out the difference in cost or I could provide them an alternate address located in the lower 48 States to ship it to.

I bid, I watched my bid get pushed higher and higher in under $2 increments. Finally I won the paper cutter. Good price for both me and the seller, I paid at once and seller left me feedback that they were happy with my purchase.

Then they never contacted me. I waited. After a bit I sent an email, just to check in. Silence. I waited and waited. No response. Finally, as the time neared to file unreceived item at eBay I sent them another email. They responded with a short statement that they can not ship to Alaska and refunded my money.

Wait? What? They said in the listing, had to TYPE IT IN, that they would ship to Alaska. I told them I was ready and willing to pay extra, just let me know what it would be. I had four people ready to receive the item in the Lower 48 and forward it to me themselves. The seller could not be bothered to respond to one of my multiple emails asking about shipping?

Poor Poor seller practices TrulyRC. Very very poor.

My opinion: they were disappointed with the sale price and saw a chance to renege on the sale so they could relist it without being bitchslapped by eBay.

Advice to other sellers: Don’t ignore the customer. ASK them if they have alternate ideas before you flip them the bird and refuse to complete a sale they had entered into in good faith. They MIGHT, just MIGHT know what they are doing. I had a freaking TREADMILL, yes a treadmill, delivered to Alaska from an eBay seller in New York for cripes sake, I think I could have helped them work out getting me the paper cutter.

Click image for full size view of the original listing from eBay. Notice the last line that clearly indicated to me that the seller WOULD be willing to work out shipping to Alaska.

So, what did I discover to be unsuitable for one reason or another? A small sampling of the failed converters:

• CraziVideo
• Media Coder
• Screen Edit 1080
• Handbrake

And the one that finally succeeded? Any Video Converter. YAY! It worked beautifully for me! I just finished conversion of the first video in a series I am making for a painting I am working on. I’ll get it uploaded onto YouTube later.

It is a real shame, because I dearly love the little camera, it is one of the nicer digital cameras in appearance, weight balance, overall weight and ease of use while still giving good pictures that I have seen, but it is a battery hog that dislikes anything but fully charged batteries. And yes, I did set the battery type to the type of battery I am using in the camera.

Overall opinion: I am keeping the camera simply because it is a very nice camera that I paid less than half price for, but it is a backup secondary camera for kicking about on my ATV in the summertime, not my primary camera for everyday use or for use when I MUST be sure I will get pictures.

This is the first time I have ever purchased a camera brand new off the store shelf, so I was fairly excited to be owning a brand new camera.  I was browsing along and spied the red markdown sticker for a Polaroid camera in the case, nearly invisible behind the bottom of the sliding door. $49 for a camera that had sold for $129. It was the display model, but Wal Mart tended to be good from my past experience in selling good working display models so I was not scared by that.

Getting my little camera home I was disappointed to discover that it would not power on. Assuming the batteries that had come with it might have something wrong with them I went and got my fully charged NiNH batteries that I use with my Wii remote. The batteries did not work. Camera did not power on. Major disappointment. I even called Wal Mart to find out what my options were since it had been the last camera like that, if it fails to work could I use it toward price of a different camera and how long I had to bring it back in.

As I was dejectedly looking at what had quickly come to be a very well loved little pink camera even before I had got to use it, I somehow got it to turn on. No idea what I did, just kept fiddling with the batteries and holding the power button down until *gasp!* it came on! I knew from my Canon A70 that the power button has to be held for a few seconds before the cameras will power on.

After a few hours of the camera seeming to work great, it stopped working great. Okay, I made it work once, I could make it work again. Once more to fiddling and once more it started working after a bit. This would come to be a reoccurring theme with the camera. Work for a while, then I would have to figure out how to make it power on again. Frustrating. Very frustrating.

I decided to do some research and discovered quite a few complaints identical to mine at the reviews page on Overstock.com, where it seems to be a very common issue with this camera, with all of the solutions seeming to be the same as my fumbled discovery – fiddle with the batteries and the camera will eventually power back on properly. There are enough positive reviews on the camera that I assume that aside from the apparent flaw in the battery connection the camera is at least a decent camera.

I am now on a search for if there is a way to fix the problem with the apparently faulty battery door connection.

What happened is I went to one of my blogs and just by accident noticed that the title of the post did not match the title of the URL. Somehow I had posted a new post over top of a post that had already been made on the blog. This might not seem like too serious of an issue, until you take into consideration that I use my sites to keep track of what happens in a daily journal (sometimes a bit cryptic, but they tell a big story to those that know what to look for), and I earn income through sponsors. People that pay me a set price for an advertising link from my blog to their website. It was a sponsored post that had got overwritten. Eeeek!

That is not a good SNAFU, so now I am working with Windows Live Writer with an uneasy feeling that the program too easily might replace important posts about my life as a caregiver or sponsored posts. Anyone know of a plugin that lets me turn off any overwriting of posts that are already on the blog?

Back last week, on the 22nd, I busted my shin on a brass horse here in the house as I was cleaning up around the fireplace and hurrying to go somewhere. (You can read that disaster in the post I made when I busted my shin.)

Anyway, here I am a full week after I busted it on that brass horse, and my shin still hurts. No, I mean HURTS. I am hobbling around, had to call nephew over to help my dad a bit, am totally useless and would KILL for coffee, but don’t want to call my nephew back to get me some – really don’t want to walk into the kitchen to get it. So, I am lashed to the desk because of the busted shin and should, one would hope, put my focus into work rather than fiddling about playing computer games… hmm.. have not played Bejewled Twist or SIMs in months… hmmm… No, I won’t revert to playing games, I will work on the novel that really does need more of a name than “co-written novel”. We’re making decent progress on that, not going to stop now.

Mom used to growl about that.  Every year just as she was going to be able to make the yard look nice, she had to go south for one thing or anotehr and now — it’s happening to dad.  :::pounds head on desk:::

We’ll see what happens, but at moment I have no idea if he’s here or being made go to the lower 48 (rather he really wants to or not).  Looooong story… not getting into it.  Just wish I knew for sure what was going on rather than having dad say “I don’t wanna go south” then being put into position of “Okay… maybe I should go south.”  :::pounds head on desk:::  And people wonder why I’m stressed so often.

Right at the end of the year I got a virus on my laptop, the first time I have ever had a truly nasty virus on one of my computers, which did a nasty number on the poor computer.  The damn thing took over the poor little laptop to the point that the computer could no longer do anything.  It would boot up, then just sit there and do some process over and over apparently, trying to figure out what it was up to, but never seeming to figure it out exactly.  I tried leaving it for a long time in that state, but it never seemed to catch up, so I started in safe mode and tried to work things out there.  No luck.  I could not get the computer to do anything.

I tried to get it to backup to last known good configuration, but it could not because one of the first things the virus did apparently was to erase all of my backup points!  I could not access the Internet, CD drive, thumb drives, printer… everything was locked up tight so there was no way I could save my information and no way I could get help from the Spybot forums in correcting the error.

Finally, with nothing left to do, I reset my poor little computer to the factory specifications and have been reloading my programs and everything since then.