Picasa2 is Awesome

I just downloaded Picasa 2. This is a new free picture manager from Google.

When I first saw that google released a free picture manager, I originally thought it wasn't a very big deal. We got Kodak's Easyshare picture manager when we bought our new Kodak CX7430 camera last month and it is OK. Not great, but it does a pretty good job managing the pictures on our hard drive.

I had heard a few good things about Picasa2 so I thought I would give it a try. All I can say is "WOW!". If you have a bunch of digital pictures on your hard drive and it is getting somewhat difficult to manage therm, then this program is for you. Go to the 1st link in this post and download and install this software. Let it scan your hard drive for pictures. You can exclude folders after its initial scan. The interface is really nice and it has a ton of features.

One of the features that was really nice was its ability to backup pictures onto a CD-R. I've been meaning to do this for quite a while and have never gotten around to archiving the pictures because they are scattered all over the place. I never had an easy way to grab all of the pictures. This was pretty foolish because if we had had a hard disk crash, we would have lost all of the digital pictures of the family (clear back to when both kids were born). After I excluded a few of the folders so that they didn't show up in the list of pictures, I started the "Backup Pictures" process. It took me all of 10 minutes and 2 CD-R (about 1GB worth of pictures) to back everything up.

Another feature is Picasa makes it really easy to upload a picture to your blog. That is how I created the below blog entry about Kyler's train.

Let me know if you tried this out by posting a comment by clicking on the "# Comments" link at the bottom of this post.

This is Kyler's train set that he got for Christmas. The clock tower, green tracks, and risers are the new pieces. He can now make some pretty sizable tracks. 

Kyler and the Eye Dr.

Kyler had his first eye exam today. The dr. started with near vision, and had a chart with pictures on it. He pointed to the larger pictures on the top row to hear what Kyler called each one. Horse, telephone, duck, hand. Then he pointed to a character in the smallest row and asked Kyler what it was. Kyler said, "A tiny duck, a tiny telephone'. The dr started laughing. He said out of the hundreds of kids he's seen, over 20 years, no one has ever said anything about the picture being so small! Kyler was the first one. The dr kept chuckling during Ilea's appointment, still laughing about a tiny duck. I think Kyler made the dr's day!

Bite of Cake

Ilea got a new book for her reading program. It's 'Bearenstain Bears Go to the Moon', which we already have. She said it was going to be a bite of cake. I said, "You mean a piece of cake". She said, "No, a bite of cake, because this one is going to be even easier than a piece!".

Lunch Conversations

Today we had some deep discussions at lunch. First we talked about heaven. Kyler wanted to know where it was, and we discussed different possibilities. Kyler thought maybe it was in tummies, and that it would tickle. Ilea finally decided that you go up to space and turn left. She's pretty sure that's where it is. Then the topic turned to weather. We got some snow flurries this morning, and were looking at the current temp. I told them it was 34, and it needs to be 32 to snow. Kyler jumped down on the ground, and put his feet and hands up in the air, saying, that if you took your socks off, it has to be your hands and your toes number to snow! I said yes, that would do it. We'll keep you posted.

Ikea's in the Bible?

Kyler was singing a song at the table. It was about someone in a tree, and having dinner with me.
I said, "no, it's 'and I'm coming to your house to eat'."
Kyler said, "No mom, not the song about Ikea in a tree, I'm making up my own song!"