This and That: New Year's Resolutions
       By Elizabeth B. Wright  January 2006

When it’s time for New Year’s resolutions, computer users need all the backbone they can get to cope with what needs to be done digitalwise. Here are maybe some things to think about.

Get the new internal hardware installed and running -- not so easy sometimes.
Hook up the peripherals and see if they actually will work as advertised.
Unpack the upgraded programs that you received and actually install them. Then try to get your old documents to run in the new upgraded version. Get busy and input the genealogical information you have been collecting into your favorite program. Then output it to some media (even paper) in order to share it with the rest of your family. In my case, that means sharing my Mother’s family line with the other female members of my family. There are not very many of us, so it shouldn’t be a big chore.

These are just a few rather obvious things to do. And while they may have lasting results, they really don’t take that much time to accomplish. Not like losing the extra pounds so many of us need to lose.

One very reasonably priced program I have recently bought is Print Workshop 2006. Its pedigree is: 2005 ImagEngine Corp., published and distributed by ValuSoft, a division of THQ Inc. Digital image content © 1997 - 2005 Hemera Technologies. That’s quite a mouthful. It is a greeting card type program that has come out on DVD, something I have been watching and waiting for a long, long time. Most of the clip art programs come with so many CDs that it soon becomes tiresome trying to use them. I would rather have somewhat fewer images, but have all of them available on one disk. So far this DVD version has worked fine. One much older CD version of this software contained a simplified but useful Desktop Publishing module that was adequate for most novice users, but still difficult enough to take some time to learn. Later versions of the program dropped the DTP function and went solely to simple publishing tasks similar to The Print Shop, etc. Designing and printing greeting cards doesn’t have to be rocket science, so the simpler the program, the better I like it. The price for the 2006 version of Print Workshop was $19.95, and I don’t think you can beat that.

I designed my Christmas letter this year in WordPerfect with dimensions to fit on some commercially printed Christmas paper. Because each year we include pictures of our family, it can become cumbersome, time consuming and ultimately expensive to print them at home using my HP Photosmart printer. I have opted for two years now to take my master document and holiday paper to Kinkos to be reproduced. The price this year caused a little bit of a gulp, but I decided to do it anyway. In the past, the Kinkos machines were the ordinary color Xerox copy machines This year the machine was a Xerox color laser. I was really pleased with the quality of the laser reproduction of my master copy. The pictures look much better in the Kinkos equipment product than they ever could have looked from my home printer. So, biting the bullet, I paid my bill and left with enough copies to send to those on my card list who might be interested in seeing pictures of our family and reading a brief (and I do mean BRIEF) summary of our activities for the year. We naturally include a personal note with each card and included letter that we send.

With the exception of the genealogy project, my computer jobs for the coming year are not well defined yet. That will probably change in the near future. Since Windows XP is rumored to be on the way out, I need to learn to use it more effectively before it becomes obsolete. Then the fun and expense of yet another Microsoft operating system upgrade will keep all of us busy for the foreseeable future.

Happy New Year in 2006.

 

Elizabeth Wright is a member of the CCOKC and a regular writer for the eMonitor