A Day in the Life

Well, it is about time to develop a new blog template. Andrea made a new layout in Photoshop and now I get to put it together. It is a lot of fun to have the challenge of making someones vision a functional website. Also, it will be nice to have a new layout to look at. So keep you eyes out in the next week or so and we should have a new blog theme.

Today I began my first post-graduation class at BYU. I decided to take a class on Photoshop when Zac suggested it would help him in his web design pursuits. I’ve also been wanting to learn how to use the program to edit photos as well. So today we just learned the basics (Zoom, resize, creating and changing text, etc), but I am so excited. My husband thinks I am a nerd, but I really love going to class and learning something new. So since I don’t go to classes anymore, this is really fun for me. Plus I’m learning something that I may use in my real life. I’ve already created an awesome birthday party invitation with my new photoshop skills, and soon I’ll be retouching photos like crazy and designing stuff for Zac’s websites.

I posted the invitation so you could all see how amazing Andrea is at Photoshop after only one lesson! – Zac

So tonight my sister called me with a computer problem. She said, “Can your hard drive just stop working or something because I turned on my computer and all of my documents and pictures were gone”. Well this was weird, and I didn’t really know what to say. I asked a few questions and everything appeared to be right. I told her to just come over and we could take a look.

When she got here we turned on the computer and it prompted her with the normal Windows XP login. When all of the personal settings were loaded (which took forever), the desktop was blank and the My Documents lead to a blank folder with the sample Music and Photos. It basically looked like a virgin install of XP.

Well I accidentally clicked on the Picasa icon and the program started up. Right away, the program started finding all of the files on the hard drive. As it turned out, all of the files on her computer weren’t gone, Windows had just gotten all messed up. Somehow, and I don’t know how yet, the registry or something was changed, because a new used file had been created named ‘TEMP’ and all of the shortcuts were remapped to those folders.

Even though I don’t know exactly why things got all messed up, at least the files were not deleted. That would have been the worst. We backed them up to an external hard drive and then tried to run a virus scan and spy ware remover. They both ran and of course found nothing. Likely I will just reinstall the OS and all of the documents so her computer will be healthy again. So even though It isn’t fixed, Picasa helped us find the missing files in a jiffy. Thanks Picasa, therefore, thank you Google!