Monday, July 13, 2009

Why I Have No Pictures to Show

So the birthday party went great. Here's why I have no pictures to show yet.

A first birthday is bittersweet. Somewhat sentimental, right? I mean, the baby year has gone. You're welcoming the toddler stage, full of lots of new challenges and surprises. To commemorate the event, I decided I was going to make a slideshow of music and pictures from the last year. And then I was gonna tally up how many people cried by the end, myself included.

It was going to be approximately 175 pictures long, from birth to 12 months with 3 songs, all fading in and fading out.

Attempt 1: Used Nero because it had a nifty "Make a picture slideshow" button. Easy enough! 25% of the way finished and the program freezes up my computer. I get that wonderful message that says, "Nero has encountered a problem and must close. You will lose any unsaved data." Had I saved it? Of course not.

Attempt 2: Used Nero again, saving every time I put in new pictures. After picture 99 (of 175) was entered (I would tell you the percentage, but I can't divide in my head. Over 50%. How's that?) I get yet another message. "You have reached the maximum capacity of pictures allowed in a Nero slideshow. Would you like to start another slideshow?" I was seriously about to pull my hair out. I closed down the program and waited for Andrew to get home.

I had now sacrificed TWO naptimes for NOTHING.

Attempt 3: 2 nights before the party. A little stressed. Windows Movie Maker this time. I had forgotten why I hated it so much several years ago. Because it STINKS. You have to manually click each slide to fade in and reclick it to fade out. So 175 x 2. Equals...I don't know. A LOT OF CLICKING. Then I realized the default time for each slide was set at 10 seconds. That's a lot of time to look at one single picture. I wanted it set at 3 seconds. Guess what? You can't just "select all" and change the time for every picture. Nope. Gotta individually change all 175. Added in the music. Made sure music and picture times matched. Done. Finally. Saved. Went to bed.

Friday, the day before the party, I walked into the bedroom to see a black screen with white writing flashing. The computer was making a loud clicking noise. Yep. The computer died- along with all of Drew's pictures, the movies from the last 12 months, and the slideshow, all of which we thought were backing up on a different computer. They weren't. I cried. Andrew was mortified. He called people and found out if he put the computer in the freezer for at least 2 hours, he would have about 20 minutes to get whatever he could get off. Well, we got the pictures off. Not the movies. Not the slideshow. We're still working on getting the movies back. That's all I care about.

So, to make a long story longer, I stayed up until 1:30 on the morning of his birthday party to complete the slideshow for a second time.

It was worth it.

Lots of laughs. Lots of tears.

So once I get my computer back which has an SD card slot, I'll upload pictures. Until then, you're stuck reading what I have to write and imagining a little boy who played his heart out.

5 comments:

Amanda said...

I'm so sorry you had to go through all of that! We used to have a DELL computer but it crashed so we got a MAC instead and LOVE it! I hope you are able to retrieve your movies. I know how much they mean to you guys. I can't wait to see the pics from the party. I know you all had a blast!

Lori T said...

Ohh, when you said it crashed, I thought it was this morning! You poor thing! Honestly, I'll be praying y'all can get the rest back.

I can't wait to see the video slideshow. I meant to tell you not to use windows movie maker.

Did you try Picasa 3? I love it when I can use Jonathan's computer- a faster, new Macbook pro!

Audra Laney said...

@ Amanda--I'm trying to convince the hubs to get a MAC, but he's screaming no!! :)

@ Lori--Thanks. The FBI guy said it'd be 500 dollars for them to TRY to get them off. They said since the hard drive had been running "like it was" all day that it had been scratched and probably damaged most of the data. Looks like we lost them. :( I haven't tried Picasa 3. I'll use anything now over windows movie maker!!

Unknown said...

that made me sick at my stomach!! oh my!

love~

Jenna said...

Oh my goodness! You poor thing. Thank goodness you got the pics back!! Reading this made me realize that I need to backup all my pics RIGHT NOW!

This Might Tickle Your Fancy

Blog Widget by LinkWithin