LaptopJenny is back!

Now returned from her SECOND display repair is LaptopJenny... my HP DV5030US.

Unlike last time, I made a FULL backup of everything this time. This helped me greatly when, like last time, HP reformatted the hard drive. I'm very pleased with the way that Backup and Restore actually worked with Windows XP Media center on this thing. I've got all of my programs, desktop icons, network connections (VPN to work, etc).

I specifically haven't restored all the photos yet, because I can't. They just won't fit. I've got 18 Gigabytes of photos (1997-2003), and 10 remaing gigabytes to put them in. I've got too many picture.

I carry around, on a daily basis, some 80,000 photos. The common wisdom of photographers everywhere is that you can instantly double the quality of your collection by throwing away half. I've already done this, I have about 160,000 photos in the archive. (144 Gb!)

I did it the first time by just tossing out things that were out of focus, badly framed, etc. I wasn't all the way through, either... but I lost my place in the first HP format, so now I get to figure it out again. Not only that... now the pictures are ones I've already decided to keep once.

It's overwhelming if you look at the math. Reviewing them and making a decision for each photo might take 10 seconds each....800,000 seconds == 13,333 minutes == 380 South Shore commutes... yikes! If I focus on this, and spend most of my train commutes, I'll be done next year.

When I give out the number of photos on my laptop (Ctrl-T in ThumbsPlus)... I typically get a reaction of disbelief, and dismissal, which lasts only long enough for the slide shows to begin. (F8 in ThumbsPlus)... then a pleasant tour through some days events.... then thanks and appreciation... it's an emotional ride I've learned to enjoy taking.

It's a hell of a lot of fun to be able to pull out the laptop, and start a slide show for bored kids on the way to Chicago.. I do it about once ever other month. Now I'm showing a lot of photos of Virginia as well. In this way, LaptopJenny is a social tool, and not just a toy for playing RT3. It helps me to share a bit of my world with my friends and acquaintances.

I've been lax putting things up here... and on my Flickr account... I'm working on getting my life organized a bit more, so I'll try to get this going as well.