My Aric Audio Super 300B Amp all lit up with Elrog 300B in the power slots. This is one sweet sounding amplifier.

Posted by admin as uncategorized at 11:26 AM GMT-0500

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I just went inactive from this blog in mid 2017 …. I don’t know, lack of interest, lack of ambition, who knows. My interest tends to jump around from time to time and it was just one of those times. So, why was I doing a blog to begin with? I think more than anything else, I wanted to see if I could learn enough to do it myself, without help other than online guides and searches. I think I did that to my satisfaction and just decided to move on to something else of interest. Most blogs/bloggers are chasing “followers”, people who read the content and appreciate if for their own reasons thereby validating the blogger’s effort. To be honest, there were only two people who really followed and read this blog anyway, me and my mother-in-law Virginia.

Here we are, half of 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, and now half way into 2022 — dang, that’s five years and a lot has taken place during those five years. I won’t go into a lot of detail on what’s taken place in that time, but will outline some key happenings: My one and only blog follower has passed on and we miss her; we lost our last golden retriever companion; Allie Mae and we miss her too; Our Son and his wife relocated to Dallas from Florida and that makes us very happy; Kay has had major foot and back surgery; Kay has become an active Dallas County Master Gardner; We lost a much loved grand daughter to gun violence; Kay and I both experienced Covid 19 first hand; Kay lost her younger brother to Covid; I have experienced and moved past prostate cancer; we have sold our home of thirty plus years and moved into the Highland Springs Senior Living Community. That pretty much covers the main events of those five years past.

Wow, a lot has changed in five years, but there is much that is unchanged. We are reasonably healthy for our age, we still love each other unconditionally, we still love and treasure our family relationships, Kay continues to be an active, competitive bridge player, we still love all dogs and especially our grand-dogs Bear and Goose, Kay continues to be the “much loved” social butterfly while I continue to be the “sometimes grumpy” social hermit, and we continue to explore and develop new interests along the way.

Posted by DRHamp as uncategorized at 11:44 AM GMT-0500

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In the summer of 2022, we moved to the Highland Springs Retirement Community in Dallas. I had assumed that my enjoyment of my backyard birds was at an end. ….. We have a small lake just outside of our apartment and as we soon found out, it was a popular stop-over for migrating water birds. In this photo are 60+ Canadian Geese and as you can see they had little fear of human contact.

Posted by DRHamp as uncategorized at 8:07 AM GMT-0500

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This shot was taken from inside the house with full zoom (300mm) hand held:

Posted by DRHamp as uncategorized at 9:06 AM GMT-0500

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Well after many, many years of using exclusively Microsoft applications for office and email;  I’ve finally started making the break-away.

I’ve used MS Outlook as my email client for years and it has been an excellent product.  It had some great features, but became cumbersome and extremely difficult to migrate to a new pc system when that became necessary.  There was no intuitive, automated way to backup and restore the outlook installation when that became necesssary.  Outlook over time also became a significant resource hog and began to contribute to the erosion of  overall system performance.

I began to look for alternatives and finally settled on Mozilla Thunderbird.  After three months of exclusive use, I have found Thunderbird to be reliable, fast and with virtually all of the functions of MS Outlook.  It’s not quite as professional looking and polished as Outlook, but with a number of third-party addons, can look pretty good.  It’s clean, lean, easy to backup and restore —- I like it!

Now, I’m asking myself the question:  “Why didn’t you just transition all your email to GMail”?  GMail is the excellent browser-based email application from Google.  I’ve used it for years, as a supplement to my PC based email client.   I still use Gmail and really like that it’s an anywhere, anytime email capability and only a web browser is required.   I’m still struggling a bit with some of the functionality that I’ve grown accustomed to in Outlook and Thunderbird that is lacking in Gmail.   One example is Folders — Outlook and Thunderbird have them, and GMail doesn’t.  I really like to organize my email into folders, or categories like:  Family, Friends, Finance …… etc.

I’ll keep playing with GMail functionality and suspect that one day Gmail, or some other Browser-based email application will be the only one I use exclusively

Office applications are next — hello Open Office!

Posted by DRHamp as Hmmmm!, uncategorized at 9:02 AM GMT-0500

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Ok, I’m not in to New Years Resolutions, but I do have a goal in mind for 2009. It’s pretty basic and it’s to keep my blog up to date with a post a week at a minimum.

My Blog, “The Ancient Geek” has lain dormant, for all practical purposes, dead since June 16, 2008. So, effective with this post I will implement my goal and hopefully end my blogging hiatus for ever (and ever Amen!).

There are several areas of my life activity that need to be brought up to date:

· Our progress in qualifying in the Wine century Club – 75% complete in June & progress has been made

· An update on my current “transient” passions is in order.

· An update on the current “state-of-the-palate” as far as wine is concerned – changes have been made

· An update on the Hampton dog situation 2008/2009.

· An update on the my current gadget interest outlining any progress during my blogging absence as well as near-term plans/wishes.

Since I only have one regular blog reader (other than myself), it should be clear that I do this primarily for my own benefit and enjoyment. So this post satisfies that element as well as eliminating the occasional loving nag from my mother-in-law (who is the other regular reader). She never fails to remind me that I haven’t posted anything since June, 16, 2008.

Each of the “bullet” items above should be a separate post, but dont hold me to that.

So, that’s my goal – not a resolution – a goal. I’m obviously not sure I can live up to it – so I need an out.

Posted by DRHamp as uncategorized at 7:17 PM GMT-0500

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I think it’s important to remember friends and family — especially family.

Family was the core of my Mom’s existance – life revolved around her husband and her two boys — and later her grand children and great-grand children.

One of her goals later in life was to live to see the millennium – and she did that, greeting the year 2000 with a smile and her usual good humor.

She passed on in January 2000 and today would have been her 100th birthday.  We love her and miss her, and thinking about her makes me smile.

Posted by DRHamp as uncategorized at 9:45 AM GMT-0500

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