Ikea! I'll never stop saying Ikea!

I've shown the construction of my new computer desk, shelf and file drawer that we got from Ikea. Now that it is all put together and Jerry has cleaned up the mess I already made on it, you, too, get to see it.

"What's behind all the new furniture?" one might ask.

A new camera.

This camera of mine is an ever expanding hobby. There was my intervalometer that lets me make time-lapse movies with the camera.

Then, I thought, "What's the point of taking photographs if they're never printed?"

We had a photo printer that turned out to be a BIG DUD. It used up ink like it was free. It would churn and grind for minutes any time we wanted to print anything. It seems to have done a deep priming of the print head every time it was used. It quickly ran out of ink and I gave it a new set of cartridges and it emptied those in a short time. According to this very long thread on a forum, it is a common problem for that model of printer and that a fix was never to be expected.

So I started shopping for a photo printer.

One of the things I thought I wanted to do is get my panoramas printed. I had looked at online processors but their services were rather pricy. I wondered if there are consumer printers that can print panoramas. It turns out that Epson makes printers that print on roll paper. So I got myself an Epson Stylus Photo R1900 printer.

It can print on sheets from 4"x6" to 13"x19". They've got specialty paper and canvas for it if you're in a very artistic mood.

And they've got rolls of paper in 8.3" and 13" widths.

You can see my second successful panorama picture on the desk just beyond the chair in the picture above. The image is 8"x44". I took it this summer at Blue Mesa in the Petrified Forest National Park. Here's a tiny version of the image (click on it to make it less tiny, but still tiny).

Blue Mesa in Petrified Forest

Picasa web albums seem to have a limit on the size of photos so I can't show you a full resolution file. It wouldn't do much good anyway. You'd either have to shrink it to fit on your monitor or pan and scroll to see small bits of it at a time.

My first successful panorama printout was this image from the Grand Canyon taken the day after we were at the Petrified Forest.

Grand Canyon

The photo printer doesn't work as a network printer and we wouldn't want to use it for our day-to-day printing anyway so we got an HP printer that was on sale at Costco to replace the BIG DUD from Canon. It does copying and network printing and scanning. It prints photos as well. But I'll use the Epson for that.

And you can't expect me to do photo processing on a little screen on a notebook computer, can you? No, you can't. So I got myself a new iMac. Ooooooh!

The weather machine still wants a Windows system so that is still here. You can see its monitor to the right of the iMac in the first picture.

So now I have a new, large photo printer, a workhorse printer and a beautiful iMac. My old computer desk was a six foot wide table. It wasn't big enough or functional enough to hold all this gadgetry. So we got the desk and storage for all the supplies and accessories. With any luck I'll use the storage instead of just heaping piles of junk on the vast horizontal surface.

I'm still using evaluation versions of image processing software. I'm getting toward the end of my evaluation period so I'll have to stimulate the economy a little more in a couple of weeks.

I'm in geek heaven!