A Gaggle Of Geeks

By working pretty much nonstop, Saturday night we wrapped up the new issue of the Gypsy Journal, Terry proofed it, and I made the corrections. Then I converted the file to a PDF format to be ready to send to our printer.

We were patting ourselves on the back for being done ahead of schedule, and at the last minute I happened to glance at the file one more time and realized that the headlines on the front page were totally messed up! Instead of listing the feature stories in the new issue, it was a sentence from my thought for the day that I include at the bottom of each blog. How the heck did that happen?

I scrolled down two or three pages and it was there also. What the heck? Then it hit me, I had cut-and-pasted that thought for the day into the blog for yesterday, and somehow it wound up in the layout for the paper too, though I had no idea how. By the time we got that corrected and finally dragged ourselves to bed it was after 3 AM. Then I laid there for another hour or so, wondering what else I had screwed up.

Sunday morning we both looked over the corrected file again, just to make sure there were no more surprises, and darned if there weren’t! I have no idea how I did that. I guess the gremlins were working overtime.

But we didn’t have time to mess with it right then, because we had about a 20 mile drive to Paradise Oaks RV Resort in Bushnell for the opening of the TechnoGeek Learning Rally, hosted by Geeks on Tour and TechnoRV.

When we arrived, our friends John and Kathy Huggins were pitching in to help out at the registration desk. John and Kathy produce the weekly Living the RV Dream podcast, and are also the authors of an excellent new book on RVing called So You Want To Be An RVer? It’s a good primer for anybody getting into the RV lifestyle, and even old veterans like ourselves picked up some tips in its pages.

They had a nice turnout of folks for the rally, a combination of fulltimers, extended travelers, snowbirds, and even some weekend warriors. But it didn’t matter what their status as RVers were, they were there to learn. And there’s so much to be learned in the next few days!

Jim and Chris Guld from Geeks on Tour and Phil and Tracy May from TechnoRV have put together an excellent program, with seminars on everything from digital cameras to RV electrical safety, the Picasa photo management program, smart phones, using Facebook, blogging, and lots more.

Here are Chris and Jim in the top photograph, and Tracy and Phil in the bottom photo. Between the four of them, there’s well over 50 years of technical experience to draw from. If you can’t learn from these folks, just hang it up, because you’re incapable of learning!

In addition to their technical abilities, Phil and Tracy are also accomplished cooks, and they will be serving several gourmet meals during the rally week. Here they are in the kitchen getting ready to do their thing.

Unfortunately, we didn’t have time to hang around and eat with everybody because we needed to get home and go over the paper one last time before I uploaded it to the printer’s webserver. Driving home, I realized that before I could do that I needed to download to my new laptop computer Ipswitch, the file transfer program I use for sending files across the Internet. I had it on my old Dell desktop, but forgot to download it to the new computer. As it turned out, that was quick and easy. All I had to do was go to the Ipswich website, enter my e-mail address and password, and it took about five minutes to download and set up the program.

I got the new issue uploaded to the printer and breathed a big sigh of relief. This week they will proof it again for any last-minute corrections that need to be made and get it on the press. Once those last-minute corrections are done with, if there are any, I’ll be sending out the link to the new digital issue. If you’re a digital subscriber, look for it in your inbox in a week or so.

Thought for the day – Never judge a book by its movie.

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