Saturday, September 19, 2009

Who bought up all the pumpkin puree in Leesburg?


I have visitors coming to visit from Germany soon and today I wanted to make some traditional desserts to have prepared in the freezer for their visit. Since it is almost October, my plans included several pumpkin flavored items.

Today I have been to four different grocery stores in Leesburg in various parts of town and in every shop, the shelf space for the pumpkin puree is eerily empty. You can see where it should be, but nothing is there but a gaping space.

In one store, I asked someone who was stocking shelves if there was more and she said it would be in on Monday.

However, this is a very strange phenomenon. I cannot figure out why someone is going around town buying up all the pumpkin puree to be had. If you are the person who has invested your life savings in pumpkin, please post a comment on this blog and let me know, why you need so much pumpkin. Hopefully I will beat you to Target on Monday and manage to snag a few cans before you snap it all up!

Thursday, September 3, 2009

Sony Support is excellent

We returned from vacation recently with footage taken with our Sony Handycam DCR-HC48. Last year I was able to import the footage easily on both our Gateway PC and my laptop.

This year something was not working properly on the PC, so I wanted to import to my new laptop, a Sony Vaio with Vista 64bit. The camera manual said Vista 64bit does not support the USB connection and the I would need an iLink cable which I ordered.

When the cable arrived, each time I tried to import the footage, I got a blue-screen error and my laptop rebooted itself.

I tried poking around on the Sony support site, but could not find any FAQs for this problem. I decided to send Sony and email. This was on a Saturday. In 9 minutes I had a reply from Sony with a solution that was easily understandable and doable. Apparently the Magic-i visual effects software on the PC (for the webcam) needed to be updated.

Five minutes after receiving the email and a mere 14 minutes after sending the email, I was happily importing the footage! I wish all support groups were this helpful. Thanks Sony!