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And so I pause on a very grey and icy Christmas Eve morn to say two words. I've been busy with work and family matters and even when I'm not "busy" with them, it's hard to concentrate on other things that seem a bit frivolous, such as photography. I got a "lateral" promotion at my day job - same title, but additional responsibilities, a new office, and a minion. Never had a minion before. It's actually kind of worrisome. I know *I* can look busy, but now I have to either make sure another person also looks busy or I look bad. We'll see how that goes.

Anyway, as soon as this family thing is resolved - which, sadly, probably won't be much longer - I really do want to try to get back into photography. It's just that scheduling things in advance is a bit of a fool's game at the moment.

Anyway anyway, I gave my father and my grandmothers digital photo frames for Christmas and preloaded them with several hundred family photos. They were a huge hit.

You can give these to even non-techie types if you a) preload them and b) make sure that they are such that if they get turned off or unplugged, all you have to do is turn them back on and they go into slideshow mode. I don't know what kind of industrial design school dropouts they've got designing the interfaces for these things - half of them don't even have a shuffle feature - but you can find acceptable ones if you shop around a little. They've gotten quite reasonably priced, too. I got 15" ones for not much more than a hundred dollars! That's big enough even for older people whose eyesight isn't the best and/or larger rooms.

M