I took a great one-day introduction to digital photography class back in January from local photographer Steve Glass. I’ve had a point-and-shoot digital camera since they first appeared on the market (well, when they went below about $500) and used to use a 35mm SLR quite a lot as a hobby.

But this class did two things - first I learned that my little Canon point-and-shoot actually could do a lot more than I suspected. I learned more about that camera that morning than the the entire time I’d owned it, and I also learned the basics of a digital workflow in Photoshop and/or Lightroom.

The second thing the class did was reawaken my interest in photography. I started taking the Canon out once a week or so and got involved in Flicker. And then I started buying photography magazines. That led to learning about the product lines of the major digital SLR companies. And that led…

You know where this is going.

After reading a few dozen reviews of various DSLR’s, I now have  an Olympus Evolt E-510. Yesterday I took it out for half a day and spent most of the evening processing the images I took. I will say that (1) I don’t know what I’m doing very well yet but (2) I’m really very pleased with the camera and the quality of the shots. It’s very lightweight, I’m getting the hang of all the controls and menus and I think it was a great deal (I bought it from Amazon in a kit with two lenses for $640).

Here’s my Flickr site if anyone wants to see what I’m up to.

For the past few days, I’ve been unable to dump anything from phpMyAdmin. The host told me it was because my DB was large (wasn’t) and another suggested I try another browser.

I use FF for everything, but I tried it in IE7 and voila, it worked.

Doing a bit more investigating I found a forum where someone was having a similar issue and the suggestion was ‘toss your cookies.’

I tossed mine, and suddenly FF is exporting again in phpMyAdmin. Lesson learned (and recorded here for future reference).

REVISED 3/20/08

Actually this turned out to be a FF profile issue. Here’s what Mozilla told me:

Occasionally a Firefox profile will get gummed up in a way that is very difficult to track down.

As a diagnostic, you could try using a “clean” Firefox profile: Creating a new Firefox profile on Windows @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base. If that works, then one of your extensions may be at fault, or a bad setting, or a corrupted file. If the cure isn’t obvious, you can move your bookmarks and (selectively) your other settings to the new profile: Migrating settings to a new profile @ MozillaZine Knowledge Base.

I’m running a campaign to purchase a $499 annual BrowserCam account at Fundable. You web designers should be familiar with BrowserCam for viewing your work on many other browser/OS platforms.

The cost is $25 each and 20 people can join. For your money, you get unlimited captures and unlimited 60-minute remote access sessions (on Windows and Linux, or 30-minute sessions on Macs).  Please sign up if you’d like to take part by clicking the link here.

I tried to obtain an authorization code from Register.com today and gave up. I sat on hold for 45 minutes - there were no ‘we estimate you have 10 minutes’ or ‘are number 20 in the queue,’ which would have been helpful.

I contacted a Live Chat tech and asked about wait times on the phone, he invited me to ‘continue to wait and my call would be answered shortly’ and he ‘would forward my comments to the appropriate department but could not give me my authorization key.’

This is why all my domains are now on Enom.

We used Authorize.net for about 9 years for our retail site with almost no problems. When we sold our business last fall, we highly recommended the buyer stick with them, and she chose to.

We closed our own account in December, but had to reopen it briefly in January to retrieve some tax data. However, getting it closed again is another matter.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve tried to contact tech support several times to have my account closed. The shortest wait time I’ve encountered has been 28 minutes, the longest over 48 minutes (and these are at the beginning and end of the day, when they suggest that wait times are shorter).

Sorry, but I think this is ridiculous. It has never in the past taken me more than 5-10 minutes to speak to a human at Authorize.net, even during very busy holiday periods.  I’m wondering what’s happening with them to cause such extraordinary delays in service… And I’ll definitely keep it in mind if my customers ask me about them in the future for other ecommerce solutions.