The foundation is in

The landscape is changing in our neighborhood. A construction crew laid the foundation for a new house behind our place yesterday.

Now that we know what the footprint of the house looks like, we see how close it is to our home and it has us thinking of some kind of screening shrubbery. I suspect they’ll appreciate it as much as we will.

In the process of getting this image (which shows the back of our house on the far right) from my Olympus point-and-shoot camera to my netbook, I discovered that my Windows XP operating system suddenly doesn’t like Windows Explorer, the program that launches when you click on My Computer to see the hard drive and peripherals, like the memory card reader.

Windows tells me that Windows Explorer encountered a problem and needs to shut down. If I persist, I get a message that Dr. Watson has a problem and must shut down. After that happens, I get no response when I click on the Start button or anything in the tray at the bottom of the screen. All I can do is launch Task Manager with ctl+alt+del and click on the Shut Down option to restart the computer.

So maybe we have finally reached the point where I’m going to have to go over to Best Buy and get an external CD/DVD drive and use it to reinstall Windows XP.

Thinking back, it appears this machine started getting wonky about the time I first installed Photoshop CS. I’ll not make that mistake again.