About Pat
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Hi! I’m Pat Mulcahy and this is my personal home page. You can read more about me on my blog. And if you would like to contact me, you can access my contact page.Ora et Labora is Latin for “pray and work,” the motto of St. Benedict. My contact with the Benedictines of St. Procopius Abbey began in college, and I have loved their spirit of hospitality and their spirituality and attention to Liturgy ever since. So it works well as my website’s name! I am a brand new priest, the second, or third, or okay, fourth of my careers. Obviously, God has been working on me for over forty years, and finally got me to step aside and let God be God in my life. I have never been happier. I have a lot of interests, including liturgy, preaching, Scripture, Contemporary Christian Music, liturgical music and music ministry, reading mystery novels, boxing, and a whole bunch more. But I’ve already said too much as it is! Enjoy my website. Peace, |
iPat630: theBlog
My new Eye-Fi SD Card
By Pat | June 28, 2008
I’d seen a bunch of stuff published about the Eye-Fi SD Card. Basically, it’s an SD memory card for your digital camera that also connects wirelessly to the internet, uploading your pics automatically to your favorite picture sharing website, and also to your computer. Say “so long” to the days of having pictures languishing in your camera for months on end. At $99 it’s pricey for a 2 gig SD card, but when you add the wireless features, it seems pretty darn reasonable. So I purchased one from Buy.com and waited eagerly for its arrival.
When I got it, I was initially confused, but then impressed by the creative packaging. It’s pretty low-impact since it has no nasty hard plastic covering to cut away, and when you pull the tab on the right, the package opens to reveal the card and reader on the left, and the quick start guide on the right. Nifty, I thought.
So I figured I would try the installation, since it seemed so easy. Not so fast there, though, things are never quite what they seem. When I plugged the card and reader into my USB port, I initially got the device to appear as a mounted drive on my iMac. So far, so good. So I clicked through to the “START HERE” folder, and ran the installation program. That went okay, too. But, on running the program, I got a message that said the card could not be initialized, so hey, WTF on that? Not only that, it brought up the web-based Eye-Fi manager, asking for my user name and password. Since I didn’t yet have the opportunity to sign up on Eye-Fi, I had no user name or password, and there was no option to sign up for one. Very frustrating.
So I looked around on the internet, and found an article somewhere that said that user ran into the same kind of thing, but when he plugged the reader into another port, it worked. So I tried that. No joy. Then, being a dyed-in-the-wool Windows survivor, I decided to try rebooting my Mac. After that, the reader would not even show up as a mounted drive. So I began to think about the arduous process of having to return the darn thing to Buy.com.
However, deciding not to be hasty, I though of putting the card itself into my trusty multi-card reader. I first deleted all the Eye-Fi program from the computer. Then I put the card in the multi-card reader, re-installed the manager program, and even got prompted to update the software. Good sign. After updating, I ran the manager program, and viola! The card was recognized, initialized, and I got directed to the sign-up portion of the web manager. From there on, smooth sailing.
I was then able to go through the setup, to point the card to my account on Flickr, and to direct it to send the photos to iPhoto on my Mac. I did the required test photo, and it uploaded perfectly. At this point, it’s all set up for my upcoming vacation, and I couldn’t be happier. Nifty product, buggy reader, but solid otherwise. My advice: if you have a card reader on your computer already, bag the Eye-Fi card reader and just use that. Bottom line: totally worthwhile product.
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