I want to be a better baker. I went to William Sonoma a few years ago and bought all these fancy baking cookbooks. You know, the kind where you need to order foreign ingredients online, and to bake one loaf of bread the yeast needs to rise and be pampered for sixteen hours straight.

I am pretty sure I have never been pampered for one hour straight, let alone sixteen.

Needless to say, the books have remained unopened. The desire is still there, and maybe one day I will follow through, but right now I recognize my time just doesn’t permit baking with ingredients I cannot even pronounce, let alone find in a store.

Sometimes people do the same thing with photography.

They start out with a cute little compact camera, and decide to make the jump to a DSLR. The goal is to take better pictures and understand more about photography, but years later they are still shooting on auto and taking the same quality photos they got with their much smaller and cheaper counterparts.

I am not the type of person to tell you never learn more about photography. I have such a huge passion for photography that I love it when people ask me questions, or tell me about a class they took to learn more about it. At the same time I get that it’s not everyone’s thing. Sometimes you just want to buy a nicer camera and take nicer pictures with no strings attached. You need a camera that will take better photos, without having to pay for online courses teaching you terms and settings you know you will never understand.

I want to help find you that camera.

So, I contacted FUJIFILM, and asked them if I could try out the FUJIFILM HS20EXR. If you want better photos, but don’t have time to learn all about photography, this is the camera for you.

Here’s what I love about this camera. It has the same cool look of a DSLR, but you don’t have to deal with changing lenses. It has similar buttons and features, but it’s a much easier camera to navigate than most DSLR’s. If you want to take better photos and have more control over things like exposure and focus, this is such a great camera. You can still adjust the aperture or shutter speed, but you can also skip all that and just select picture scenes.

Let’s take a look at the selection dial on top of the camera. By selecting SP1 or SP2, you can choose from a vast variety of scene situations in the menu, telling the camera what type of situation you are shooting. Snow, sports, portraits, nighttime; there is even a selection for photographing pets! By selecting a specific scene, you are  still able to shoot on auto but the settings are more appropriate for the situation, and the results are better! The camera does all the work for you.

I know many cameras already offer sports or portrait settings, but with this FUJIFILM camera you have many more specific scene selections and Real Photo technology backing up your photos.

Some of my other favorite features of this camera are:

-Shoots high quality HD movies at 1080p
-Incredible zoom lens of 24-720mm  (720mm? Holy crap that is far!)
-Advanced anti-blur and image stabilization
-16 megapixels
-Shoot raw, j-peg, or raw and j-peg files
-Motion panorama feature that shoots and instantly pastes together images up to 360 degrees
-Face detection, recognition, AND pet detection
-And so much more that I didn’t have time to try out because I have four children and they said if I take any more pictures of them they are going to bury my camera in the sandbox.

Besides being a good looking camera, the FUJIFILM FinePix HS20 also has a 3 inch LCD monitor on the back that can flip and rotate for better viewing.  I love shooting from my kids perspective on the floor and this totally saves me from laying down on the ground.

So now you have seen what the camera looks like, let’s see it in action. Three of my four kids play ice hockey so I brought this Fuji camera along with me to our latest practice.

This first shot I turned the dial to one of the SP settings for snow. The camera exposed the scene perfectly, no underexposure like you typically see in an overall white scene.

In the next few shots I put the camera setting an EXR auto. Think of an auto setting with a kick. EXR CMOS technology gives your photos an extra boost of sharpness, clarity, and ultra low noise even with an iso setting of 1600.

I did not expect these photos to turn out at all. This concrete tunnel to the rink had no natural light, and very poor lighting above.

Here’s with the camera set to the sport setting.  I was really putting this camera to the test shooting fast paced sports with no natural lighting.

Here’s a few more on the EXR mode. I loved how the color came out crisp and sharp and didn’t require any post editing.

My absolute favorite feature of this camera is the panoramic setting. You can select 180, 240, or 360 degrees. All you have to do is push the shutter and pan the camera along whatever scene you want to capture. The camera pieces the shot together and saves the photo instantly. No more piecing photos together later in Photoshop!

So are there any negative aspects to this camera? I found a few. First, the camera does not have a rechargeable battery. If you keep lots of AA’s on hand you will get along just fine. Second, the viewfinder is digital so it takes some getting used to. And third, the camera name is not cool. Fuji, you have got to come up with better camera names. There are just way too many Fuji camera’s toting the FinePix name. How about Uber Cool Shot? Or how about The Blog Hog?

Actually, maybe FinePix isn’t so bad.

Overall, I was very impressed with this camera. It is a fabulous camera for someone who wants to take better photographs but doesn’t understand, or have time to learn, the basics of photography. The list price of this camera is just under $600, but I noticed Amazon currently has it on sale for around $330. That is a fabulous price for this camera.

Special thanks to FUJIFILM for loaning me this camera. It was so fun to play with a camera that was not only easy to learn to use, but also boasted some of the lastest camera technology! To learn more about FUJIFILM camera’s go here.

Now, let’s get down to the real business.  Who is going to teach me how to pronounce focaccia? My William Sonoma cookbook doesn’t have a pronunciation guide, and it really sounds like a bad word to me.

We interrupt our Bosch posts for some breaking news.  Yesterday the popular Blogging site provided by Google went down for about 20 hours!  Many people are complaining about lost posts and comments in the outage.  During a scheduled maintenance on Blogger’s servers, there was some corruption in the data.  This caused Blogger to become unstable, they had to restore their servers from a previous backup, which is why some data may have been lost in all the shuffle.

On Blogger your data is not your own.  You can download your posts and comments using a couple different tools, but you do not have access to your database.  If Blogger decided tomorrow that it didn’t want to host your blog anymore, it could just delete it.  If there was a catastrophe at Blogger and their server crashed, they do not HAVE to restore your data.  You don’t pay for the hosting, so you have no ground to stand on if something happens to your data.  If you are serious about blogging, you aren’t going to want to trust someone else to care as much about your data as you do.

If you are on Blogger, I either recommend switching over to a self hosted WordPress installation (which will run you about $10/month), or at least making sure you are backing up your posts and comments on a regular basis.  So the real question becomes… I wonder if Facebook & Twitter’s traffic increased during the outage.  All those bloggers with no where to write….

I mentioned yesterday that you should have an “offsite” backup, whether it lives in your car or at someone’s house.  I also mentioned that you should not keep your external hard drive plugged in and on at all times.  Here are a few more I wanted to mention, but I was getting too wordy…

Your backup drive should not be used as “additional” storage.  If you need additional storage you should buy a separate hard drive for storage only.  If you want to be super safe, I would also back up that storage drive to ANOTHER external hard drive.  I know it’s starting to add up to a whole lot of external hard drives, but how valuable is your information?  It could be tricky trying to figure out how to backup one external hard drive to another.  The easiest way is to just plug them both into a computer and copy the data from one to the other.  There is nothing worse than finding out the hard drive you have been using as additional storage has failed, and there is no backup of it.  You think since it’s not part of your computer it’s always there, but if that fails it can be very costly to try and retrieve the files you’ve lost.

There are a few types of backups I’ve discussed earlier.  The more data you backup the longer it’s going to take.  If you want the quickest backup, you can just backup your most important files.  This would be your pictures, documents, videos, etc.  If you keep everything you are going to want backed up in a certain folder (for example “My Documents”, don’t forget to organize your files within the main folder), then you can just take the entire folder.  You won’t have to go looking around your computer for more things to backup, you’ll just know that you are getting all the correct data. 

My last best practice is that you backup OFTEN.  Anytime you add a lot more data to your computer, when you upload a family vacation, when you have a large project you are working on, you should create a new backup.  I also backup about twice a month.  If my files changed more frequently it could end up being even more frequently then that.

So ask yourself today… what would you do if your computer crashed?

Don’t forget to enter the giveaway for a Western Digital Passport External Hard Drive!

I know you’ve heard me say it over and over again.  You KNOW you have to backup your computer.  Hardware fails every single day, and if you don’t have a plan in place to backup your computer you are just asking to lose all of your pictures/videos/documents etc!  I prefer backing up to an external hard drive.  I currently use a Western Digital Passport.  Online backups (to me) take too long, and I don’t like the idea that I have to be online to restore.  What if my internet is down when I need to restore my files?  What if something gets corrupted in the transfer?  I just prefer to have my backups with me at all times.  Here are some of my “best practices” for having a good backup at all times.

Do NOT leave your external hard drive plugged into your computer at all times, or plugged into power at all times.  Typically an external hard drive has the same kinds of parts as your internal hard drive.  It’s just in a nice plastic casing to protect it.  Would you leave your PC turned on ALL the time, even when you are sleeping?  There is a reason that PC’s have a sleep or hibernate setting.  You want to rest your hard drive, and the rest of the pieces of your computer from time to time.  You wouldn’t leave your car running at all times either, right?  So it is with an external hard drive.  If it is constantly plugged in, it is constantly spinning the disk inside.  that takes power and causes wear and tear on the internal parts.  An external hard drive running in this manner will fail sooner than later.  Best practice is to plug in the hard drive during the backup.  When the backup is complete then unplug and store it in a safe place.

Offsite backups.  Companies do this, and you may not have to be super crazy about it, since it’s just your personal data, but a good idea is to have your backup stored in a place that can’t be damaged when your home gets damaged.  Two good places for this is to either store your backup at a friends house, or in your car.  If you are getting out of the house during a fire, you may not remember to grab your hard drive.  So to save you the hassle, backup to two different hard drives.  Store one near your computer for easy file retrievals (say you accidentally deleted that file you’ve been working on for months, luckily your backup is there to save you), and store the other one in the car or at your friend’s house. 

Come back tomorrow for the rest of the best practices for backing up your computer!

Western Digital was kind enough to give me an external hard driveto use with my review.  It’s ultra portable, and can hold up to a TB of data (that’s 1,000 GB).  My backup transferred to the hard drive lickity split and it’s a sleek black and blends in nicely with my desktop.  I hardly know it’s there!  They also offered to give two of my readers a 500 GB Passport!  To enter to win the external hard drive simply leave a comment on this post.  As always, only one entry per person.  Giveaway will end on Sunday November 21st.  Again there will be 2 winners!

So my sister posted a comment on my last post about how she is nervous about her laptop getting stolen and losing all of her information on her laptop.  Now I have told my sister time and time again that she needs to purchase and external hard drive and back up her laptop!  She continues to ignore my requests, and thus I will say a hearty “I told you so” when her laptop’s hard drive bites the dust, or she happens to destroy her laptop.  If you are smart though and actually TAKE my advice (I really have no room to talk though, cause I never take her advice about eating healthier) then lets walk through backing up your computer using Norton Ghost. 

Norton Ghost is one of my favorite backup utilities.  Here is the beauty of Ghost.  I back up my laptop pretty regularly.  My laptop’s hard drive bit the dust a while back.  The Dell guy came out, replaced the hard drive and then went back on his merry way.  If I did not have a Ghost backup I would have had to re-install all of my programs and then restore all of my files back to their correct locations.  Since I had my backup though all I had to do was restore the image, and it was as if my hard drive had never even left.  With NO effort on my part.

What Ghost does is create an “image” of your computer.  Basically it’s a snapshot of all of your settings/programs/files exactly as they are at the time of the backup.  You can schedule the backups to occur at regular intervals, and you can tell it the type of backup you want to do. 

Full Image Backup – This backs up everything on your computer from programs to files, to your background.  It is how you won’t miss a beat in the event of a bad virus, a software install that goes sideways, or even a hardware failure.

Files and Folders – You can also select to just back up your files and folders (specifying which ones you want backed up based on location or even just by file type!)  Say you want to backup all of the .jpg’s on your computer in various folders that they may be in.  Just specify that file type and it will take all of the images from your computer and place them on your external hard drive (or wherever else your backups are located)

Incremental – an incremental backup is a great tool to make sure your backups are always up to date.  What an incremental backup does is back up only files that have changed since the last backup.  This makes the backup quicker, and always up to date.

Ghost has some more great features that you should check out!  http://www.symantec.com/norton/ghost

*GIVEAWAY*

Symantec has graciously given me a copy of Norton Ghost to give away!  Simply comment on this post for your entry!  You can also tweet about the giveaway for one extra entry.  I am also giving away a copy of Norton 360 v. 4.  I personally don’t use 360 as I like a much quieter antivirus program that I can’t even tell is there.  Each is worth about $70!!  There will be two winners.  Giveaway will end at 8 PM on Sunday, April 25th. 

GOOD LUCK!  and get that backup ASAP!!

*Disclaimer – I received a free copy of Ghost to review, but I was already using a previous version that I had purchased myself.  I have never used Norton 360, and did not receive a review copy of it at my own request.

Really, I’ve been in the tech industry long enough to have a story for just about anything.  Like have you heard my backup horror story?  Here is my fun little webhosting story.  I used to have my sites hosted with a company that kinda rhymes with smoohost.  I have a PLETHORA (one of my absolute favorite words, which I love to use whenever I can) of websites.  I am constantly coming up with new ideas, and rushing out to get the domain name as soon as possible.  So one of these such times, I had a GREAT idea for a Blog scavenger hunt.  It spanned many blogs, and was super fun!  We had awesome prizes and it was really a blast to do.  Day one of the scavenger hunt was huge, and traffic was through the roof.  What do you know?  My site (the first stop on the hunt) went down!  After that my site was VERY hit and miss and would be unavailable at least once a day.  There was also a day that my database went completely missing, and they had to restore it from a backup and I lost several posts.  My sister who was also with smoohost was not having any of the same issues I was.  I called bluemost to see if they could move my site to a different server, since clearly the server my sites were currently sitting on was failing on a regular basis.  They said that they could not do that, and that “uptime” was not a guarantee!!  WHA??  WHA TO THE WHA WHAT??  I’m trying to build a following here, I’m trying to grow my brand, I’m trying to sell products!  No guarantee of uptime!  What am I paying for??  So when they said that, and refused to transfer my site to a different server I said good bye, and never once looked back.  (as an fyi, my sister’s site, which is still hosted there is now having similar issues to what I had… going down for abut 30 minutes at least once a day)  Now that you know who NOT to go with… who SHOULD you use for web hosting??  That is super easy!  Twenty70 Hosting! 

What I like about Twenty70 is that first, they are women owned.  Women in the tech industry is just obviously a passion of mine.  Their “help” is not outsourced to some othe country.  It’s VERY personal.  The technology they use make it super easy to get your blog or website up and running, and the server’s they are running on are totally solid. 

Since I want to get to the giveaway part, I’ll discuss the reasons for getting your own domain tomorrow….

SOOOOO…. The GREAT news is that Twenty70 is giving away $500 towards going to BlogHer!!  Find out all of the fabulous details on their website https://www.twenty70hosting.com/blog/2010/03/blogher-sponsorship-lets-begin-twenty70-blogher10/ Good LUCK!!!

**Disclaimer – Twenty70 hosting is NOT paying me for this review, they may potentially give me a flight to BlogHer depending on their budget**

Generally I’m a big fan of the backup.  Here’s a fun little story…

Once upon a time, early in my career as an IT Manager I was not checking up on the backups.  One day I fielded several calls saying that the drive all of the company’s files I worked for was inaccessible.  I saunter over to the server room to find the drives had crashed on that particular server.  I checked out the backup situation and found that we did not have a valid backup on that server for the last 6 MONTHS!  This was EVERY file the company had!  I ran back to my office and had a good cry, thinking for sure I would be fired.  We took the drives down to a data recovery location and paid them $11,000 to retrieve the data on the drives.  ELEVEN THOUSAND DOLLARS!  Needless to say, after that day I was a BIG fan of backups.

While my data now isn’t quite as valuable as the company I used to work for, I still prefer to backup my computer frequently.  About 9 months ago my hard drive on my laptop failed.  I had recently had a good backup, and therefore did not miss a beat when the new hard drive came.  Today, I’m not quite as lucky.  My backups on my laptop have been failing recently, and I knew it was because the hard drive was failing.  I’ve been trying and trying to get a good backup before I upgrade my laptop to Windows 7, so I could easily roll back if it went sideways, but after running some diagnostics, and trying several different backup programs it was not meant to be.  My new hard drive will come this week, and luckily I was able to at least backup all of my documents, videos, pictures, music, etc.

The up-side is that I will be able to start with a clean install of Windows 7… and I just love having no traces of Vista left on my computer.  The downside is that once the hard drive comes, I’ll be spending the day reinstalling all of my programs and transferring my files back instead of the computer doing all the work for me.

Do yourself a favor and BACK UP TODAY!!!!  A great website to help you do so is www.safecopybackup.com