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And since it was my birthday I thought “how nice, someone remembered!” Then I saw the attachment: postcard.zip.

Hallmark does not zip its ecards, hardly any postcard service does. They have a pickup link, or immediately show the ecard as an embedded image. As this was in my Yahoo account I clicked on the Scan before download link and true enough, Yahoo’s Norton Antivirus scanner detected a virus in the file.

Hallmark themselves know that this and has released useful information on their site on how to combat this email. The first versions of this email came out in 2007 and has been reported to be still ciruclating around May of this year.

The good thing about email services like Yahoo is that they have built-in antivirus checking, so that the chances of your downloading malware is almost nil. However, if you get it in your email client and your antivirus program (gasp! you don’t have one??!) is not up to date, you may be in for a heap of trouble.

When I first heard the word “lomo” I thought it was a cut of meat. Lomo is the Tagalog (also Visayan) word for tenderloin. But when I read up on it I realized that it was not only the name of the Russian makers of the camera, but also of the technique by which blurriness, oversaturated colors or off-kilter angles are now considered chic when they used to be—well, bad photography.

Lest the lomo enthusiasts start giving me flak about my statement above, I would like to come on record as having spend more than half my salary in the mid-90s on film and film processing on this Minolta which is an heirloom from my aunt, now in Seattle, Washington, US of A, and comfortably ensconced in the digital age. I too consider myself as ensconced, but not as much as I would like to be, as my idea of ensconce-ment is a digital SLR. Maybe in a year or two I would have a hand-me-down DSLR but until then …

Which brings me back to this Minolta, which has not been used since I got my first digital camera (another hand me down) in 2003. I’ve cleaned the parts that can be reached by cotton swabs, and I’m hoping that when I go out to get ASA 100 film the shutter will work and I will be able to take pictures with it again.

I got the dreaded “power calibration” error while trying to burn a backup disk on this three-year-old IBM T43. As this was the first time I had encountered it (and half past midnight really isn’t a very good time to encounter problems for the first time) I had to go ask my good buddy Google for help.

It appears that there are three main causes of the power calibration error.

1. The drive doesn’t like the media. With the proliferation of cheap blank media there will be instances when the blank cd itself is the problem. I thought this was my problem at first, having bought a stack of 100 cd’s from a local dealer that prides itself on very affordable prices, but consequently offers little if any warranty.
2. Power consumption. In this era of usb hubs that look make your peripherals look like sucklings on a sow there may be a chance that your cd recorder is not getting the power that it needs to burn your cd’s. So off went the usb hub and I suffered the eraser-head pointer tool on the T43 keyboard. Still no go.
3. Dirt. Yuk. Yep, this was actually the culprit in my case. I live in a country where dust and grime is part of everyday life and I remember again that this laptop was assigned to a heavy smoker before it ended up on my lap. I took out my bottle of micro clean and spritzed a q-tip, swabbed the lens (very gently) and then gave it a few bursts of the rubber dust blower. THAT fixed it.

Am burning happily again now, and I’ve passed the tip on to my buddies at work. Hope it helps you too.