The Adventures of Lorie and Brian Groth

Some friends and family haven’t quite figured out how to easily post photos online yet, so here is a little tutorial.

Copy to your PC: The first step is to copy photos to your computer. There are all sorts of ways to do that, including importing via Windows Live Photo Gallery, but I always just pull the memory stick out of my camera and manually copy files from it to my PC. It is easiest if you copy them to your Pictures folder.

Start WL Photo Gallery: Once you have photos copied to your PC, go to your Start menu in Windows, click on All Programs, then Windows Live, then Windows Live Photo Gallery. This is what is pictured to the left.

View photos in WL Photo Gallery: In WL Photo Gallery, navigate on the left-hand-side to “All photos and videos", then Pictures, and down to wherever you copied your pictures.

Edit: You can now double-click on any photo and “auto-correct”, change the file name, and do whatever else you want to the photo. Use the Fix and Info menu items to do all of this. Click on “Back to gallery” to get back to your list of photos.

Publish: Click on each picture you want to publish to http://photos.live.com. When you hover over a photo, you will see a small check box that you can click, or you can hold the Ctrl key down when clicking on different pictures. Then on the menu bar, click Publish/Online Album.

This is when you will see the image to the left. Type in a name for your new online folder or select an existing one. Then click Publish. (tip: if you select the Upload size of “original”, then I can download your large file, which is nice for me)

Share: Once the files get uploaded, you can click the “View Album” button. Then when viewing them online, there is an option to “Send a link” right above your list of photos (circled in red in the picture to the left).

This year I wasn’t biking alone. It was a little cold, but since there was no rain, Char (Lorie’s mom) joined me for a ride around London on the only day of the year when no city buses run. During the day, the temperature dropped, but we never got rained on, so it ended up being a nice 3-hour ride. I made a rough map of our route, which included the following locations:

• Going past the Royal Albert Hall with a short stop at the Albert Memorial
• Through Hyde Park up to Speakers’ Corner, but nobody was speaking today
• Around Piccadilly Circus, which had more cars this year, probably because the weather was nice so people were out and about.
• A short break for coffee (not me) at Leicester Square then down through Trafalgar Square
• Down to the Thames River where we saw the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, and The London Eye.  
• Past Buckingham Palace and up to Hyde Park Corner
• Then back to the river across from the Battersea Power Station (used on Pink Floyd’s album Animals)
• Over the Chelsea Bridge, through Battersea Park, over the Albert Bridge and back home

I’ve posted some photos too.

Tonight we went with a group of friends to the Royal Albert Hall for Carols by Candlelight with the Mozart Festival Orchestra and Chorus. To me, it was like a Christmas church service, but with just the music parts.

I was most interested in going so I could see the Royal Albert Hall, so here are some interesting facts about it:

1. Built in 1871, but the design is very similar to today’s modern stadiums.
2. The pipe organ is 70 feet tall, one of the largest in the world
3. In 1872, Morse code was first demonstrated there
4. The Wine Society in in London exists today because of a large amount of Portuguese wine that was left there in 1874 after an exhibition
5. In 1963, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones were on a double bill there. I think this is the only time they played on the same stage on the same night.

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While out walking Milo today, I took a few random photos of what we normally see. I especially like the mini campervan that’s almost the same size as an old Honda Civic.

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We were at Borough Market the other week and I still enjoy being a tourist there, hence the photos.

To all my friends and family that I’ve said “just wait, new versions are coming” … you can now get those new versions of Messenger, Mail, Photo Gallery, Movie Maker, and more.

Please download everything from http://download.live.com so you can easily upload photos to share with me (uploads to http://photos.live.com) with Photo Gallery, have better video calls via Messenger, and manage your e-mail with Mail (even you gmail users).

Yes, these are the products I work on at Microsoft, so I am naturally biased, but I think they are great products. Also, if you haven’t already done it, then after downloading the new products, go to http://profile.live.com and setup your Windows Live Profile  

The little dot on the map points to the one square foot of land that I now own in Scotland. Because of this, I am now Brian Groth, Laird of Kincavel, which is on the Ardnamurchan peninsula in Scotland. Laird means land owner.

Yep, I’m a bad-ass and I too can carry a sword just like the Highlander. Or maybe I’ll just be content to know that weeds and grasses grow on my land and the occasional sheep pees on it. 

The land is at:
Latitude North 56 Degrees 43.872 Minutes
Longitude West 6 Degrees 11.155 Minutes

Useful links to know about my land:

• A Map of the area
• General information about Ardnamurchan
• Tourist info
• And even more info about the area.
• Sister Beth bought us this for our recent birthdays via Moon Estates.

Jesus (he works in Spain) and I tried to go to a Dutch pancake house tonight in Amsterdam called Pannenkoekenhuis. After a very long €50 taxi ride (traffic & rain) we got there – only to discover that it is closed Monday through Thursday. Today is Thursday. The taxi driver was sort of lost, so he didn’t care. Since we were left to walk in the rain, we didn’t walk far, but at least we saw some streets lit up for Christmas. We ended up a a quaint little place that did serve some local foods, including my ham & cheese pancake (sort of like a crepe) and my advokaat and chocolate pancake (again, crepe-like). Nothing amazingly great, but better than airport food, which is where our hotel is located and at least it was interesting.