[Leica] Vince's bad Dell

[lrzeitlin at gmail.com (Lawrence Zeitlin)]

Just a couple of answers:

The parks you speak of are all around this area. New York State is park
crazy. It was a tradition of the super wealthy, the Rockefellers, the
Vanderbilts, the Harrimans, the Roosevelts, etc. to donate their estates to
the public. It also saved them a bundle on taxes.  Within a short bike ride
of my house, just north of Croton, we have Croton Point, a very large county
park extending into the Hudson River, Blue Mountain State Park featuring
miles of mountain bike and horse riding trails, the Croton Dam Aqueduct
trail which follows the old Croton aqueduct 40 mile to NYC, the Peekskill -
Briarcliff trailway, and the Hudson River Parkway, a section of the planned
100 mile long park along the river funded by the NYS Clean Waters Act. The
very big 190 sq. km. Bear Mountain/Harriman State Park is just across the
river and is a section of the Appalachian trail. The trail itself crosses
the much photographed Bear Mountain Bridge. Stretching along the river to
New Jersey is the Palisades Park with its towering cliffs. And then there
are many more. If you want to drive a bit further you can rough it in the
"forever wild" Adirondack State Park - three times the size of Yellowstone.

About used Macs. If you can forgo Windows compatibility you can pick up a
used high end G4 Mac for peanuts. Say under $300. These will run Photoshop,
GraphicConverter, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and all the other goodies in Mac's
iLife suite. Free programs are available which are more than adequate
substitutes for MS Word and Excel. I'm writing this on my absolute favorite
computer, a 5 year old Mac 12" Powerbook.

Ric is right. Your son's Mac computer may well be rescued by one of the disc
correction programs like Disc Warrior. If that fails, a simple
reinstallation of the operating system may be all that is necessary. Macs
usually don't die unless the screen goes black and smoke starts coming from
the openings.

Lime and cranberry - sounds good. It might be better with a drop of gin.
Just the subject for a critical taste test.

Larry Z

- - - - -

I might be in touch sometime this summer as I'd love to bring my little boy

up to that park you had such lovely pictures of; where is it again? Along

the reservoir or the river?  Anyway I'm not drinking these days but I'll

have my usual seltzer with lime and cranberry while I advise you on whiskey

choices.


Thanks for that sage advice. I didn't know about the used macs and my (20

year old) son needs a new computer (which I will have to pay for; he got the

dreaded little "file folder" symbol that signalled the end of his Mac) so

we'll look into that.


Vince