And Old Mind in a High Tech World

For the past several days I have been working on a slide show to show photos of our youngest son Bill who will turn 50 in July. He did this for us on our 50th anniversary in 2003 and we marveled at the presentation, as did the rest of our relatives. 

I decided to do the same for him on his birthday, as a surprise. I started searching for old photos about a month ago and this took forever as our photos are stacked away in photo boxes, in no order whatsoever~ and the 35mm slides posed a problem. How would I get them developed into photos to use in the slide show.


Guess what! Last night I finished the slide show, even adding music from the 70's and 80's as background music. I am so proud of myself!!

I have spent many, many hours on a project that probably would have taken our computer savy sons about an hour or two.

I couldn't figure out how to add captions or titles to photos I was using as slides, so I turned to Power Point which I had used a couple of times. I had so much fun with transitions, sound effects, background colors, etc. that sometimes I lost sight of what I was supposed to be doing.

Then there was the problem of music. I got Bill's friend Dorothy to download some music from the 70s and 80s (I had no idea what was "playing" back then). She send a CD with some songs and when I played them, our son James came running over to the computer and started singing along with the oldies. He knew all of the groups or singers and the songs. I recognized the music and the beat since I had heard it a lot while the boys were growing up.

Bill and Barbara 

I thought you just clicked on "Play CD" and then, voila! There was music in the air. But not so! There's a lot you have to program into the slide show to make the music play. Ah, so many trials and errors and now I have it all worked out. Maybe I can figure out a way to link this site to the songs so you can listen to them. That might take about a month to figure out.

I would love to take some computer classes and learn to work with photos. That's another story.

Jim and I each have a computer and we network. For awhile we shared a scanner but recently he bought his own and you can scan photos from 35mm color slides. Yeah! He made my copies for me to use in Bill's slide show.

Don't say you "can't teach an old dog new tricks"; we are living proof that it can be done, and we are still learning something new every day.