Through the Viewfinderthoughts of a photographer

This started out as a hunt for an air leak. For a couple of years I’d noticed there was a nasty draft coming from my Saturn Ion’s glove comartment. Tolerable in the summer, but pretty chilly for passengers during the winter months.

The day arrived when I was ready to disassemble the dashboard and hunt down the problem. “An air supply hose must’ve slipped off ” I thought. With several hours set aside for the project, I gathered up my tools, scrunched under the dash and began to start removing parts. I opened the glove compartment and started to remove the door. It was then that I noticed an small, slim plastic door at the very back of the glove compartment. It was hanging open. The source of the cold air!

As it turned out this is the door for the cabin air filter, a smaller version of the air filter you’re used to replacing on your home furnace. I think the previous owner of my car must’ve pulled it out, gone hunting for a replacement and then given up. It would’ve been nice if he’d closed the air filter door first!

Replacement of the air filter is an easy task, requiring no tools. To replace the filter carefully pop the left guide from the outer glove compartment door.

Then pop out the right guide (a little harder, but it’ll come out if you’re careful).

After the glove compartment door is loose, swing it all the way down. You’ll see the slim (approx. 2″ x 10″) cover to the air filter. If it hasn’t been tinkered with, you’ll see two plastic pull-clips on either end (in our case the clips were gone so we replaced them with small sheet metal scews).

Slide the old filter out. Installing the new filter is a bit trickier than changing your home furnace filter. The filter tends to hang-up every so often. It goes in at a slight angle, so work it back and forth and it’ll eventually slide into place.

Then close up the filter door and secure it with the original push-clips or with two sheet metal screws.

Now you’ll be breathing cleaner air, and in my case, no more drafts!

 
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The older we get the more important our memories become — the tangible ones like photos and pictures of our loved ones, our happy times, life’s markers like weddings, parties and holidays. In the Digital Age we need to take extra steps to make sure those files are properly protected.

Back everything up. This goes without saying. However you need to back up the same files in several places to be really safe.
DVD’s and CD roms fail after time. I have some CD’s burned in 1998 that are losing their silver layer. It’s flaking off like old paint!

Once a year one of our studio hard drives “dies”. Usually it’s the motor bearing freezing up and the data is lost.

RAID systems have the benefit of redundant hard drives (data is written to two drives at once). Yet they’re still prone to failure if a virus enters your system.

So the point here is to back up in several ways:

- make one, or better yet two, DVD disc data copies. Don’t skimp, use a good brand of media (we recommend JVC Taiyo Yuden DVD’s)

- use an external USB Hard drive dock and back up to an external (removable) hard drive.

- keep a backup copy on your extra laptop.

- try to store a backup in an off-site location (such as a bank lock box or at a friend’s house)

All this extra effort will preserve those images for a lifetime (and longer)!