In past, Uncle LIO went into depth speculating reasons why search engines (their indexing bots) not able to do deep search of SMA.com. Old glitchy forum scripts or some hidden coding gone haywire maybe. Probably why same reason Archive.org cannot fully detect the deeper pages. If there is any good to that, maybe that not searchable thing has maybe help prevent SMA.com from being hacked & spammed.

Signing-up: I see template has elements of the social-schmocial sites. Not saying that's bad. Signing up, it asks a bit more personal info, such as location and BIRTHDATE. Signing up here, I was not sure my birth or age would be displayed and so I lied when I was born :)  I also tried to put my real birthdate, born in year 2000 (I'm just a kid) and the sign-up form rejected it.

There seems to be 2 ways to post ... one is 1) REPLY & other is 2) COMMENT.

1) With 'reply' type post, a warning about 15 minutes editing minutes left to edit comments.  In the heat of keyboarding emotional debates, commentary, & opinions, many times I know posters have gone back to re-edit, change, or delete. But only 15 minutes window period to re-edit? I feel under pressure :(  Wonder if that editing time can be extended.

2) With 'comment' type post .... it looks like there is no editing feature of your post/comments, BUT it allows you to delete the entire comment. Look at the 'x' in upper right corner. That feature similar to facebook. You just delete comment & rewrite if you want.

Hi Mike!

Not too bad.  Took my Son last month to Prague to meet the crowd there; planting seeds in his head...  Opera Season doesn't go full tilt for another month, so I'm home dickering about.  Almost done setting up my little smithy in the garage...  Hope all is well!

Hi Strider, 

Thanks for all the info, it wasn't overload at all, just what I was looking for.  Andy had told me that there were adaptors for lenses, I have an Olympus e520, and one Canon lens (50mm) a Tiffen 62 mm, and another Canon 135 mm.  These are all really manual, from my old 35mm cameras, so I'm pretty sure they'll work.  Do I have to find an adaptor specifically for canon to olympus, or do they make generic ones?  Just started looking into this, notice they range from $10-150, so there must be some differences..  I wanted to peruse what was allready on here for info before I started a redundant discussion post.  Attempted to get Sophi to do the research part, but she's just into the creative stuff, so it's up to me to figure out the nuts and bolts of this venture, sigh, when I want to make models too!

I'm thinking you were watching the Gumbi show, my eldest daughter is 13, so she started off with the Gumby movie.  Man, I think she watched that movie at least once a day for a solid year when she was a toddler.  Now that I am learning a bit about animation I kind of wish we still had it, I would look at it with a different eye (specifically, that epic swordfight scene...)  

Wish I had more time to research today, but duty calls.

Thanks for your help.

Wow Strider, you're doing all the work for me, it's awesome!!  After a very busy weekend (had a bday on Saturday) I'm finally getting back to the project.  So no go on the plug for the camera (the battery does last a long time), I guess I can deal with that.  I was thinking what's the big deal about having a plug, but then I thought, duh, you have to move the camera to change the battery, which means you'd have to do an entire shoot on one battery or else have some discrepancy in the film, correct?  I suppose it's pretty impossible to get it in exactly the same position.  See, it's starting to make sense, it will make more sense when we actually get set up and start doing it, I suppose.

So my only other option is this Tiffen lens that came off my old 35 mm pentax k-1000 (loved that camera!)  It is an FD mount lens, 62 mm, I'll look and see if I can find a converter for it.  I'm pretty sure I have more questions but I'm not thinking of them right now, need to reread and absorb a bit.

Thanks again for sharing your rather extended knowledge.

OK, thankful that the parts so far are in our budget, going to order the adaptor and remote today.  You were right that was a tiffen filter on the lens, but still can't see a name on this dang lens anywhere, have no idea who made it, hope it works with the adaptor.  My other option was to hit up friends with old cameras for lenses.

So now for the computer part, cringing.  I have a pc here that was recently put together and so has nothing on it, would I be able to use that, or do I need to have a laptop, and what are my options for software (besides Dragon?)

I'm being terribly lazy using you for a reference, I promise I'll do better research myself soon.  I'm a baker and my business is super busy right now (autumn in new england is busy time) plus we homeschool, so trying to get into the swing of things.  As I mentioned before, everyone wants to make models and stories, no one wants to do the boring technical work, sigh.

i read your blog virtually the whole afternoon, and wanted to say thanks for all the useful information you share with people!

i wish you all the best and kind regards!