It's a rainy Saturday afternoon, so it seems like a perfect opportunity to keep the world up-to-date on the latest happenings of my life.
October 31st was my last day at the company I have been with for over 4.5 years. No hard feelings, but it was time to move on. It certainly made for some interesting goodbyes though, seeing as I was dressed up for Halloween. I may post a picture if I get a hold of one, but let's just say that I'm sure I made a lasting impression.
I decided to take a week off before starting my new job, just to decompress, clear my cache, and get some stuff done that I've been meaning to do. I'm very excited about my new job; the product looks slick and useful and I think I'll get lots of opportunity to show my skillz. They are in north Waterloo so it's a short commute, but hopefully the Intrigue can handle a few more clicks.
[Side note: I'm not mentioning any company names because I'd like to keep some degree of separation between my work and private life. Please keep that in mind if you make comments.]
As I mentioned, I've had the week off, and while I didn't quite get done everything I envisioned, I'm happy with what I have accomplished. But instead of having one massively large post, just click here and here to see what I've been up to. Other than that I've been playing lazy househusband (fairly well I think!)... I may get used to the "stay-at-home" thing. ;)
I'm a lumberjack, and that's okay...
The first major task I had this week was the removal of our two unsightly and photon-absorbing maple trees in the back yard.
I have a 10" chainsaw that came with the house, and it was great for lopping off the limbs, but cutting through the 8" and 12" trunks proved to be more difficult.
I enlisted the help of sleep-deprived Ryan to assist with the trunk removal. With a combination of the chain saw and a newly-purchased bow saw we felled the trees. And that is where The Grinder came in.
This beast of a machine chewed up the stump like a demented beaver on steroids. We rented it from Home Depot, along with a good-sized roto-tiller (and thankfully we had the Suburban). After we clean up the mess and put some sod down there should be no trace of The Maple Duo.
PS: Shout out to my sister for the lumberjack connection.
I have a 10" chainsaw that came with the house, and it was great for lopping off the limbs, but cutting through the 8" and 12" trunks proved to be more difficult.
I enlisted the help of sleep-deprived Ryan to assist with the trunk removal. With a combination of the chain saw and a newly-purchased bow saw we felled the trees. And that is where The Grinder came in.
This beast of a machine chewed up the stump like a demented beaver on steroids. We rented it from Home Depot, along with a good-sized roto-tiller (and thankfully we had the Suburban). After we clean up the mess and put some sod down there should be no trace of The Maple Duo.
PS: Shout out to my sister for the lumberjack connection.
They's organized!
Between Carolyn and me, our three cameras, and the various well-intentioned but never-completed re-organizational backups, we had amassed about 160,000 files spanning two hard-drives amounting to about 450 GB. Of that, 150GB was an exact duplicate of images due to a recent migration to a bigger hard-drive. That still left me with about 115,000 photos (300GB) that were haphazardly organized, thus giving me no easy way to confidently determine which files I could delete because they were duplicates.
So, as any craftsman would do, I put my own skills to the test and wrote a program. This software would compile a list of all the images files I have, generate a comprehensive structure in which to store the files, and eliminate all duplicates (including JPG versions of RAW files). It would also convert all my (proprietary Nikon) RAW files to (open) Adobe DNG format, and embed pertinent IPTC data (creator, copyright, etc.) into each image as well.
It took me the better part of the week to do it but finally the software - Photo Organizer Lite - was finished. (I scrapped the previous two incarnations - Photo Organizer and Photo Organizer Basic, as they were really too ambitious for the task at hand.) It's actually still running as I write this, but the most critical work is complete - the photo re-organization. Of the 157,359 images the software found 89330 exact duplicates, 7260 duplicate RAW files (where a DNG had already been created), and 29228 duplicate JPGs (where a RAW version already existed).
The happy result is a sensible organization of only about 32,000 unique images (I'll have an exact number when it's complete). I've just freed up almost 350GB of space and I can now confidently find any picture I'm looking for (presuming that I know approximately when it was taken). The next step will be to tag all my images with appropriate keywords (see The Daunting Task) so that my photos will not only be organized, but easily searchable. Methinks that will have to wait until the next time I have a full week off...
PS: In case you didn't catch it, the title is a reference to Chicken Run.
PPS: Oh, and special thanks to Jack who had a hand in (impeding) the development of this software.
So, as any craftsman would do, I put my own skills to the test and wrote a program. This software would compile a list of all the images files I have, generate a comprehensive structure in which to store the files, and eliminate all duplicates (including JPG versions of RAW files). It would also convert all my (proprietary Nikon) RAW files to (open) Adobe DNG format, and embed pertinent IPTC data (creator, copyright, etc.) into each image as well.
It took me the better part of the week to do it but finally the software - Photo Organizer Lite - was finished. (I scrapped the previous two incarnations - Photo Organizer and Photo Organizer Basic, as they were really too ambitious for the task at hand.) It's actually still running as I write this, but the most critical work is complete - the photo re-organization. Of the 157,359 images the software found 89330 exact duplicates, 7260 duplicate RAW files (where a DNG had already been created), and 29228 duplicate JPGs (where a RAW version already existed).
The happy result is a sensible organization of only about 32,000 unique images (I'll have an exact number when it's complete). I've just freed up almost 350GB of space and I can now confidently find any picture I'm looking for (presuming that I know approximately when it was taken). The next step will be to tag all my images with appropriate keywords (see The Daunting Task) so that my photos will not only be organized, but easily searchable. Methinks that will have to wait until the next time I have a full week off...
PS: In case you didn't catch it, the title is a reference to Chicken Run.
PPS: Oh, and special thanks to Jack who had a hand in (impeding) the development of this software.
Best game ever
I think most people would agree that the best game of all time is pong. I remember playing black & white pong (or its variants, tennis or hockey, all in one system!) when I was a wee lad. Well, I think pong is about to make a huge comeback. Check this out:
http://www.electronicmiracles.com/?s2=4&s3=13&p=1
So cool!
[Postscript - Nov 7th, 2008]
After some joint research with my mom, we finally found the gaming system that we owned.
Those were the days.
http://www.electronicmiracles.com/?s2=4&s3=13&p=1
So cool!
[Postscript - Nov 7th, 2008]
After some joint research with my mom, we finally found the gaming system that we owned.
Those were the days.
