So last Tuesday after battling for two nights with Apple, and blogging, it got to 21:30 and I still needed to wash my hair. Le sigh.
The lake was a little fuller after the hail storm.
Thursday was a bit of a crazy day. There was a bushfire near the airport, so people were distracted monitoring that (it originally started in trees that I'd noticed on the way to the club just last weekend were dead because of the drought). And then it took out some good chunks of our network because an Optus location lost power and they didn't have generator backup there. And there was a water bomber plane crash. Sadly it was the same C-130 we saw taking off out of HMAS Albatross last year. Sad times. And then they closed the airport (well most flights were cancelled), stranding people in (and out) of Canberra for the evening. I really couldn't concentrate very well on work that afternoon. In the evening I was going to watch Coco by myself (finally caught up on all the Pixar movies I started watching a year ago, with just Toy Story 4 to go now - which is coming soon!) but the boys were ok for me to watch it on the main tv and they watched it too. Was pretty good. Well except for the whole I issue I had that photos have only existed for the past hundred or so years, so what did people do before that? Paintings? hrmm
Friday I went over to Chrissie's and we had some champagne for her birthday and had Chinese takeaway and just chatted which was really nice. Her car was damaged in the hail.
Saturday I did a bunch of research into how I was going to morph Ryan's donut photos. One person said use "face movie" from Picasa. My version of Picasa was pretty old and didn't seem to have it, so I downloaded the latest off the Wayback Machine. And it was magic. Saved me hours and hours and hours of effort. Well, I still need to get some final photos from Luc to finish it off but I suddenly found myself free for the weekend.
In the evening was a party for Aquila's 60th. Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising but he came and stayed anyway which was nice. And we didn't have a late night. There was a lot of food. Food spam to follow ;) After the jigsaws!! OMFG!!
Sunday. OMFG I hate Apple. Ever since I got my XS, it's never synced my Google calendar with the phone. I've tried all sorts of suggestions but nothing ever worked. So I gave up and downloaded the Google Calendar app which works just fine. But it's also stopped syncing my contacts. Which is more annoying because I often update my phone, but I want Google to be the master. So I went hunting to see if I could try again to fix Google sycning. Someone talked about using iCloud. So I logged into iCloud to find my contacts aren't synced there at all!!! Even though it's set to backup contacts. What a retarded piece of crap. I complained on Twitter, as you do, and they actually responded. Not with anything useful of course. I haven't tried the last thing they suggested, because I was completely over it. I'm going to go back to my old 1999 perl/mysql database as my "master", making sure I have a full backup of everything, then try some more to hack away at it.
We were originally going to go to the club Sunday afternoon but Stu wasn't feeling up to socialising, so we just stayed home. Which suited me just fine as I was having fun geotagging my USA 2000 photos, and listening to the Classic 100 Music in the Movies, Rescreened, which I listened to the entire weekend which was awesome. Did a bit of jigsaw as well. We watched Quantum of Solace in the evening. Man, that movie made me dizzy just looking at it. Such a frenetic pace in the action sequences - editing of shots less than a second each. Madness.
Monday I woke up at 3:30 and never got back to sleep (well I did for about half an hour at 6:30). Hurrah. Spent the day geotagging photos. It was fun reliving my trip to New York from 2000, with more fresh memories to reinforce it all from a year ago. I was sad geotagging the World Trade Centre photos though - I found it somewhat strange/disturbing that I could still geotag those photos with complete precision. I was even able to geotag just about all the photos fairly accurately in Disneyland. It's amazing how much has stayed the same over the past twenty years. Managed to manually geotag the entire set of photos in one weekend. Ok so there were only 727 of them, and about 70 I'd done the other week.
On Monday afternoon a bushfire started near Orroral, where Stu, Kit and I did the Granite Tors walk a few years ago. We could see the smoke from our place.
We watched the first episode of Picard in the evening.
Got a much better night's sleep on Monday night. Tuesday the Orroral fire got much much worse. We could see the pyrocumulus clouds from work. I got some pretty insane timelapses of it.
Tuesday night I backed up my phone. It only took 32 minutes and about 8-10 reconnects of the phone to get the photos and the half dozen regular videos, not counting getting two timelapses I got via Google Drive earlier in the day. Then another 15 minutes to process them (every single video had its timestamp changed), minus the few minutes I ran outside to see the sky on fire..
Today I worked from home. Last Friday David had gotten sick enough of our slow internet upload speeds that he called Internode to see if they could fix it. Today an NBN dude turned up and went off to fix it. Turns out there was a broken connector, resulting in exactly half the speed we should have had. So he fixed that and our download speeds are now back up to 20mbit down, 4 up. Not quite as fast as it was before, but still twice as good as recent times. Hurrah! So at least that was a win. Smoke from the Orroral fire blew north and the sky got a really eerie green/brown/yellow colour for much of the day.
Tonight was just going back into the photo labels I'd done for the USA 2000 trip, and giving them a bit more detail and tidying it up. I also redid all the panoramas. Back in the day I used a program (Panavue?) that you had to manually set linkage points for it to line them up. It worked pretty well for fairly horizontal panoramas, but not so well if the camera was angled. So I redid them in Microsoft Image Composite Editor. Sometimes Microsoft comes up with amazing software, and this is one example. Works like magic.
Case in point:
In all the crazyness of the world right now I can't help but be inspired by these flowers growing in our front garden. They've basically had no water all summer, except during the storm last week. Yet here they are, in full bloom, smiling at the world.
Stay safe everyone!
Sylvia Johnson
I loved the photos of Chrissie & Nathan and the red sky on fire and the beautiful flowers at the end. Glad you had an enjoyable time celebrating Chrissie's birthday.