Photo sorting that is.  November and December last year (and a little bit this year) and then I'll be done with the first pass of sorting my digital photos into folders.  There'll still be quite a bit recategorisation needed to get everything into a setup that I'm happy with.  Then I'll need to finish scanning and sorting my prints.  And one day mum and dad's...  (and we won't even go there with all the holiday photos...)

Backtracking a little.  The other night at the movies we saw a trailer for The Second Best Exotic Marigold Hotel and were talking about it and it came up that we should watch the original.  So last night I went over to EffanC's to watch it (left the sweetie at home to work on his uni assignment).  We chatted and nibbled for a while before watching it.  I thoroughly enjoyed it, I thought it was very well done.  Must go see the sequel.  The sweetie came over and saw the end of it and then we went home.

Today I was able to work through some of the work that's been accumulating while sorting out problems, so that was good.

Early night tonight.

Had a pretty productive day today.  Got things done.  Fixed things (I hope).  Walked up the hill and hacked some portals.  Cleaned the kitchen.  Cleaned the study.  Sorted a month's worth of photos.

So yeah, pretty good day.

I still haven't done the vaccuuming.

So I woke up this morning thinking it was Monday.  So when I realised it was Tuesday it made me a feel a whole lot happier.

But the relentless onslaught of problems and interruptions took its toll on me and I almost snapped at one point from one too many phone calls during one too many problems.

I ranted half the afternoon, and all the way home with the sweetie.

But we did have some rather evil bbq pork ribs from Costco for dinner.

And watched some Veronica Mars and sorted photos and battled with my computer running at 100% cpu from riot-act pages I had open in my browser.  Stoopid stoopid stoopid site.  Why don't they just put the full article (and adverts if need be) in the rss feed??  The vast majority of riotact pages I just skip over because it's too much effort to go and actually read them.  Fail fail fail.

So several achievements tonight.

Firstly, I finished sorting 2013 photos into folders, leaving just a few thousand from 2014 to file.

Secondly, I finished the paint by numbers I've been working on for a while.  A bit disappointed in how it turned out actually.  Not as good as other ones I've done.

Finally, I finished watching Wonders of Weather, a documentary dad had on dvd.  The last episode featured a whole heap of Simon Carroll's work.  Just amazing.

So I achieved something tonight.  I finally finished the first pass of sorting my digital photos from year/month folders to folders by subject, finishing off photos from 2003 tonight.  I still have a good chunk of the last two or three years to file yet, so still a bit of work in that space.  Also did a bit of painting and watching dad's weather documentaries.

Today was yet another day of stress, problems and interruptions.

But we did have rather a nice lunch for Aquila's birthday at Black Pepper.  I had some satay chicken skewers which were delicious.

So mum will be pleased to hear I've *finally* gone back to editing our wedding photo book for reprinting.

I first did our wedding photo book in 2010 for the parents' for Christmas that year.  I was thoroughly stoked with how they turned out, but I wanted to change a few things for our own copy - some of the images were a little dark and needed lightening, there were a few little layout issues in places and I needed to fix some of the text.  You can't edit a finished photo book with Blurb, you have to essentially reimport it and start again.  But the first time I did this all the imported images that were vertical were showing up horizontally in the image list.  They were ok in the main part of the book, but I was paranoid that I'd go to get it printed and all the vertical images would come out sideways.  So there it sat for a few years.

Anyway tonight I fired up BookSmart to have another go at it.  For some reason I was able to open the old book and all the thumbnails look ok.  So I started doing the lightening of some of the photos.  So far I've come across one image that opened vertically in ACDSee, but horizontally in Irfanview.  So I really don't know what will happen to that image.  It *looks* ok, but if the exif data is screwed up who knows what will happen.  Just have to hold my breath I suppose.

Horror day at work today, too many things breaking for no good reason, and of course lots of people complaining about it :(:(  Was really wishing I'd stayed at home :(

So yesterday was photo sorting, painting, and watching dad's documentaries.  We went down to Kit's after dinner for a while which was nice.

Today was a meandering start.  I cooked cheesy hash browns for brunch yummm.  Went to the markets for some food shopping late morning.  Jo and Marc popped in briefly.  Did a bit of cleaning and photo sorting in the afternoon.  Still haven't vacuumed :(

Nat and Andrew came over for dinner (roast chicken and epic potato bake) but while we were waiting for it to cook we looked at our photos from Hong Kong (both trips) and Taipei.  After dinner we read through Geek Battle questions, and put on various YouTube videos.

Dave2 has recently posted his sagas with migrating from Aperture to Lightroom and his method of cataloging his photos.

It got me a bit more motivated to keep sorting out my photos.

You see I don't use any software to manage my photos.  I just don't trust it.  I prefer to see my photos as is in a directory structure.  I did play with Picasa once and *hated* it.  I also tried using windoze built in tagging feature and hated it even more.

So now I just keep files in directories.  In the olden days I used to file all my photos by year then month.  This was fine for when I only took a few photos per month, and I kept an excel file database to manage it all and it was all good.  In January 1999 I got my first digital camera.  I loved that camera.  I used it for five years.  But I only properly documented all my digital photos for the first year or so.  Then it all got too hard because I took so many photos.  So it became impossible to find anything unless you knew *when* something was taken.  I could spend ages searching through months and months of photos trying to find a photo I took of something.

In recent years I've changed my photo sorting to be by subject.  This generally works a whole lot better.  But I still haven't finished sorting my photos.  I get little bursts of enthusiasm from time to time, but it's an awful lot of effort.  

So I just keep plugging away at it.

Today I was filing some of the first year of photos I took on my digital camera into my folders by subject structure.  I found some fun ones mum would probably like of the mess they made repainting the house in 1999..

The other month, Dave2 resurrected his FridayQ posts.  I did many of these ten years ago (holy crap has it been that long ???) but I also missed a lot because I actually often found them too hard!  Often it required thought and brainpower that I just didn't have.  Anyway, I thought it might be fun to work through them for the next year (until I forget) and compare answers with ten years ago.  And I even still have a "category" in my blog, which is pretty disturbing in itself!

Friday, June 4th 2004...

FQ Topic: Escape

FQ1: What is your favorite way to escape from everyday life?
Movies, tv (to some extent), internet.  Jigsaws, although that gives me plenty of time to let my brain wander, which sometimes goes into fantasyland, sometimes about life in general.  Alcohol to some extent.  Travel, but not nearly enough of that :)

FQ2: When was the last time you made an escape? Where did you go?
Well our last proper holiday was to Hong Kong and Taipei.  Given that I did almost no planning for it, I guess you could say it was an escape.

FQ3: If you could escape to anywhere on earth right now, where would that be?
Gosh.  Probably Europe somewhere.  I love Europe.

FQ DARE: Post your passport photo (or your driver's license photo if you don't have a passport).
I *hate* my passport photo.  These days you're not allowed to smile for your passport photos which makes me look completely retarded.

Compare with last time ...

So I've had a great Christmas break so far.  Mostly.

Christmas day was a fairly lazy start after staying up a little too late with Kit on Christmas Eve (I forced them to watch the carols hehe and then we half watched Frozen, oops).  Didn't get to Potty's til a bit later than I wanted to, which meant the pork didn't get on til a bit late, which meant it was going to be a late lunch.  But we brought heaps of nibbles so ordinarily that would have been fine.  But just as we were sitting down to eat lunch everything happened at once.  While serving ourselves lunch Annie and the family turned up (it was 2pm and they were meant to arrive after lunch, but lunch was late hrmm), and miss V took that as her cue to open her presents.  Next year I'm not putting labels on presents.  That'll learn em.  Anyway, so instead of a nice relaxing Christmas lunch it was all super rushed and stressful.  Grunt.  The rest of the afternoon was a bit better though.

George really didn't like his Christmas collar and was so depressed he almost got run over because he wouldn't get out of the way when we came home.

Friday morning I got stuck into my holiday break.  Friday and Saturday I had really productive days, getting stuff done around the house, as well as some sorting out of *stuff* and sorting my photos and lots of sorting of Dad's photos.  

Annie got me this for Christmas - super cute, goes with the little Neuschwanstein Castle she got me last year.

Cherries at Damien's

Sunday morning was more of dad's photo sorting, then we went over to Damien's for a Thermomix feast lunch.  Not a demo as such (he wasn't trying to sell us one), just a fun little banquet of dishes from it.

First he made up some pizza dough.

Then he made a very nice dip of cream cheese, garlic, green onions and parsely.

Then a leek and potato soup

The leftovers of the soup made the base for a sauce that went with this steamed chicken and vegetables

And here's that pizza

And finally a sorbet to finish

So quite a feast in the end!

Afterwards we played a round of the Logo Game, which I won, then came home and did more photo sorting.

Monday and today was primarily photo sorting and a bit of house stuff.  And shaking my head over dad's "system" of backups.  So much waste.

Here's the "before" pile.  The offsite backups, the archives, the working copies, backups of mum's photos, unsorted cds, copies of other people's photos, and an entire large spindle of unfiled duplicates.

And this is everything I'm chucking out.  Over four hundred cds :(  Such a waste.  They would never even have been used either.  He would have just burnt them, filed them, and that was the end of that.  And I swear about fifty of those cds were from their Gulf Savannah trip in 2007.  Sooo many copies of everything.  Sigh.

Last night we went to EffanC's for dinner, and after dinner we watched Labyrinth on the big screen (aka their lounge room wall).  It was super awesome.

So I've gotten a lot done this break, although not nearly as much as I wanted to.  There's still so many things on the todo list.  Life is too short.  Holidays are too short.  Sigh.