Sunday.  9th.  Got home from the coast and spent some time doing Dotz, then closing off browser tabs.  I really feel like I need to spend less time on the computer/internet/phone... hrmmmm.  Downloaded photos from the week and blogged the last two weeks and some of the coast weekend.  Leftover mince with cauliflower rice and cheese for dinner.  Death in Paradise 14.1.  Somehow managed to lose a BRAND NEW HAIR TIE!!!  Had a slight meltdown because I'd been out of sorts all day, and this just sent me over the edge.  

Monday.  Went to bed early (like 20:30) but woke up at 12:45 and stayed awake for HOURS.  Sigh.  So not transfunctionating during the day.  Mostly just did house stuff during the day, which all took a lot longer than normal because I wasn't transfunctionating.  Finally finally got a bit of rain around 18:00 (even the weeds are dying at the moment!!).  Need to bribe the little brother into visiting before daylight savings finishes so I can see what I'm cooking.  Had lamb chops from Chris's and cabbage for dinner.  I never used to like lamb chops growing up because they were just too damned fiddly with all the fat and bones.  After forty years (and almost never having eaten them in the meantime) I have to say my opinion hasn't changed much.  Sure they're tasty, but just too annoying.

Tried to watch Stranger Things but nothing would connect to the Chromecast, even after rebooting it, the wifi and Stu's phone.  Did a bit of a Google and found everyone on the internet complaining about it.  Enshittification much??  We ended up watching a bit of Hard Quiz.  I think I could answer ONE question - football, meat pies, <what> and Holden cars?

Tuesday.  Slightly early night.  Actually slept quite well.  Hurray.  NEIL at work, who was off getting bits of him chopped out.  Chromecast still down.  Turns out an intermediate certificate expired so stuff couldn't authenticate.  I wonder if Google are debating whether or not to fix it or let the generation 2 devices all just die and force people to buy new ones.  I imagine that would piss off enough people that they would refuse to buy anything Google again.  I also got my quarterly reminder at work to check for expiring certificates coming up in the next quarter.  If only Google had done that.

Wednesday.  The brother type person called me while I was at lunch.  He could come TONIGHT.  Except I didn't have a new light to install yet.  He suggested Bunnings.  I walked up to Project Lighting instead.  They had a record of what we bought last time and I got something similar.  Not the same of course.  No no no.  Maybe that's a good thing though because turns out Mercator Franklin lights are TRASH!!!  Seriously LED lights should last years and years and years.  Not SIX years!!  And it's not like you can just replace a bulb, now you have to REPLACE THE WHOLE DAMNED FITTING!!! #hate  Anyways, so David picked me up after work and installed the new light! Hurray!!  Bestest brother ever. 

Had a few drinks and chatted then he got a bee in his bonnet to setup the PS3 to be able to use Netflix and Amazon Prime.  Did I mention I have the bestest brother ever?? :)

Thursday.  Woke up around 2:45 for several hours.  Sigh.  Although surprisingly unzombielike. 

NEIL again for the day.  Julian's farewell at drinks which was nice (I called the Japanese whisky, but not Lego Himeji Castle :) ).  Pizza with blue cheese for dinner!

DS9 1.13.  Another dumb episode.

Friday.  Slept fairly well.  NEIL at work.  Brown Food Friday!!!

DS9 1.14 and Death in Paradise 14.2.

Saturday.  Went to bed at 21:30 but didn't get to sleep til after 00:30.  Sigh.  Then meh sleep.  So twice this week I've had crap sleep the night before a day off.  Sigh.  Zombie morning, mostly house stuff.  Did some Dotz and even did a jigsaw in the late afternoon - 500 pieces in an hour and a quarter flat!  I asked the sweetie what's for dinner?  His response:

Google fixed the Chromecast issue.  Haven't looked up what they did.  Watched DS9 1.14.  Another meh episode.  Does DS9 actually get any better?  Most of season 1 is lame.  Stranger Things 1.5.  They finally banded together after all attackings things separately.  Reminded me in one place of E.T.  :)  

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok.  Got a bee in my bonnet to write a script to swap out Picasa database directories.  And spent a chunk of the day tagging people in photos.  Whoops.  Also gave Neil a lift to the hospital for antibiotics (did you know "hospital at home" is a thing?  You stay home but have to pop into the hospital every day for treatment.  Advantages and disadvantages - nice that you can hang out in your own house but a pain to have to trek into the hospital every day). 

Also.  Why TF does windoze reset the sort order of my directories EVERY DAMNED TIME IT REBOOTS???  Far out it pisses me off.

Have had like three drops of rain this afternoon.  So much for showers.  

Sunday.  12th.  Cooked a very nice lamb roast for dinner with all the veggies.

Death in Paradise 12.1, some Dotz, and photoshopped (with gimp) a photo of Vicki for Kit to blur out the background.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok.  Even got another 20 minutes sleep after I woke up at 5:30. 

I desperately wish we had a FOGO bin.  

Unproductive morning then worked with my newfound method of doing a full config dump to automate a text backup of policies (there's full data backups but you can't easily pull out just the policy from that).  Cooked up some cheesy mince and salad for dinner.  Death in Paradise 12.2.

Tuesday.  Lights out was a little bit late, so then ended up too tired to go to sleep.  Restless for like an hour, then the storm kept me awake for another hour or so.  So, tired day.  Frustration with Powershell that's setup differently in dev and prod.  At least prod works.  Spent the afternoon on the quality script again - made some good progress with that. 

Took this rather spectacular photo of the sun behind one of the epic dandelions in the afternoon.  Had to turn the phone down so the camera was at the bottom, then point it up a the sun.  Could barely see the screen to see what I was doing cause it was so low down.

Leftovers for dinner then Death in Paradise 12.3, then Mum photo picking.

Wednesday.  Slept okish I think.  Made some good progress on the quality script, but again it was like one step forward two steps back as you find bugs.  Raced up at 16:30 to pickup the car (they even had a power outage for an hour in the afternoon!), then raced home. 

Beat the storm by just a couple of minutes.  

Hail!!!

As I was out the back watching the hail I realised I'd forgotten to water all the plants out the back that morning, and all my strawberries were all flop :(  And I couldn't even bring them under cover because it was HAILING.  At least they all got some water (and they mostly perked back up later but a lot of the fresh runners died :(:( ).  And the mini capsicum out the front which I *did* water that morning was also all flop :(  Stoopid 30+ degree hot and windy days.

After the storm I propped it up on the side of a bucket, and it did recover.

Death in Paradise 12.4.  Some of the murders are wayyy too unbelievable.  Like right in the middle of a wedding?  With the most preposterous setup for an alibi.  Dumb dumb dumb.

Thursday.  Got the quality script mostly working.  Still a few issues.  Drinks at Bar 59 again.  It was a lot more crowded this time!!

XL got sweet potato chips this week - they were amazingly crunchy.  The chef wouldn't tell me how he made them so totes amazeballs!

Got Dominos pizzas delivered (even though we had stuff to make our own).  Tried to get a vomit pizza but it was a big letdown oh well.  Death in Paradise 12.5.

Friday.  Debugging and fixing the quality script.  Even figured out why a part of it was running so slowly.  Turns out if you have a big array in memory, and make a copy of it with another name, even if you only do lookups on one of them, it's super slow.  I guess Powershell doesn't like having too much in memory at once.  Christmas movie season continued with Die Hard 3.  

Saturday.  18th.  22 years since the worst day of the Canberra bushfires (I wasn't living here yet, but I did mention it in my two week old blog).  A day of All The Things.  Mostly house stuff, hardly time for any fun. 

I really should take before and after photos of this crap

Another week, another 800mL lemon juice.  Jim is very kindly going to take this lot off my hands, as our freezer is very full of the stuff!!

Cooked up a heap of veggies for dinner, including a potato bake, to have with some leftover mince.

Death in Paradise 12.6, then Darkest Hour, which we'd both watched on our way home from New Zealand in 2018.  

Sunday.  Slightly late night due to tv *and* a movie, which meant I couldn't get to sleep because I was too tired and restless.  Another day of All The Things, altho did have a bit more time to do some hobbies.  No roast this week, oh well.

Sunday.  5th.  Leftovers for dinner then Death in Paradise 11.7.  They promised rain and storms in the evening.  Got neither.  Early night.

Monday.  Slept somewhat better, but awake around 5.  Managed to have a mostly scripting day (at least in the afternoon).  It started off as a stoopidly complicated script, and I was trying to merge in my code as well as split some functionality out into functions so I could call it from two different places.  It was doing odd things because a couple of times I'd merged things into the wrong order.  But made good progress by 17:00 and got some functionality working which made me super happy.  Then processing museum/Pompeii photos, dinner, Simpsons and museum blogging.

Tuesday.  Slept mostly ok.  Made some progress on the quality script, although it feels like one step forward, two steps back, as you expand testing and find more problems.  Sigh.  Leftovers for dinner, Simpsons, photo picking, Dotz.

Wednesday.  Took a while to get to sleep but slept mostly ok.  Busy morning before work, but only got a bit of the way through my todo list.  Put the six lemons that dropped off the lemon tree overnight out on the letterbox.  Made good progress on the quality script, even ran it over prod to see what bugs still need working out.  Tried again at lunch to get my glasses adjusted, and they're definitely a lot better.  Lemons were all gone by evening.  Finished most of the leftovers from the weekend for dinner.  Then continued the todo list, with a bit of Dotz before bed.

Thursday.  Took forever to get to sleep - tired and restless.  Did you know you can be too tired to go to sleep?  I certainly can.  More good progress on the quality script, actually nearly done with it.  Well part 1 anyway.  Bar 59 after work for drinks.  Made pizzas for dinner.  Death in Paradise 11.8 (end of season 11).

Friday.  Got to sleep well enough even with an early night.  Woke up before 5 though.  Pretended to sleep for another hour. 

Put my script into production to run on a schedule.  Then I realised I did the whole thing wrong, which is what I'm suspecting is making the whole thing run so slowly.  Will work on part 2 the other way and see if it works ok, and if it does will go back and fix part 1.  Then I had a sad because there's no simple way to dump all the rules with one api call.  You have to get the list of all the policies then go back and request the rules for each one.  A couple of thousand api calls later.  But then I found something by pure chance on the internet that provided a solution not only for that problem, but also another problem I've been pondering for months.  Kievs and pommes noisettes for dinner then Death in Paradise 2021 Christmas special.

Bit of rain came through but not too much

Saturday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  A day of All The Things.  Too much house stuff though and not enough time for fun.  Cooked lemon pepper dill chicken for dinner which was very yummy.  Then Death in Paradise 2022 Christmas special.

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok I think.  A day of All The Things.  Too much house stuff though and not enough time for fun.  Yeah rinse and repeat of yesterday.  I logged onto Access Canberra to see if they'd answered my question about MyWay+.  A week after I logged the ticket, it's still Unassigned.  Hurray.

Got a bit more water in the storm last night.

Lamb in the oven for dinner...

So after the New Years Eve fireworks we should have gone straight to bed.  We didn't.  Rage came on, and as in previous years they play a lot of nostalgia music.  It was too much effort to go get ready for bed, so we just sat there watching.  For like an hour.  Whoops!!

So a very late night.  Of course I woke up at like 5:00 anyway, because that's what I do.  So pretty much a zombie day. 

Did some Lego and Dotz in the morning.  Cooked up some cheesy hash browns.

Did some house tidying in the afternoon and might have also tidied up some of the back yard a bit.

Finished our Christmas Eve feast leftovers for dinner.  Death in Paradise 11.5.  19:30 is bed time right?

Thursday.  Went to bed early but took forever to get to sleep.  And then woke up early.  Was NEIL at work all morning.  Had a little bit of time to look at the quality script, but it was mostly staring at my code wondering what the stuff I did last year actually does.  Picked up the car from servicing, but it still has the engine light on.  They didn't actually fix anything, they just suggested booking it in for more work.  Hurray.  Pizzas for dinner then Death in Paradise 11.6.

Friday.  Took forever to get to sleep.  Again.  Sigh.  Did sleep in til 6 though.  Not much in the morning, mainly just NEIL.  Then went off to pick up Mum at Jolimont.  Had some lunch first, then headed out to the Museum to see Pompeii, which was actually pretty good, and not stoopidly crowded like I was expecting it to be.  Dropped into Chrissie's on the way home but noone was home.  Had a look through all Mum's recent holiday photos, then Stu got Chinese delivery for dinner.  Dumpling Inn didn't show up online so he got it from Quan's Kitchen which was actually pretty decent. 

Then watched Heaven is for Real with Mum.

Saturday.  Took forever to get to sleep.  Restless night, awake *a lot*.  Sigh.  Did some house tidying in the morning, then All The Cooking.  Put on a roast of epic proportions, including *two* potato bakes!

D/K/S arrived and there were many noms

And we did presents and photos and stuff while lunch was cooking

All the feast!

Roast pork, scored with my new Coles meat knife (I probably over-scored it, so it was hard to separate the skin from the fat), home-made apple sauce, gravy, blue cheese potato bake, regular potato bake, sweet potato/brussels sprouts (forgot the hazelnuts)

David and Mum and I then played a game of Monopoly for Sore Losers

It's quite a different game play from regular Monopoly.  It's faster, not so monotonous, but also more annoying (if you're not playing Mr Monopoly).  We also played a little bit of Disney Trivial Pursuit.  Well we didn't "play" it but picked out cards and just read the questions to each other.

It was a lovely day and I had a lot of fun.  Great catchup with everyone.

The great little-red-bauble hunt

D/K/S left around 19:50 then I just collapsed.  Much to the chagrin of the Mother Type Person who wanted to keep playing games for hours.  But after several crap nights sleep and an entire day of People I was well and truly done.  

Sunday.  Went to bed super early.  Still a somewhat restless nights sleep, but did sleep until 6:40.  Looked at holiday stuff with Mum, then dropped her at Jolimont.  Came home and collapsed in a heap.  Stu and I both exhausted from a weekend of people.  Had a quiet afternoon of cleaning the kitchen, putting away Christmas decorations and Dotz.

Sunday.  22nd.  Dug some beef out of the freezer for dinner with rice and peas.  Then watched The Santa Clause 2, which was a bit silly.

Monday.  Slept mostly ok, but awake early. 

Busy day of hours work, then work work.  I'm definitely too dumb for powershell.  Made a peppermint slice after work for Christmas. 

It's times like this I really miss the brother type person.. 

I put a heap more lemons out on the letter box and got this.. 

Cooked up some wedgies I found in the freezer and had them with leftover beef.

Then had a "f$%, wank, bugger, s#$%ing, arse, head and hole" moment (guess where that's from haha).. because I realised, with barely a week left in the year, that I hadn't started reading through my blog and writing up my year in review post.  Usually I start a month or two in advance to get it all done before the end of the year.  Instead I'm going to have to take hours out of my break to do it.  Sigh.  Perfect weather today though - not too hot and nice and breezy.

Tuesday.  Christmas Eve.  24.12.24 - cool date!  Slept mostly ok but awake early.  Did a mind map to map out the logic of the quality script.  Essentially had to start from scratch due to the differences in product design.  So mapped it all out then coded it up with ifs/elseifs/elses.  Actually managed to get it all to flow which I was super happy about.  Now just need to insert the checking code into the right places.  Next year problem!  Spent much of the afternoon cooking... see next post...!  But I've also started getting spam to my Ticketek email address - the one that got hacked earlier in the year.  Buttplugs.

To keep things simple, I decided to simply use the "feels like" or "apparent temperature" to colour code my weather pixie.

I mapped out the colours to how I feel about the temperature..

Over the past few days here's some examples of the output...

Fun stuff..!

Sunday.  15th.  Blogged, then leftover food poisoning for dinner.  I was fine.  Then the last of Donna Hay's 2022 Christmas special.  I really wish she'd stop saying "perfect"!!

Monday.  Slept mostly ok. 

We just need Charlotte to write "Some Pig" in this...

Got ready, fed the fish, had a drink, put away some clothes, put a load of washing on, watered all the plants, mowed the lawn, picked up all the lemons, dusted, vacuumed, took out the rubbish and recycling, closed up all the windows and blinds, hung out the washing.  Then sat in front of the fan for ten minutes to cool down before starting work at 8:30.  Sigh.  I'm the Naughty Email Intervention Layer this week while Neil is on holidays.  I felt in holiday mode too.  Didn't want to do any decom (I always worry about deleting stuff then going on leave) so just a lot of cleaning out of inboxes etc.  Blogged some Lego after work.  Then worked on colour coding the weather pixie.  Also added the time zone based on the time zone on my host.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep (like 11), then woke up at 5.  Sigh.  Finished making up icons for the weather pixie - it has a different colour based on the feels like temperature.  Christmas movie season continued with Die Hard 2.  Man the plot holes in that thing are ridiculous, but it's still a lot of fun.

Wednesday.  School holidays.  Urgh.  But in a strange twist of fate, there was no queue at Subway and there was a *whole row* of empty tables next to us briefly.  That was unexpected!

Annie sent me a photo of the SAMs in Port (up for Potty's birthday)

Cooked up some food poisoning sausages (we were fine) and some broccolini and parnsips that really really needed cooking.

Thursday.  Took a while to get to sleep, awake from 5.  It was nice and COLD overnight which was awesome.  Didn't get much work done between all the crap.  Lunch at Vanilla Pod.  Shared a pepperoni pizza with XL (Peroni beer and a pizza for $20 - pretty good value!!).

No sooner had I gotten back to work when James and Josh came and picked me up to go down to Woden to go to Space Kitchen (Rachel wanted to go to see the epic cakes).  Bizarre place.  They make a fuss about bookings and booking times (we only had "an hour", even though the booking was for 14:30 and they close at 16:00 and the place was mostly empty anyway - weird!!).  The cakes looked pretty spectacular, although I think my favourite was the lemon meringue pie - very lemony!!

Purple passionfruit

Nutty one

Lemon meringue

Red velvet

The little cakes we got

A very brief but lovely catchup.  

Too full to eat any chips at drinks (which was surprisingly busy for the last drinks of the year), and only ate half my pizza..

I love this time of year...

Friday.  Slept mostly ok but awake pretty early.  Had to go with the sweetie to pick up a package at Fyshwick (bumplugs at Border Express wouldn't try again to deliver it) and drop him off at work.  Which made me super late for work.  Frustrating day of coding - didn't get anywhere with my script cause I'm dumb.  Had dinner at Kinn Thai with the sweetie.

Salted and Pepper Squid - wok-tosses (their spelling!) fried squid, onion, garlic, 5 spices and chilli $19

Pad Prik Khing - stir fried crispy pork with chilli kaffir lime jam and green bean $29

They say you can get anything in a vending machine in Japan.  Truth is, the vast majory of vending machines only sell drinks.  I think the most unusual one I've ever seen in Japan sold flowers.  So it was pretty funny to see this vending machine in the Canberra Centre carpark selling toy Cat trucks!!

Then watched The Santa Clause (1994) which I don't think I've ever seen.  That was a bit of fun.

Saturday.  All. The. Things.  Got heaps done but not nearly enough.  The dude serving us at Knead asked Stu.. hey this may sound like a strange question.. but do you have a sister?  And he's like yeah..  and the dude is like, what's her name?  And Stu is like .. Anne.. turns out the dude has Annie as an English teacher and recognised Stu cause, well, they do kinda look alike :)  Funny stuff!!

Made some creamy lemon dill chicken for dinner, then forced the sweetie to watch Love Actually with me (I said he could bring his laptop so he could just do stuff on the computer :) )

Sunday.  Did some weeding then I thought I'd go food shopping early to beat the crowds.  Except markets.  Sigh.  Literally no parking after several laps so parked at the pool, and they can find my trolley later.  But Coles itself turned out to be relatively quiet which was nice.  A lot easier to keep up your Christmas spirit when there's less people around.  Another day of All The Things.  Spent quite a bit of time sorting out paperwork for our trip next year and getting travel insurance.  Then I tried to book tickets for Pompeii at the museum.  The buttplugs at the National Museum now FORCE you to register a whole account just so you can book tickets online.  Hate hate hate hate hate.

I really wanted to have my last Bricklink order filed by Christmas.. but I'm only like two thirds the way through.. sigh.. 

The other week (month!) I mentioned how I'd love to get a weather pixie working on my blog again.  Last night I had a harebrained idea to have a go at it.  At least text for now.

I first tried it with PowerShell to see if I could at least grab the file.  Easy enough (I've had a bit of practise at work over the past month) but will only run on my computer, not my web host.  So it was onto hacking Perl.  Had to do lots of Googling to get code that would work.  By bed time I could grab the contents of the JSON file from BOM, but couldn't quite parse the last hash (the JSON file there is a hash (observations), with an array (data), with a hash (each chunk)).

It may have contributed a little to me not getting to sleep for ages.  

This morning over breakfast I got it working, and was able to get it to save the data into fields and spit them out into useful infos, including a CSV file for histerical data.

I didn't spent tooo much time on it during the day - I'm wayyyy too busy to waste time on coding!

But I was able to get my script to output results into a html file that I could load in an iframe on my blog.

It's rough as guts - there's no styles at all, it's just raw html, in a table no less.  But the bones are there for it, so will tweak it as I find the time.  There's a cron job that runs every half hour to update the html file, as well as the CSV file.

Very exciting!! ;)

Sunday.  17th.  Had an almost vegetarian dinner (except for the bacon hehe).  The bullhorn chillis were $2 from Toms.

Watched the second Christmas special of the American Lego Masters series.

Monday.  Slept okish (took ages to get to sleep and woke up early.

The sky sure was blue after all the rain on the weekend!

Dunno what was up with this currawong.  Maybe it ate too many strawberries haha

Nick helped me out with a script and I actually got it working which was super happy making.  Leftover lemon pepper chicken for dinner.  Queensland photo picking, jigsaw, Men Against Fire on Black Mirror.  I'm sure if real militaries could do that they would.  The Bricklink order (the quote) was "cancelled"  #grunt.

Tuesday.  Took ages to get to sleep then woke up early.  The Bricklink seller said the quote was already cancelled when he went to look.  And there was no way to reopen it.  #grunt.  

From Bricklink:

Canceled - There are three reasons a quote is canceled:
The seller did not provide a quote within three business days.
The buyer did not take action on the quote within three business days.
The items in the quote were sold before the order was generated.

Probably that last one.  Fortunately I was able to add everything to a wishlist so it was (relatively) easy to reorder it.  

Productive day, got some scripts working, did some music, tidied the house a bit, cooked dinner, did some photo picking and watched some tv.

Wednesday.  Took a while to get to sleep and woke up early.

Finally!  A strawberry haul!  These were in the pool so the currawongs didn't know about them, and the snails never found them either.  

Ok day at work - made some progress on scripting - got one of Daniel's premigration scripts working so that made me super happy.  Road block on another function though.  Home late, dinner, backups, hair, jigsaw, bed.

Thursday.  Took a while to get to sleep and woke up early.  Sensing a theme here. 

Busy day prepping and working with the vendor on a big cleanup of the mess they made.  Had to work through drinks so didn't really get to talk to people much.  Pizzas, bed.

Oh, and David might have been on the news the other night..

Friday. 

Finish of the cleanup went ok, noone screamed.  Mostly scripting all day.  Managed to get something super complicated working so that was cool (adding IP addresses to a group, sounds like it should be simple right hahahahaahh), but didn't finish Daniel's complicated script converting.  Kievs for dinner.

USS Callister on Black Mirror which was actually kinda fun.  A little bit like White Christmas in some ways.

Saturday.  Breakfast with Annie at Gang Gang which was nice.

Did our food shopping afterwards.  Then All The Things all day.  

Cooked up the last of the leftover pork in a red curry

Death in Paradise 10.5 and then Arkangel on Black Mirror.  

Yeah so it's early.  Sue me.

Sunday.  Slept mostly ok but woke up fairly early.  Just around the time the cacaphony of birds was starting.  Got a smidge more sleep until 5:30.  House stuff in the morning.  I even mowed the lawn!  Probably the first time in over thirty years.  I had to mow the lawn sometimes as a teenager and I HATED it!!  The lawnmower was loud and hard to start and our lawn was huge and I would ALWAYS get hit by debris even with the catcher on (which was a pain to have to empty over and over again).  I never did it here either because our lawnmower was loud and hard to start and I'd been scarred from doing it as a teenager.  Anyways.  We got a new lawnmower the other week because the starter cord on the old one broke right off.  The new one is battery powered (we did get a new 36v battery and charger because it was easier to just get the kit rather than putting in a special order for just the mower.  Turns out the new battery is chunkier so that's useful.  The thing is super easy to start - you just press down the start button and pull one of the levers (you have to keep the lever(s) held down for it to keep operating which is the only real annoyance).  And it's relatively quiet.  So yeah, winning.

Other than that just various house/computer stuffs all day.

Had a bit of a poke around the interwebs for something to get the Date Taken entry out of my photos.  Think I'll probably give Image::ExifTool (perl module) a go.  Did a hello world type script that gives me the correct time on a file that has an incorrect modify date.  Won't take too much effort to scriptify something to hopefully do what I want..