Monday Meanderings - 7.27.2015

I mentioned a few weeks back that I have been digitally scanning the packets of photo prints that we have accumulated over the years, with good intentions to put them in binders someday. You know what they say about good intentions. Toward the end of the print developing era the film processors began including CDs of the prints, so that really helped speed things along.

So, having finished the Walmart and Walgreen packets, I have turned to the 8 or 10 binder albums that do contain the earlier photographic history of this branch of the Anderson family. And once again, I encourage you - nay, strongly advise you - go get out your albums or shoe boxes or whatever and with a soft-lead pencil, or an archival ink pen made specifically for that purpose, put some dates and names on the backs of those pictures.

And, if your pictures are not in archival-quality sleeves and albums, your heirs will benefit greatly if you tend to that chore at once. A few years back we did take the Hodge-podge collection of albums and moved everything to photo-safe plastic sleeves in uniform binders.

Unfortunately, it was too late for many of the earliest photographs. Who knew, 50 years ago, that gluing prints onto craft paper, or worse, using the sticky page type albums was the kiss of death for pictures? So there is a stretch of time where pictures are marred, or large blobs are missing, or where ordinary glue has soaked through the backing.

Our earliest snapshots were in black and white, and measured a miniscule 3.3 inches square. The color prints that began showing up are faded, or the colors have shifted to pale oranges and greens. Many are out of focus, or fuzzy; I don't remember our first cameras, but they obviously weren't very good. Interestingly, there are a few Polaroid prints in the mix that have retained a clarity and sharpness of color that really stands out.

The time-consuming part of this project is physically removing the prints from the album pages, marking them so I can get them back in the albums correctly, carefully positioning them on the flat bed of the scanner so that they will be in the right sequence, then putting them back.

After scanning, I enter what few dates and notes that exist into the metadata of the digital images. Fortunately, my scanning software can identify up to 6 pictures in a single scan, but it is still a tedious project.

And that's a whole lot more about my scanning project than you wanted to know.

On the matter of the missing cobra...

Keeping Austin Weird is easy.

It seems that a young man was recently found in his parked car, suffering from cardiac arrest. In the investigation of his subsequent death, it was determined, perhaps, that the gentleman had perished as the result of a bite from a venomous cobra. This was largely determined because the young man had other reptiles in the self-same car, there was a snake-style puncture wound on his wrist, and he was known to be the owner of a deadly monocled cobra - which just happened to be missing.

The monocled cobra is the snake you typically identify as the swaying reptile, head flared, round "monocle" pattern on the back of the head, rising from the basket as the Indian Fakir plays his flute. Yep, that's the one.

 And did I mention that said vehicle was parked at the Lowe's home store just up the road, a scant couple of miles from our house? In front of a store with a big parking lot - and a garden center? And next to this Lowe's is a Walmart with an even bigger parking lot and garden center? And on the other side is a CarMax with about 12 acres of parked vehicles?

Just when most of us were pretty certain that we were not going anywhere near that area of Austin ever again, and just hours before animal control officers set out to search the now-closed garden center, a CarMax employee found a deceased cobra on the access road, having encountered a vehicle or two while trying to cross the road. So the police joyfully announced they had a dead cobra and were going to confirm that it was indeed the right snake. Puzzling that, because, as my son pointed out, just how many monocled cobras are there on the loose in Austin?

As it turns out, it is rather difficult to identify cobra venom in the human system, let alone which specific cobra injected it. And the police now say that this was a possible suicide. Really? I'm pretty sure they are talking about the young man, and not the snake, which in a moment of regret and remorse slithered in front of an on-coming vehicle.

There's a lot to like about this town, but please, no more missing snakes.

Monday Meanderings - 7.20.2015

Barb and I were discussing the frequency of changing the sheets on our bed. You know, every few days, once a week, every two weeks? What was optimal? She didn't think helpful my observation that when I was in college, I changed my sheets every semester, whether they needed it or not. Usually.

I think we have fetched up on the shores of summer. It's hot here in ATX, dear hearts.I may have mentiond this last week, but it's still hot so I'll mention it again. And probably mention it a few more times, I'm pretty sure.

Our fig trees are over-achieving this year. These are the self-same trees that, years ago, when I mentioned to an experienced gardener friend of ours that I had just planted three fig trees, he replied, "You better hope that two of them die." They didn't and from time to time we are up to our elbows in figs. Figs on the driveway, figs on the trash cans, figs on the outside A/C unit, and if you step foot under the trees, gummy, sticky figs on the bottom of your shoes!

I love me some strawberry-fig preserves, but the bad news is that figs are not on my diet at the moment, so in preparation for when they are back on the menu I slipped some shopping bags over my shoes and picked a bucket of figs from the low-hanging branches (had I been able to reach the top of the trees I would have had a barrel of figs) and froze them. And since the Fredricksburg peaches are abundant this year, I'm going to freeze a batch of them as well and in a few weeks I'm going to have a fruit fest!

Alas, after last years bumper crop, this year's pecan harvest appears to have come to this:

At least one can hope that the absence of pecans will give the tree limbs a rest this year. By the way, I have no idea why my thumb looks dirty in this picture. I wash my hands often. Really. At least once a semester.

I have finished the Robert E. Lee book at the studio - except for the 90 pages of detailed notes and sources in the back of the book. After Lee's surrender to Grant, he accepted the position of President of Washington College (after his death renamed Washington & Lee College). He is content to live out his life in obscurity at what was at the time a backwater institution.

His wife, on the other hand, spent the rest of her years battling the U.S. Government for redress and compensation for illegally seizing the family estate overlooking Washington -  now the burial place of some 7,000 Union soldiers, put there in large part at the hand of her husband. We of course, know this as Arlington National Cemetery. It was an interesting read.

Tech Wednesday

A few computer related thoughts, both old and new, that have come to my attention lately. The new has to do with this bad boy:

 

File it under "Memory Loss" - something that I'm becoming familiar with these days. Powered up the desktop and all it did was beep at me. Annoyingly. Consistently. Tried the usual; power off, power on; unplug the cable, plug it back. Beep! Beep! Beep! Beep! Called the computer dude who makes service calls, and when he showed up the next day, I turned the system on and it booted perfectly!

I'm standing there thinking bad words, and he said, "I'm that good!" But in the long run he did make it go Beep! and now all is well with that system. Now if I could just get my iPad to quit closing apps immediately after opening them.

Both old and new. I was at the tire place this past week, and the technician printed out my service ticket - on a dot matrix printer.

The noisy little printers had not crossed my mind in a long time, but I discovered that not only are they still in use, they are still being produced, and they are not cheap!

The really old has to do with these pictures I came across. This one is of the first IBM Disk Storage Unit - the model 350 - being loaded on an aircraft. Both the drive and the Airline are long obsolete. This particular unit provided the equivalent of a whopping 3.75MB of disk space! That would hold fewer than 100 average iPhone pictures.

The 2nd photo is an ad for early disk drives for the initial IBM Personal Computers. The capacity has been boosted up to an incredible 10MB, but look at the price! Still, the 10MB version costs only a single month's lease payment of the 350 Storage Unit above.

By contrast, I picked up a small (3x4x1/2 inch) 1 Terra-byte drive - roughly a million megabytes - a while back for about $50. No doubt they are cheaper now.

Oh, the memory stick above? It's 2 Gigabytes (2,000 Megabytes)  and set me back $12. Installed.

Monday Meanderings - 7.13.2015

Just when I was starting to have Soccer withdrawal, along comes the CONCACAF Gold Cup tournament. It's the men, but you go with what you've got.

One of the teams in the competition is from Cuba, which has issues that most national teams don't face. One is travel documents; for Thursday night's game, the coach and 6 key players were missing because they were stuck in the Antilles with visa problems. The other major problem is that team members keep defecting - usually before playing in the tournament - so the coach never knows who he is going to have on hand for the game. For that matter, last night an assistant coach defected, along with two players.

Two of Google's self-driving cars are scooting around town these days. They figure Austin's traffic problems are a great testing ground. There are always two people in the cars when they are on the road, so the only way to spot them is all the extra gear bolted on the top and sides. Not to be mistaken for the camera gear on top of the Google Street View cars, which are also in town.

Barb's primary physician is retiring this month. She has only been going to see him since March of 1973 - 42 years!

In my biography of Robert E. Lee that I am reading for Learning Ally, the war is over. Lee surrendered to Grant and is now President of Washington College, at this point a little back-water school in Virginia. Later, of course, it will become Washington and Lee University, the ninth oldest institution of higher learning in the US.

If your home phone service is provided as VoIP - from a cable company, in other words - check out NoMoRobo, a free service that stops annoying robo-calls. Really. Love it!

Monday Meanderings - 7.6.2015

Well, Carly got her hat trick, Abby got her trophy, and I survived 58 Women's World Cup games! It was a great tournament and I enjoyed watching it and goofing around about it on Facebook. Among the arcane facts surrounding the tournament was a news item that Austin came in 4th in the US in TV viewers. I take great pride in the role I played in that!

Still reading about Robert E. Lee at the studio. If the author of the book is to be believed, if Lee had had a few capable Generals, the outcome of the war would have been different. Of course, that also says that if the Union Army had had a few capable Generals the war would have ended quickly.

Lost another high school classmate several days ago. He was actually a year behind me, and as was the custom then, all of us sophomores in the band really hassled the new freshman. Joe got tired of my harassment and invited me to settle it behind the band hall. I foolishly accepted; he popped me in the nose right off the bat and that was that. In my one and only fist fight I learned that I was not very good at it, and Joe and I went on to become great friends.

I've been scanning photo prints these last few weeks. You remember photo prints, don't you? It became obvious that I wasn't going to put all those photos in binder albums, so I'm trying to create "digital" albums. It's a little late to be handing out this advice, but you will be much, much happier in years to come if YOU WRITE THE DATE on the packet from Walgreen's, or Walmart, or wherever you used to have your film developed. Better yet, put the date on the pictures themselves. I don't know why photo labs stopped putting dates on prints.