Late Start Today

I hate TMJ. Worse, I hate the drugs that you're given to help it. After that last post last night / this morning, I took the Flexeril 10mg and Ibuprofin 800mg to help with the pain and stiffness. Can you say "wiped out"? I didn't even move until after 9:00AM this morning. Even then I was groggy. So I made it to work *LATE!*

Sorry, Dad. It wasn't intentional, I promise.

Nose to the grindstone (and no lunch for this late arrival.)

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No Doubt, Little Boy Has Something

I figure since I'm up, I might as well post something.

Yes, it's 1AM. I just put Christian back into his bed. Earlier (if you read the previous post) he had been whining and crying - and he was running a fever. Hot enough that you could feel it through his clothes. Christy and I laid him down in our bed and did that parent thing - rubbing his forehead, patting his stomach, and finally he feel asleep. Of course, that's part of the problem. The only bed that can fit the three of us - Christy, Christian and I - is a honest to goodness king bed (we have a queen size one here). But a king bed just means that either Christy or I gets to sleep well: Christian has this knack for turning sideways and pushing against you with his feet... Anyway, I just went back with the ear thermometer and had Christy check his temp - 97.7. His head was a bit damp too. Well, whatever he's got at least the fever is broken.

I took him back to his bed. I had to wrangle the little fella to get him laying longways with the bed - that knack of his works when he's by himself too. He fell fast asleep, though I'm sure that will change very shortly. (Every morning, he tries to get up at 4AM and he never stays in his bed past 6:30.)

Oh well. Another short night of sleep for Dadda...

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I Think I'm Going to Be Sick...

You know that gut feeling that you get when you know you've screwed up? And how it gets worse the more you attempt to fix or as every new attempt to fix doesn't just fail, each attempt shows that the failure was worse than you initially thought it was. (<- Nasty, run-on sentence! Small attempt at levity.) Well, I've got that feeling. Actually, I've had that feeling since 2PM today.

Around 2PM I was feeling pretty good about the progress I had made in organizing some new photos and in re-organizing the old ones. But then I looked at one of the links in the old blog sidebar "Pictures of Christian" - as it was on the old site. (You're probably noticing that the link is not here anymore...) I decided that I should go ahead and make sure that all those older and already published photos had made it into Picasa. And that's when I noticed that first thumbnail dated around 04-08-2004 that had no equivalent in my saved photos on this computer - the feeling hit. I took no time in going to the old hosting site (now only available via this IP address) and downloading each and every photo. I started looking for matches and what became more and more worrisome was the growing number of non-matches. I ended up with almost 200 thumbnails (from the previous site) that don't match and cannot be found anywhere on this computer. Judging by the names of the thumbnails and how some numbers in sequences are skipped, I figured that I was really missing 250 - 300 photos.

Ok. That's bad, but not the end of the world, I thought. I was thinking I had backups in three or four places - my desktop at work, the private backup folder in "My Documents" stored on the RainGard server, a folder on my home server, the full laptop backups on my home 320GB external drive, my smaller but more recent backups onto my NSLU2 server at home, or at worse case even on my old iPod. (Heh, make that five or six places!) So I felt bad, but I felt like I had odds on chances of finding the photos. I first checked the desktop folder where I kept daily backups for the longest time - hmmm, I must have deleted the whole backup folder that last time I had to restore my drive. Phooey! Ok, check the private folder on RainGard's server - hmmm, I must have stopped making that backup because of the amount of disk space I was using - needless to say I deleted the backup as well... Doh! I got home and checked the folder on my home server - nope, that backup pretty well matches my current photo folder, meaning that backup is a post-2nd death and resurrection of this laptop backup. Dagnabbit. Of course, the feeling started to get worse. I wanted to check the iPod but couldn't because it has a firewire interface and only the desktop at work has firewire. I fired up the "sometimes works, sometimes doesn't" 320GB external drive at home and promptly found out that the full laptop backups were made with IBM Rescue and Recovery v2 - of which backups cannot be read by the Lenovo Rescue and Recovery v3.10 on the laptop now. UGGHHH! It was now time for the wedding rehearsal so this bad feeling just had to wait.

After the wedding rehearsal, we headed to Top of the River to eat. (Christian is the ring bearer and at three years old, I'm not sure what to expect out of him tomorrow seeing how *well* his part in the rehearsal went tonight... Note to self: Set expectations really low and I can only be happy at what happens!) What a meal at Top of the River! My thanks to the groom's father! That was excellent and fun. And a needed respite from the day's events...

I decided I'd stop back by work and check out the iPod backup to see if the photos might be there. Carp! Nada, nothing, not a thing. But Hey! My old IBM Rescue and Recovery CD - a bootable one at that *and* it should be able to read the backups on the 320GB drive at home. I hurried home and booted up the RnR and what can I say, I'm shooting 100% on this thing. Every backup is POST 1st death of the laptop - which is to say that nothing of worth was there. Auuuuuggggh.

Oh, and didn't I say earlier that it got worse? I didn't? Well, I should have. You see, I was able to find the catalog file from the Adobe Photoshop Album that I had been using, and I installed the latest starter edition of Adobe Photoshop Album to look through it. That bad feeling, oh yeah, it's really bad right now. I found that not only did I only have those ~200 thumbnails of images that I published from the time period of March 2004 through May 2004. I found that I'm also missing photos from (and I'm really guessing here) around August 2003 through May 2004. Yes, I really want to go puke now. It's hard to even type that. The first eight months of my son's life! I know I was taking 30-40 pictures a week sometimes! Oh, puh-lease just let me puke - if only that would take away this feeling.

I had to take a break there. If not just to catch my breath, to take care of Christian. He might have caught something earlier tonight. He's got a bit of fever and was crying out as the fever started to break. That does at least give some reality to this - that the here and now is much more important that the mistake(s) or even personal triumphs of the past. I do feel some better just after writing all this. Like pouring out my angst (only a few people read this, thank goodness!) gives a little relief too. I honestly have no idea / earthly clue what happened to cause so many pictures to go *poof*. EVERY single backup looked exactly the same as my current "My Pictures" setup. I can only guess that the first laptop death, where I knew I had lost some financial work and etc., must have taken away all those pictures and I just didn't realize it because I hadn't been organizing or publishing photos in a while. Bleh!

I should say that I do have one last hope on the missing pictures: Christy's iMac. Most all of those earlier digital photos correspond to the time before I got my own digital camera (the Dimage Xg). And Christy had uploaded most of her photos to the iMac. Unfortunately, her iMac currently has a PSU problem - something which AppleCare Suppost said will require us taking it to an Apple service center to have it fixed. I guess that project / to do item just got high priority! (Please, please, let the photos be there!)

I'm off to bed...

PS. I just made a local copy of the existing My Pictures folder (at least what images I have now will have current backups!)

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Nope, No Pastor Dean Blog Yet...

Whelp, here I am blogging and chatting with my pastor at the same time.

The "No news is good news" moment of the day is here and gone - Dean is waaaaay too busy to start his blog up yet. I mean, only a wedding, a birthday, and his mother in town for him to attend to... I know he can multi-task, but I'll give him a pass for the time being. He did mention that he could make his first blog post in the recovery stage of this week.

Dean, I'm holding your feet to the fire on that one... ;)

And as far as the pictures and organization/posting? I finished up organizing and captioning all of the pictures in Picasa that I had previously organized under Photoshop Album. Now I just need to figure out the best way for publishing those...

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And in Other News...

Oh yeah. The other reason that I'm re-starting the blog: I've started helping my church with a website and I've encouraged our pastor - Dean Wood - to start a blog there. I didn't think it would be very nice of me to be pushing him toward blogging unless I maintained one as well.

If I'm successful in encouraging him, I'll be sure to link his blog from here.

Which reminds me, I need to link the church's website from here too!

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Blog & Picture Update in Progress

It's been a long time. A really long time.

To tell you the truth, one of the reasons I stopped blogging was the time factor. I really only wanted to use this blog as a place to put my latest thoughts and pictures online. Thoughts = easy (I type at a decent rate). Pictures = unbelievably hard - especially in terms of time. And that time became an issue due to the way I stored and organized pictures locally on my laptop - with Adobe Photoshop Album. I loved the organization that Photoshop Album enforced with my pictures, but I hated to do the actual organization. Furthermore, using Photoshop Album meant that I went through the following process just to post any image:

To post a picture, I would first take the original picture, rename it to something that made sense, clean it up (remove artifacts, crop the image, or just remove red eye), then make a thumbnail of the cleaned up picture, edit the appropriate .html file that it would be linked to, upload the image, upload the thumbnail, and finally upload the .html file. I would then post something in the blog about the picture(s). LOTS of work. After a while, I had more pictures than I could ever possibly sort through, not to mention do the above to publish.

So what has happened between that last post (June 27, 2005????) and now?

For one thing, the way I am starting to organize photos (and re-organize the older photos) has changed dramatically. The biggest reason for this change? Google Picasa. Picasa is so easy to use and does everything that I was doing manually - AUTOMATICALLY! The only part of the process that requires any kind of thought process for me is the naming of the pictures. I can do that easily and it doesn't take that much time either.

If you'll bear with me (for the next couple of weeks I presume), I'll be re-publishing my old photos, and blogging! and publishing newer images.

Stay Tuned!

As a teaser, you can check out the following Picasa generated albums:

• GBC Easter Egg Hunt


• Safety Posters

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Aquarium Update

Whoa! Has it really been that long since I posted here??

Uggh. Oh well. I ended up performing a water change at the office with Python Products "Clean and Fill No Spill" device - which I purchased from Drs. Foster Smith. Since I hadn't performed a water change or cleaned up my aquarium for quite a while, I decided I'd better perform some maintenance at home too.

The problem is that the water/tank was so nasty - and took so much time - that I pretty much was limited to cleaning the gravel and pulling out water, and then using the same product to fill the tank back up. All of that means that tomorrow I'll get a chance to do some aquascaping (removing some partially dead / dying Amazon Swords plants, separating up the Java Fern, and moving around some of the Java Moss, etc.)

I should also state that the Killifish are still alive, as is the Japonica shrimp. However, the last Japanese Trapdoor snail passed a while back.

I will also mention that I am planning a HUGE picture update (mostly of Christian) and will be reworking the existing pictures links.

Byron

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