The last photo...

The last photo...  I'm still working my way through my mom's belongings.  This afternoon I came across the little point-and-shoot digital camera she had for the last couple of years she was alive.  I'll be giving that camera away, but inside it I found the memory card, with about 400 photos on it.  I'm pretty sure those are all the photos she took during those few years; I don't think she ever figured out how to copy them to her computer.  Every time I visited her, helping her send photos to her friends was high on her list of things for me to do.  :)

My mom was a remarkably bad photographer, which given her artistic sense was a bit of a surprise to me.  It's the mechanics of the camera she never seemed to understand, from the zoom lens to the focus.  I'd guess that of the 400 or so photos, less than a dozen of them are properly exposed and in focus.  Probably 90% of the photos are of flowers; the remainder are split between people, bugs, and dead bats.

There was a surprise for me near the end of the photos, though.  Unbeknownst to me, she had taken a dozen or so photos after she arrived here in Utah.  Most of these were of people: some friends of ours who visited her to welcome her to Utah, the staff at the assisted care facility (she loved those folks), and so on.  One, however, was the photo above.  From it's placement in the camera's sequence, I'm pretty sure one of our friends took that photo, almost certainly at mom's request.  What you see there is how she looked during her happiest time here, just after she arrived.  It gave me a real start to see that.  In a good way, though.

Miss you every day, mom...

Do I still use...

Do I still use ... DEVONthink and my Fujitsu ScanSnap IX500 for scanning receipts and other documents?  So asks Ron L., by email. 

The answer: hell, yes! 

At this point I've been using this for over three years, and I've got just over 4,000 documents scanned.  The process of scanning and transferring numbers to my bookkeeping (for which I use Moneydance) has long since been burned into my “muscle memory” – I no longer have to think about it at all.  All those 4,000 documents are just electrons, and not occupying file cabinets and boxes like they used to.  Since I got my iMac Pro in December, the OCR time has dropped to something insignificant – a second or two unless I scan something like a 20 page legal document in fine print.

Best of all, finding a document is now just a matter of a Google-style search, with effectively instantaneous results.  This took a couple of years to become a reflexive habit, much like it took me a while to think of the camera on my smartphone as a way to remember or record things.  Just recently I've started yet another use of DEVONthink: I create .pdf files containing notes (and optionally drawings or photos) and import them.  DEVONthink is happy to accept .pdf files from anywhere, and indexes them just like it does scanned documents.  Being able to do Google-style searches on these is very useful, and basically infinitely faster than the file search built into OSX.

At this point I consider all this part of my minimally-acceptable computing environment.  If one of them dies, I will have to find a replacement...

A feverish Saturday...

A feverish Saturday...  Yesterday I was operating on intellectual fumes for most of the day, the victim of a fever that reached 102.7°F at its peak, just before I went to bed.  Most of the day I spent playing simple games with Debbie (and losing!) and reading; anything more mentally challenging would have been impossible.  At around 4 am I woke shivering, and realized that my fever was breaking.  By 4:30 am my brain was operating on all cylinders again, and now this morning I feel fine.  I can't remember ever having such a short, intense illness before.  But it's gone now – yay!

The two videos below are of our dogs.  The first one shows all five dogs enjoying their morning bananas.  I'm going to try re-shooting this one with a wider field of view, as this attempt doesn't show them actually catching the banana slices, except for Ipo.  The second video is showing off a skill that Ipo has acquired.  All three of our young field spaniels have thoroughly learned that when they come in from outside, they're to run directly to their crates and wait for a treat.  We trained this behavior in the possibly forlorn hope that when they come into the house during mud season (just started) we won't have pounds of mud to clean up in the kitchen – it will all be contained in their crates.  This all works great unless the crate doors are pushed to the closed position.  Even unlatched, this stops the dogs cold – except Ipo.  All on her own she learned how to grab the wire of the door with a front claw and whip the door open, so she can run in and make preparations for Milk Bone consumption.  In this video it happens so quickly you really can't see how she's doing it...