Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 198

I made some progress on fixing the problems with the transfer process for photos I’m giving Diane (who’d’ve thought that going from Photos to Lightroom to Photos would have issues?). We upgraded her machine to Catalina and that solved the timezone errors during import. And I’m close to having a fix for the disappearing GPS data. I hope.

At least I get to look at nice pictures while I’m debugging – here’s sunrise from our balcony just off Patmos, Greece nearly two years ago.

I took six photos of the sunrise that morning – it’s a relief to be down to one!

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 197

We watched the “debate” tonight.

I wasn’t surprised to see Trump refusing to let Biden speak without interruption and ignoring the moderator’s attempts to reel him in. I wasn’t surprised to see him dodge questions and lie whenever he could. I wasn’t surprised to hear him bring in his favorite stories (like the leader of an unnamed nation with “forest cities” calling him “Sir”). I wasn’t surprised to hear him condemn Democrats at almost every opportunity (he did claim to get along well with California Governor Newsom while blaming him for the fires here).

But I was shocked when he didn’t take the softball that Chris Wallace threw him asking him to condemn a White Supremacist group (I won’t name them), instead telling them to “stand by”. Not surprised – Trump is who he is – but shocked that he couldn’t manage to dissemble for just a little bit and look just slightly less racist.

Vote Biden. Vote Democratic all the way.

And in the meantime, please stay sane. Here’s a short video from the Oregon Zoo that might help.

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 196

The Yom Kippur services were engaging. The “core” service this morning was pre-recorded at the synagogue, with the Rabbi, Cantor, our pianist, and a few choir members (plus a song which brought in the entire choir from their homes); the rest of the services were live on Zoom.

In some ways, it was more engaging than our usual services at Sacred Heart Church because it was just us and the screen – we could sing along without fear of distracting anyone else who wanted to hear the Cantor or choir. And there was no traffic to contend with, and no rest room lines. And there were some opportunities for small-group discussions, which doesn’t happen in the big service. And we could set the air conditioning to our own preferences.

On the other hand, most of the service was without the choir, and I missed them. And there wasn’t a chance to have an informal chat with friends between pieces of the service, and I missed that. And the final shofar blast of the evening was just one person and one shofar instead of shofarot scattered around the building with each shofar blower trying to hold the note for the longest time.

I hope we can go back to services in person next year.

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 195

I’m going to write today’s entry early so I can be off social media well before Yom Kippur starts.

In a normal year, my goal would be turning off the computer for Yom Kippur, but this year, the computer needs to stay on so we can watch and participate in services. Kol Nidre was pre-recorded but won’t be streamed until the right time; services tomorrow (except for the “base” morning service) will all be on Zoom.

It will be different – perhaps not as different as taking a tour of Berlin on Yom Kippur, but definitely not the usual experience. Fasting will be about the same, I guess!

May you be inscribed and sealed for a good year.

Shelter-in-Place Journal, Day 194

No trips to the ER or doctors today, and my vision seems to be stable, so that’s good.

I edited two days’ worth of photos from Greece to give to Diane. The culling and editing and geotagging in Lightroom all worked, but we’ve had some issues getting my pictures into her copy of Photos:

  • Photos doesn’t honor the timezone written in the exported JPEGs from Lightroom – instead, it insists on interpreting the times as Pacific Daylight Time. Once we figured that out, it was fairly easy to fix (right after importing the photos, go to Image/Adjust Date and Time and set the time zone to “Athens – Greece”. That causes Photos to move the timestamp forward by 10 hours (so a photo with a timestamp of noon gets set to 10pm), so then we have to change the timestamp back to the original timestamp. After doing that dance, the imported pictures interleave properly with the ones already in her Photos library.
  • The other problem seems to be on the Lightroom side. When I import a photo from the iPhone (in HEIC format – not sure about JPEG), Lightroom shows its location in its GPS fields, but when I export the photo to give to Diane, I have to convert to JPEG, and the GPS data doesn’t get written to the output photo. BUT pictures that I took with my camera in RAW format and geotagged with HoudahSpot DO keep their GPS data when Lightroom writes them out as JPEGs.

I am very confused. Maybe sleeping on the problem will help.