Pandemic Journal, Day 430

We took our typical walk on the Campbell stretch of the Los Gatos Trail this morning and were joined by a few families – here’s one:

After that, we went to Summerwinds Nursery and took care of our spring planting needs (or at least got started on them). They offer a loyalty program which gives you a 5% discount on everything in your order for each $250 you spend – we redeemed four discounts this morning, so we saved 20%.

We replaced all the soil in our three EarthBoxes, planting peppers and basil in one, cucumbers in the next one, and mint in the final box.

We also planted tomatoes in the raised beds, along with watermelon and lemon balm (we didn’t plan to buy lemon balm – I thought the label said “lemon basil”!).

There’s still room to plant more in the raised beds, but we’ll see how we feel tomorrow.

Pandemic Journal, Day 429

It was 5:35am. I was in the middle of an exciting dream about travel, hotels, credit cards, and expense account guidelines when suddenly there was a loud BEEP and a strong breeze. My eyes snapped open – the ceiling fan over our bed had started up at full blast for no apparent reason.

I got out of bed and turned it off; I managed to fall asleep until I had to get up for my Toastmasters meeting. But when I walked by the living room, I saw that the ceiling fan there was ALSO running at full blast. And the fan in the office wasn’t running, but its light was turned on.

All of those fans are old Casablanca fans with the “W-32 Intelli-Touch system,” which sends coded pulses on the power line to tell the fan what to do. I guess Something Happened to send random pulses throughout the house. I hope it doesn’t happen again.

Pandemic Journal, Day 428

After yesterday’s fun and games, I decided to leave the photos alone for a bit and moved on to another project.

I wrote a program which takes information from TripIt and puts the most relevant items onto our Google calendars. It works well, so naturally I feel the need to change it. In particular, what I want it to do is to tell me what changed if it updates a trip (for example, if the airline changes the expected departure time) – that means I have to save the information when the program puts it into the calendar and compare it to the new information, and that’s what I was working on today.

To be more accurate, what I really did today was read my code and try to remember what it’s doing so I can make my changes. It’s not difficult code, but I didn’t plan on persisting the information in an easy-to-reuse format, so I need to figure out a smart way to do that. I feel a database in my future.

Pandemic Journal, Day 427

Today’s project was to improve the workflow I use to move files from Lightroom to Apple Photos. My goal is to keep all of my photos in Lightroom, preferably as RAW files, and to do my editing there – then export the edited photos as HEIC files to Apple Photos so I can look at them easily on all my devices.

Lightroom doesn’t export HEIC files – it will export JPEGs, but they are much larger files. So I export TIFFs (which are HUGE) and run a batch file which uses the sips command to convert them to HEICs, then uses exiftool to set the description on each photo. I tested the workflow on yesterday’s photos, and it worked; then I imported the photos into Photos and that worked, too.

I wanted to clear out the photos I’d just brought in to try something else, so I hit Cmd-A to select them all, then hit the Delete key to make them go away. Unfortunately, I was in the “All Photos” view, so I had just told Photos to delete ALL MY PHOTOS!!

I figured it out when the system put up a progress bar, not something I expected to see. There was no “cancel” button, of course. I force-quitted Photos and reopened it; it hadn’t deleted any photos, so I thought I was OK. Until I tried deleting one picture – and up popped the progress bar again.

I force-quitted Photos again, then I rebooted the machine. When I brought Photos back up and deleted one picture, things seemed OK — until Photos said that the Photos library was corrupt and quit!

A web search revealed how to repair the Photos library (press Command and Option when you open Photos) and about 90 minutes later, all was well (not only did Photos have to repair the library, it also had to validate against iCloud, which took most of the time and didn’t have any kind of reassuring progress bar). All of my pictures survived.

If worst had come to worst, I could have restored the Photos library from Time Machine or Backblaze – but I’m glad I didn’t have to do it.

Here’s one last picture from the Heritage Rose Garden.

Pandemic Journal, Day 426

A few years ago, I adopted a rose at the San Jose Heritage Rose Garden as a Valentine’s Day present for Diane, and I’ve renewed the adoption ever since. Valentine’s Day is not the best time to go visit the roses, but the weather today was much more promising – sunny and in the 70s – so we paid a visit.

It had been a while since we’d been to the garden – it, unfortunately, suffered during the lockdown because it lost a lot of volunteers. There are also many people living in the park – we passed three tents on the short walk from the main parking lot to the garden. But the roses themselves were wonderful.

“Our” rose is a Pioneer, in spot M-18-23. It’s doing well.

I didn’t get the name of this rose, but I really liked it.

The Heritage Rose Garden has lots of individually-planted roses of different types near each other; in contrast, the San Jose Municipal Rose Garden is filled with beds which have many plants of the same variety – the effect is powerful.

I’m a sucker for multi-colored roses, especially yellows and oranges. Here’s a Chihuly.

But my favorite was “Good as Gold”.

I was happy to see pollinators at work, too.

Visiting the two gardens was a very pleasant way to spend a late spring afternoon!