In the summer of 2005 we had an apartment in Paris but no internet. To save upload time I scaled all of my photos to 1024x768. I've always kept the 7 MP images around but never got them reuploaded. Gallery2 doesn't make it very easy to do this either. There is a reupload image plugin but it allows you to edit the image, click on modify image, then reupload image. This keeps the image name, comments, description etc.. but can you imagine me reuploading 2000 pictures one at a time? It takes six mouse clicks at he least to reupload a photo. I can mass upload photos but that makes it hard to only get the ones I wanted before without having to go through them and delete the bad ones. I've settled on a comprimise. If the gallery has a bunch of photos with descriptions etc.. then I reupload them one at a time. If it doesn't I mas upload them and delete the original small images. The Europe/France 2005 gallery is the only one that has photos that need to be reuploaded. So far I have London, Going Home, Bologna, Modena and Venice done.

I also updated a few pictures in my portfolio to reflext this. The pictures of the Pantheon are now the full size 7 MP versions. I added two new photos to the portfolio that I like but didn't notice before.

Enjoy!

When I travel I take lots of pictures and it always makes me nervous to only have them on flash. I've lost two flash cards in the last couple of years to file system errors. Considering how much it costs to travel it's nothing to buy a backup harddrive or extra flash cards. I bought

a harddrive case for about $12 like the one above which works great with a 60 GB 5400 rpm Hitachi laptop drive in it. The only problem is I still need my laptop because my camera can't talk directly to the drive.

I also need to bring along my memory card reader too because my daughter's camera uses CF cards and mine uses SD cards. I've found a new device that may help me. I've been considering not even taking my laptop to Ecuador in the winter because I don't want it to get stolen. Anyway the device I just purchased is a combined laptop hard drive and memory card reader. It's a lot bulkier than my other drive case but it can work without a computer. It's made by BAFO and I got it from thetechgeek.com which had it for $14.95 without a drive. I inserted a 60 GB drive into it and was thinking to myself I wonder how I format it. I was about to take the drive back out and plug it into my PVR client since it has a ribbon cable that takes 2.5 inch drives when I realized that I could just plug it in via USB (duh) and format it that way. I plugged it in and used mkdosfs to format it which took all of 3 seconds. Now that it was formatted I plugged in an SD card and pushed the Copy button and away it went. It beeped twice when it was done. This would be a great backup tool for my flash cards. I've mentioned that I'm a little paranoid about losing data and for good reason. The summer of 2005 we spent in Paris and I only backed up my pictures to my laptop and uploaded little 1024x768 versions to this website. This summer I did the same but brought along the portable harddrive and it was a good thing too because my laptop got rained on in Poland and I lost the data on the hard drive. Had that been my only copy I would have been toast. Thankfully that was one of three copies. So back to the BAFO device. This thing is so easy to backup flash cards with it should be a crime not to do it. You plug the flash card in and push the Copy button. That's it, really! It copies the contents to the hard drive and beeps twice.

I only have two complaints.

1. It could be smaller
2. the batteries could last longer

The battery is good for 1.6 hrs and it's about the size of an old
portable walkman. The power adapter is made for continental europe but comes with an adapter for the U.S. It's a bit bulky but not heavy.

To test the speed I created a 1 GB file and copied it to my 2 GB 120x SD card across a USB 2.0 connection.

• Copy from PC to SD card - 5 minutes (3.3 MB/sec)
• Copy from SD card to BAFO internal hd - 14 minutes (1.1 MB/sec)
• Copy from PC to BAFO internal hd - 3 minutes (5.6 MB/sec)
• Copy from BAFO internal hd to PC - 5 minutes (3.3 MB/sec)
• Copy from BAFO internal CF card to PC - 4 minutes 53seconds (3.9 MB/sec)

So it's not the fastes thing on the block.. I then plugged it into my USB controller and used hdparm to test the internal hd. It clocked at about 4 MB/sec. It looks like the little device just doesn't have enough oomph to read and write at the same time. Copying from the PC to the hd is almost 5x faster than copying from the flash to the hd. The flash can't be the problem because I can write to it fairly fast. The interesting thing is it's actually faster to copy to the internal hd than from it! This is completely backwards from what it should be. The internal hd shoould be able to sustain 20 MB/sec and our fastest time was 5.6 MB/sec which is about 40 Mbits/sec so clearly we are using USB 2.0. So it appears that something internal to the device hits a roadblock about about 5 MB/sec.

None of this matters unless you're in a speed contest. You can figure that it will take about 10 minutes a day to backup your digital pictures if you're on vacation. The battery is good for 100 minutes so it theoretically could last you a week and a half without recharging...

My first paying job was working in a large restaurant/hotel. I started as a dishwasher as most people do and proceeded to learn how to cook there. I hated every minute of that job but in the end it's turned out that what I learned there has been more valuable than anything I learned on any other job. The reason I mention this is because one thing we used to cook there were Monte Cristo sandwiches. I've tried eating Monte Cristos at other resaurants but they seem to be a bit confused as to what one is. The most common mishap that I've seen is two slices of french toast with ham and cheese between them. NOT what we used to make. Our Monte Cristo's were bread, turkey, ham and cheese cut in four pieces, battered and deep fried. I made them tonight and they didn't turn out half bad. I served them with homemade blackberry jam. In the summer the Seattle area is just festooned with blackberrys so this summer we picked about 2 gallons of them and made jam and syrup out of them. The flavor of real jam is so much better than the store bought stuff that it really made the Monte Cristos taste good. I'd like to see the sandwiches a bit darker though...

 

.Years ago I ate at the Europa Pizzaria in Spokane Wa, and had the most sublime creme sauce ever. It had sweet peppers in it and was so very mild that at first it didn't grab you but after each bite my willingness to take another bite grew. By the time I got to the end I was licking my plate. Here we are years later and I'm attempting to recreate it. I've only tried to make it a few times and I'm still nowhere near but I thought I'd post a pic or two anyway...

 

Grantisms are short quips of wisdom that I think up and want to write down so I don't forget them. Unfortunately I usually forget them before I record them.

People have really really wanted me to write this up and get make it available. I'm just now getting to it. It's such an important part of my philosophy that I don't want it written in haste. Please be patient.

Whenever I have to fill in a form about myself on some website there is usually a field labelled Religion.

As I said earlier we arrived at Union Station in D.C. early in the morning. We were starving so we found food at one of the many restaurants downstairs from the tracks. The station in D.C. is really quite nice is set up like an airplort in that it has monitors for watching your train, newspaper stands, restaurants, bookstores etc.. Downstairs is the connection to the metro which reminded us of being in Europe. I just love being able to get around without relying on taxis or renting a car. We weren’t in any great hurry to get to our Bed and Breakfast because we couldn’t check in until 3:00pm and it was only 11:00am when we got done eating. Still tired from getting poor sleep on the train we longed for a bed to take a nap in. We ventured to the metro station and found our route (the red line) and purchased tickets. The Washington D.C. metro works a lot like the London Underground in that you need to enter the metro using a ticket and you can’t get out unless you still have it so it’s best not to toss the ticket until you’ve exited. This is unlike Paris, Prague and Budapest because in those cities you don’t need anything to exit. In Budapest you can even get on with nothing but you risk being nailed by the authorities which can get expensive.