David's Images of the Day Photoblog
We had a light covering of fresh snow this morning. Based on the new trails several deer and a lone rabbit must have passed through my front yard.
Once home after the Patagonia Photography Workshop, my first priority was uploading and backing up images from the trip to my primary storage and backup hard drives. During this process, I discovered that one of my Western Digital My Book 2 TB disk arrays was having problems. Then when restoring images lost on the Western Digital My Book disk array, I found that my backup Western Digital My Book array was also having problems. I ended up restoring the images from a number of Western Digital Passport USB drives (tertiary backup). Even though the backup drives are USB 2.0, the transfer rate was slow and it took almost two weeks to completely restore the lost files. In the middle of this process I also lost a HP Pavillion HDX9200 laptop during the ice storm. I was surprised that the UPS power supply didn’t protect the laptop during the several power disruptions. I have used the time to rebuild and optimize my Lightroom Catalogs. This has significantly improved the performance to find images within Lightroom.
I have updated the layout of my WordPress “Image of the Day” Photoblog site. A thumbnail slider for the current month goes across the top of the display. Images from the most recent three posts, and slides on chronologically going back several years. This replaces thumbnails for the most recent 8 posts. Which allows the most recent post and image to be front and center. The calendar for the current month then moves to the top of the right hand sidebar column. Clicking on any of the dates highlighted in blue get to the post for that date. Below the calendar, is Tag Cloud. I’ve gone back and tagged all of the posts with keywords. The tag cloud shows the top ~50 tags, with the font size related to the number of times the tag shows up in all of my posts. (Thanks to Hans for using tags). Below the tag cloud is a Blog Search function that searches all of the posts and images. Thumbnail links to the Monthly “Images of the Day” Galleries in Photoshelter. PhotoShelter is where all of my posted images are stored, and is the online location where images can be purchased. At the very bottom on each of my pages there is a PhotoShelter Search app, where all images stored in the David Mathre Image Gallery can be searched by keyword.
Comments regarding the Images of the Day Photoblog redesign are appreciated. The goal was to make the site easier to use and navigate.
The storm was forecasted. The township and the power company sent e-mail warnings for everyone to be prepared. When I woke up the power was going off and on, and finally at about 08:30 stayed off. I don’t know how long the power will be off and if I will be sleeping in the RV tonight where I have a propane heater. In the morning I took a number of images with a Leica D-Lux 5 camera. Later as it warmed and turned to rain, ice and branches started falling. There will be a lot to clean up this spring.
Individual images from this slide-show can be viewed here.
I’m back home in NJ recovering from walking pneumonia contracted while in Patagonia. Yesterday I started going through 560 e-mail messages at work. Please check out Thom Hogan’s blog about our being held hostage in Chile. It was real, I was there. This weekend I plan to start uploading new images from the fun part of the Patagonia workshop. I also need to deal with hard disk space on my main desktop and back up all images (~20k, 360 GB) taken while in Patagonia.
I arrived in Miami at about 5 AM, made it through immigrations but had to wait for my luggage. After going through customs I couldn’t directly recheck my luggage to Tampa because I didn’t have a boarding pass. It was a long walk to Terminal D. The problem with the boarding pass was I had multiple reservations on the AA flight. Once that was resolved, I had to go through security again. I just barely made it to the AA Tampa flight. The flight arrived in Tampa on time, but now we are waiting for the rain to stop so they can unload the luggage.
22-January-2011 edit: Check out Thom Hogan’s blog about being held hostage in southern Chile.