Golly darn, it is 66 degrees this morning. :D

The high is once again forecast for mid to low 80s and low humidity. I am going to take advantage and mow the yard very soon. It was weird to take the trash to the curb yesterday afternoon and has it be so nice out.

The new leaf blower will get a full test today.

Now my work computer is acting up. I blame david. I was on with IT for like 5 hours yesterday letting them try to fix it, and they figured out it something corrupt in the file system and needs reimaged. So now I need to backup all my stuff and go through that fun.

IT loves to just start from scratch and reimage and be done with it, and not figure out the real problem. I understand that it might take a lot longer to figure out a problem, and time is money.

At the last photolab job I worked at we had a $400,000 printer system from Kodak. It used IBM computers on Win NT, and a large RAID and Noritsu processor and Kodak scanner and control heads. It was complex, and if one little data file was corrupted, it would crash. The operators loved to just stop working, and call Kodak tech support and they would go through the process of reloading from scratch, and then all the setup files and it was hours of wasted time, and expensive.

I figured out the one file it was reading and grabbed a copy of it. I then wrote a short batch file that would restore that file. I put it all on a floppy drive (remember those?) and told the operators, if it crashes, just put in the floppy, reboot the computer. When you see the message I added from the end of the batch file to remove the floppy, reboot and all is fine. The boss thought I was a genius. The operators hated me, they preferred to sit on their butt, and reload the system for several hours.

I made three copies of that floppy. I gave two to the boss for his office and showed him how to do the fix. The operators kept loosing the floppy. He would haul out his, fix the system, and put it back in his office. I showed him how to do a disk-copy and he had to do that many times.

Back in the day when everyone got prints of their photos. The olden days.

Agggh. I just made a quick trip to the grocery store to get some lunch stuff for tomorrow. Once again, an old lady (older than I am, so OLD) waits for the cashier to ring up the final item, then she sees the total, and started to unzip her purse, dig around for her wallet. Finally find her wallet, unzip that, pull out the number of bills needed, put down her wallet, and digs into her purse again to get the change purse. Find the change purse, counts out the exact change, put away the coin purse. Takes the receipt and put it in her wallet, zips it up, put it in her purse, zips it up. Then she stands there trying to remember how to take more time, and finally moves to the end of the checkout counter to grab her bag, and in slow motion, walk away.

Certain first world problem, buying food for tomorrow and not even looking at the price of what I picked out.

Morning all. Long days last week. Working from 6:30 am till 5 or 6 at night. I am hoping this week is a lot lighter........

It should be light during the day and dark at night.

Except for the smoke from the fires on the western states.

I am working on a customer's project that I think he is trying to make a real pain in the butt. We are doing it for a surveyor. For whatever reason he is using an assumed coordinate system. All of our stuff is tied to the real world not just an arbitrary point as the beginning of the world.

For our program to accept his random system we have to find some of the targets in a photo (out of 956 images) and that target is truly a small speck at some random point on the photo. We have to do that at least three points and the ground control points and then the computer can make reality fit his made up world.

And he (the surveyor) is using a modern GPS based surveying system so he had to work at using a made up system. We can only guess he has some old surveys done many years ago in a made up system and he is trying to make them match those. What a royal pain in the butt.

have fun with that. I have had plant projects where the civil guys used real world and the plant had its own system based on a site monument.

I got it done. What a pain. Essentially I have to tell the computer it just a assumed coordinate system, and then open the file that we normally ignore that shows just where the camera was when it fired. Then look at that images and zoom way in, and just pan around until I find a target. We ask him to put them in a area, but it often he can't get right there, or he finds a spot close, but easier to get to. So the targets are in random places. After the first target is found, I have some idea of where to look on other images of the same area. One spot usually has 8 to 12 images of it. After three images are found for each target, I can process it partly, and then find more, and again and again until the project is set up in imaginary land.

What a pain.

morning all. So far this week is not as bad as last. Friday can't get here soon enough.

Golly what a fun morning.

We use one critical piece of software that we pay just under $600 each to buy. We usually only upgrade every few years. Suddenly my version stopped working. So I am trying to get the sales department to help me figure out why. Of course they said I need a current version to get tech support. So tech support will not try to figure out why the valid and legal license and order number I have for the year old version will not work. I can't just upgrade, because only tech support can do that, but I can't talk to tech support unless I buy the new and improved version for $900. Golly what a deal.

It is almost to the point I am going to dig on the raid and see if I have the old stand alone, no internet registration needed version and just stick with that. GRRRRRR.

It is a version that is not supposed to stop working.

Sounds to me like it quit working cause people stopped buying it.

No, it is a very popular program, and they say it has a perpetual license. We have been using it for many years, back in the single digit versions, and I just had to spend $280 to upgrade to the latest and greatest Version 22.1.

It was written by a "kid" and he ran the company for years, and had simple tech support, and the program was $100 for a version if you did the upgrades. He cashed out, and sold the company to some European software company that immediately made it more complex to register. Even though we have the program on our computer and I download a file to install it, it has to check in with the home office to run.

Who knows what happened, I might have figured it out with enough poking around on the internet. I have a customer waiting on a file and I needed the program to do a few critical steps. It will be on the One Drive site soon and the client can download it. Phew.

I mean they made it stop working so you had to spend money to make it start working. Sounds like they won.

That is possible, but no way can I prove it. I was just happy to have my main system working with the program. I have one of the really old versions on my laptop. The display is really too small to do any real work. I had it on there mostly to be able to show a client an aerial photo and the 3D point clouds we make. I also have a several year old version on my old slow i5 CPU machine that I keep only because it runs some 10 year old software. I can open up a old flight we did for a client and see what we did back then.

It is like working in slow motion on the old system. It is an old computer that had Win 7 on it originally and that had just been released.

morning all off to go earn a living.

Don't get stuck in traffic on that long commute! :p

I was very happy to click the upload button on that project from hell and send the invoice.

traffic is becoming an issue with the crawler that is starting to walk as well.

It looks like tomorrow is the day to mow. We have yet to hit 100 degrees this summer, just mid to high 90s. Tomorrow is supposed to be cloudy in the morning, and possible rain in the afternoon. Rain this weekend, and back to 80s for the weekend.

My wife has a garden tour for Saturday. One of the couples we know from the Porsche club wants to come tour her botanical gardens.

Our driveway area is a butterfly orgy in progress. She has both sides of the driveway and the entire west side of the driveway planted with flowers for the butterflies. One is a huge vine with really pretty purple flowers, and the fritillary butterflies are in orgy mode, and laying eggs and it is covered in caterpillars and they are eating the leaves and flowers like mad. We have dozens of caterpillars on it. The milkweeds are covered in Monarch caterpillars.

https://www.fs.fed.us/wildflowers/pollinators/pollinator-of-the-month/fritillary.shtml

morning all. Its supposed to hit the high 90's again today here.

Just the other day the heat index was insane, 125 degrees. The mowing crew for the yard next door showed up at 2:30 PM and at the peak hot time of day. They just go yard to yard and do it all day. All of them were dressed in sweat shirts with hoodies, long work pants, and gloves. It is good protection for the sun, and I suspect the clothes are just soaked in sweat. They did not miss a beat, and then moved across the street and did that yard, and loaded up, off to the next yard. Those guys have to be tough.

Then we hear of people dying from the heat sitting indoors in front of a fan. No doubt they are not in good shape but it is really amazing what the human body can adapt to.