Tuesday, March 27, 2012. 11:58pm: I called my old trust old Nikon Coolpix from reserve to take the photo for the next couple weeks. The photos from this camera have always been a little hazy.
This is a shot of my computer as I filled out a request for outside employment form for the library so that I may pursue my own photo restoration business. Turns out that I didn’t need to, both because other employment opportunities at the library led me to table my photo restoration plans and also because as a Free Library Foundation employee, and not a Philadelphai city employee, this form did not apply to me.
Earlier that Day: Still testing my disabled Samsung camera. Here is a picture of a blank wall or ceiling or something of the like. Probably a cieling. Wonder of wonders, do you see what is missing? The fall from the ledge has knocked the annoying speck away from the lens!
Monday, March 26, 2012, 7:49pm: Logan Circle, Philadelphia. This was the last photo I took before my camera’s touchscreen cracked and bled. In the absence of a tripod, I had set the camera up on the narrow ledge of a lamppost. I short breeze later, splat! I took the photo of the fountain in the camera’s damaged state, to test the operability of the camera’s other functions.
Earlier that Day: I went to the Reprographics Department of the Free library to inquire as to why they routinely published my handouts incorrectly. As I recall, this did not solve the problem.
Sunday, March 25, 2012. 12:02pm: A trip to the Eastern State Penitentiary, followed by a sunny spring walk with Jeannette. The place is quote photogenic. I took a great many photos today, and it was tough to choose only ten.
Saturday, March 24th, 2012. 6:51pm: A fine Vietnamese dinner at Phở Hōa with the Spindlers. I believe the afternoon was an aborted attempt at a hike turned into a genealogical expedition on ancestry.com. That was really fun because I don’t really have any genealogy buff friends my age. The weather was not the greatest these weekends. I don’t think we made it out on a single hike all season (for that and other reasons).
After dinner, we popped into the next-door Vietnamese supermarket where I saw all kinds of goodies that I don’t usually see on display and for sale. Some could be on Bizarre Foods with Andrew Zimmern.
Friday, March 23, 2012. 10:33am: There’s something you don’t see every day. A motorcycle with side-car. I wouldn’t mind having a setup like that. I gotta get a driver’s license first, though.
Thursday, March 22nd, 2012. 4:45pm: Something interesting probably happened on today, but this sure wasn’t it. No, here I am experimenting with hiding the immutable dust speck on the inside of my camera lens. I first put the speck against the white wall so I could see it in it’s full glory. Then I hid the speck by placing it on top of the pile of disks. (What decade is this?) Not so bad, eh?
Later That Night: I actually managed to take a picture of the speck on my lens. Damn you, speck!!! Get off of my lens!
Wednesday, March 21st, 2012. 12:08am: Over the spring, I was trying to set up a little side business doing photo restorations. I did two paying jobs before I sidelined the venture to work extra summer hours at various library branches. I might pick it back up again as business at the library has been drying up.
This evening I was experimenting with open-source invoicing software, and you know what? A simple free invoicing program is really hard to find! Free invoicing programs are out there, for sure, but they are all brick outhouses that are way too complicated to install and come with way more features than I intend to use in the forseeable future. All I want to do is print an invoice/receipt to give to my customers along with their finished product. …
This is siwapp. It did exactly what I wanted it to do—and only what I wanted it to do—but installation was still a trick. You see, the program is web based. This would come in really handy if I were overseeing a group of employees operating in different locations. I would automatically receive copies of all their invoices in real-time. For just little old me, however, a web based application simply is not necessary at this time. But siwapp is as simple as it gets!
Now, I’m not paying to have this thing hosted, so instead I set up a little LAMP server on my netbook and installed siwapp there. I accessed the program through my favorite web browser by pointing it to localhost. It was a silly amount of work for what I wanted to do, but I did get it running and it worked quite well.
In the end, however, I went with the invoice feature included gnucash, my finance program. It’s a little tougher to use, and the invoices are not as pretty, but since I was already using the program anyway for my finances, I found it to be the path of least resistance.
Tuesday, March 20th, 2012. 3:48pm: The Northeast Regional Library’s computer lab upgrades from Internet Explorer 7 to Internet Explorer 9. Woo-hoo!
Tuesday, March 19th, 2012. 6:35pm: Here is my sister and my buddy about to take a swim lesson. Wow, She’s really grown over the past seven months. She was a baby then. Now she’s a little girl.
Later That Evening: Testing out the zoom on my camera. I took these pictures of my lamp from my bed about two and a half feet away. Meh.
Sunday, March 18, 2012. 1:39am: My former roommate threw a stellar St. Patrick’s Day party. I had such a good time catching up with people that I neglected to take any decent photos. I did catch this light came of Apples to Apples, though, after which I spent the night asleep in the basement.
Ahh, I miss living there….
Later that Day: This spry-looking little vintage Caterpillar Ten crawler sits on a cracked, desolate-looking industrial driveway near the corner of Grant and Ashton. Looks like it’s about from 1928 or 1929, as far as I can tell from the Googles. I don’t know what is the deal with it or why it is sitting there. If it runs, then would run like this.
