Running in Flip Flops

I remember having this conversation in junior high school. It may go back as far as elementary school. This was an important question! I have my opinion that hasn’t changed since “back in the day”, but I’d like yours. If you’re offended, fine, leave a comment. But you should still vote, otherwise this could go unresolved.

Here’s the situation. It’s roughly 12am on a Thursday night. The wife, Laurie, reminds me that she wants to send in some photographs to Walmart for pick-up the next day. Seems like a simple enough task, so I fire up Picasa to download the photos.

Here’s where things go terribly wrong.

There are three options in Picasa when you import photos from a media card: leave photos on the card, safe delete (only delete the photos you import) and erase card. Safe delete sounded like the choice I wanted so not even thinking twice about it, I imported. I called in Laurie to choose the photos she wanted and then the shit hit the fan. The photos she wanted to print weren’t there. Picasa had deleted all the photos AND not imported them into the program. They were gone.

After the arguing, of course there was arguing, I set about the task to recover the photos.  I first looked for some sign that this was indeed Picasa’s fault and found multiple posts complaining of the same problem I was now facing.  So, I set about the task of recovering the photos.  I downloaded and tried 6 different undelete programs with no success, but then the light at the end of my late night/early morning tunnel was revealed: Photorec.

Photorec is a command line program, ported using the Unix on Windows toolset CygWin.  After navigating the very retro DOS looking prompts I pressed Enter and about 30 minutes later…ALL OF THE PHOTOS WERE RECOVERED! That’s right all the photos.  The other 6 programs that I tried were only partial successful in finding the photos, but Photorec recovered them all.

Lessons learned:

1. Don’t trust Picasa (I’m going back to Photoshop Elements).
2. When the wife asks to transfer photos, do it before midnight.
3. ALWAYS have a copy of Photorec just incase I forget lessons 1 and 2.

One of the recovered pictures.

I used to do a podcast that I called Razing Giants. Cute name huh? Anyway, Jonathan Coulton is an artist that I played on that podcast. He’s an independent artist that made a name for himself by putting out a song a week. The project was called Thing a Week. This song was part of Thing a Week and is hilarious. The video is definitely NSFW, as may be the song, but I’ll let you decide. Enjoy!

 

 First of May [4:10m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I actually heard a woman say she wasn’t worried about the swine flu, because she had her flu shot this year.  :-0

Stupid dikiny!

So, yesterday Matt & Nate turned 5 years old.  We decided to abuse them, and the rest of the family, by taking the happiest place on Earth.  Great time.  Everyone was extremely exhausted.  I wonder if they’ll kill anyone at school today.

I’ve had some time on my hands here at work.  What’s the Chicken doing?  Viewing your status update on Facebook.

Can you find yours in this picture?

Last weekend I bought an electric scooter from a guy in Long Beach for $35.  I couldn’t get the money out of my wallet fast enough.  The kids love it and even better, Laurie likes it.

I had to recreate just one chicken image from the past.  Enjoy Fishing on a Dock.

Over on Facebok today, a friend from high school that I just reconnected with, reminded me of a great character from my past.  I had this great math teacher, Mr. Coleman, that would use a small representation of a chicken for examples during class.  “Say a chicken is standing at the origin, in which quadrant would the chicken say the cosine is positive.”  Shit like that.  I thought this was hilarious.  Each homework assignment the chicken would make an appearance on the top of my paper in some different scene.  There was space chicken, fishing chicken, motorcycle chicken, etc.

The chicken will now be making appearances here on the blog from time to time.  Thanks Kari!

Hail Chicken!