Journal: Technology at Its Finest

 

Late last Monday night, I went through my folder of albums on my computer, and made a list of the missing albums.  I walked into my upstairs office, looked at all the bins, and wondered, Did I find the missing bin of albums?  There was one under two heavy bins, with another heavy bin beside it, next to the cubbyhole doors, and I could not move them enough to see if I had marked that bottom bin ‘Scanned’.  Maybe that’s why they’re not scanned – I couldn’t get that bin out?  Larry would have to help me look.  But not right then; he was fast asleep.

Tuesday, I went on scanning photos.  (insert amazed face) 

That afternoon, Lydia sent several photos she had taken of the children for Christmas -- Ian, 6, Jacob, 13, Jonathan, 9 next week, and Malinda, 5.  

There are new baby goats at Todd and Dorcas’ little farm.  Above is a brand-spankin'-new little one, just attempting to rise onto his pegs for the first time.

That evening, Larry sent pictures and video clips from the Dismal River Club, where he and other Walker crew members were back working again.  There were mule deer and elk all over the place, and they are not particularly afraid of people.

A little later, he sent pictures of his supper, which consisted of Brussels sprouts and some kind of potatoes with steak.  “It is really tender,” he told me.

“You can have the sprouts,” I told him.  “I’m having broccoli, fish, apple juice, cottage cheese, and berry pie.”

He sent pictures of the lobby, which sports a big stuffed bison, and a stuffed bison head on the wall as well.

When I was very young, maybe about age 3 or 4, my mother used to have me sit on a bench in the main marble hallway at the courthouse uptown while she signed papers for this and that and paid vehicle registrations and bought licenses at nearby windows.  I never peeped a word, and I sat there good as gold, and she never had a clue that I was terrified to sit there, because there were huge bison and water buffalo heads on the wall high overhead.  I was quite sure those animals were in the process of breaking out, and the whole beast would come crashing through the wall at any moment – and as far above me as those heads were, the animals themselves must be enormous, and a wee girl like me wouldn’t stand a chance.

Mama was amazed, and felt a little badly about it, too, when years later I told her how petrified I had been to sit in that hallway.  “Why didn’t you say anything?” she laughed.

Well, that was my way.  I thought it useless to raise a fuss about impending doom, if no one could do anything about it anyway.  One must simply accept one’s fate!  😂

I got 136 pictures scanned that day, which was about 2/3 of album #14, our honeymoon pictures.  I also edited and uploaded the 132 photos I took the previous Saturday.

Wednesday morning, I peered out the window, spotted a squirrel at the bird feeders, and dashed over to the patio door to shoo him off.  He jumped onto the railing, took a flying leap down onto a main joist under the deck, and, disappearing from view, skedaddled down the pole at the corner of the deck. 

I heard a scuffle, with the squirrel giving his alarm chatter. 

And then there was a rolling and tumbling of reddish brown and tawny tan fur all the way out to the stump of the peach tree.  The furry flurry broke apart, and one part was the squirrel, the other part, the Siamese cat that considers the entire south side of the hill his personal acreage.  The squirrel ran pell-mell to the tree by the garage, with the cat hot on its tail. 

Up the tree went the squirrel. 

Up the tree went the cat. 

The cat stopped at about five feet, while the squirrel scampered on up to the top, then sat in a crook of a branch and scolded loudly.

The cat clung to the side of the tree for a few seconds, then sprang down and sashayed off, deprived of its dinner, but terribly proud of itself nonetheless.

If you’ve ever wondered about the big round haybales in some of my pictures, most of the time, it’s alfalfa hay.  Nebraska ranks No. 4 in the nation in commercial alfalfa production.  But farmers also produce grass and meadow hay, and Nebraska ranks No. 7 nationwide in the ‘Other Hay’ category.

A little while before our Wednesday evening church service, the last album was done, done, done! (’cept fer them thar losted ones, ya know.)  I hurried off to get dressed for the service, and then had over an hour to scan those last few very old family pictures.  

Here’s Loren at age one.  This photo, along with several other very old photos, came from an old album with wooden covers that my mother must’ve put together in the early 1940s.  I don’t recall ever seeing this picture ’til now.

After church, we mailed a stack of Christmas cards to friends and family who live many miles away.  Home again, we had a late supper, and then I went back upstairs to finish the last of the old family photos.  And that was it; I was done.  For now.  Who knows, maybe forever.

Larry came upstairs, too, and moved a couple of heavy bins in my little office, and then I spotted the word “scanned” in permanent marker on the side of one of the albums.  That suspect bin was indeed full of albums – already scanned.  So the bin of 13 lost albums are still lost.

Going through my list of albums and gauging the dates of the missing photos, it looks like those particular albums are not crucial.  Baby pictures are all accounted for, even though one lost album is from 1997, the year Victoria, our youngest, was born.  But that album only represented one month out of the year, and I have many new-baby photos of her, so all is well ----- except, out of those 13 albums that are missing, there is one picture, just one, that was special, and would be too bad to never find again:  it’s a picture of our much-loved Dr. Luckey holding Baby Victoria in my hospital room a few hours after she was born.  I had long wanted a picture of him with our other babies whose births he attended, but never worked up the chutzpah to ask.  This time, though, I was very much aware that this might possibly be our last baby, and, knowing I might not have another chance, I asked.  He seemed quite pleased to accommodate us.

There are three or four not-too-big boxes of my late sister-in-law Janice’s photos that I might scan one of these days; and I need to make sure that I have all of my mother’s very old family photos scanned.  But this is it, for now.

Above is my mother holding Loren, her first child, as a new baby.  He was born August 9, 1938.  It’s a poor photo, but pretty special to me.  I had never seen it before finding it in this old album with the wooden covers.  In no other picture is Mama’s hair fixed as it is there, with that smooth roll all around the bottom.

This shot is also from the old album with the wooden covers.  Loren is on the left, and the child on the right dressed in a matching outfit is most likely our cousin Darlene [Wining] Wood.

Also, here’s the old wooden album, which is at least 84 years old.  I need to find out how (and out of what) to remake it.  It has black construction-paper pages that are returning to dust.  

I have scanned a total of 36,777 old photos.

It only got up to 28° Thursday afternoon, and we were issued a winter weather advisory.  Fog rolled in, making everything look mysterious and other-worldly.

I spent a while Brailling Christmas cards for my three blind friends while scanned photos were being transferred from my laptop to my 4TB hard drive, in preparation for uploading to thumb drives.  I use a slate and stylus given to me by my blind friend Penny, back when she first moved here in mid-1970.  I was 9 years old.  This little gadget is sure a lot harder on a 62-year-old hand than it was on a 9-year-old hand!  Very much of this, and I’d have to invest in a Braille typewriter!  (massaging my po’ ol’ hand)

I don’t Braille very often; but I only need to do a line or two, and it all starts coming back.

Two of my blind friends are teachers at our church school, teaching English literature, grammar, history, music (both voice and instrument).  All three ladies sing and play many instruments.  In years gone by, one used to raise a large garden, growing every kind of vegetable available here.  It was amazing to see her delicately touching the leaves, pulling out weeds lickety-split, and leaving the ‘good’ plants there.

One time when I was a teenager, I came riding up to her house on my bicycle, and spotted Rita out in her garden.  She was on hands and knees between the rows, going along at her usual rapid clip, jerking out weeds and flinging them to the side.  Her aim was perfect, and the little pile of weeds grew steadily taller as she landed one after another right atop the last one.

I had coasted the last few yards, and she had not heard me.  I waited a beat, then called out, “Rita, why is there a bunch of carrot tops over here amongst the weeds?”

She paused, sat back, turned her head toward me, and came to a swift conclusion as to just who I was.  Tossing her head back in her characteristic shout of laughter, she offered, “You can eat them if you like!”

Here are the thumb drives (2TB), along with 7 USB-to-lightning adapters for those with iPhones, and 2 USB-to-USB-C for those with Android.  

By early evening, the data was all transferred from laptop to 4TB external hard drive, and next I made a copy of the Photo folder with all the subfolders on that hard drive, so I could rearrange the folders, and discard any duplicates.  A couple of hours later, it was 18% completed, and the transfer window informed me that the process would be done in 8 hours.  Thirty minutes earlier, it had said it would take 10 ½ hours, and 30 minutes before that, it said 13 hours.

I left it to its miscalculations and trotted downstairs to put the last few Christmas gifts into the proper gift bags or wrap them.  The Christmas cards for our fellow parishioners are in a big box, ready to be sorted into the paper bags they set up in alphabetical order in the Fellowship Hall.  Hopefully, they’ll have them ready by next Sunday.

Finishing that job in less than an hour, I went back upstairs.  That’s two flights up, from basement to second floor.  Several times of that per day is some good exercise!

Joseph, Teddy, Dorcas, Hannah, and Keith

The transfer window had decided it would now be 9 hours before it was done.

Remember the days of downloading big files and programs via a dial-up connection?  And the connection would fail at 98%, and you couldn’t take up where you left off.

I posted the picture of those thumb drives on my Facebook page and asked, “So, how long do you reckon it’ll take to put 284,121 photos – that’s 1.46 terabytes – onto these nine 2TB thumb drives??  I have two available USB ports.”

Knowledgeable Nellie, who sits patiently at her computer waiting for me to ask such things so that she might helpfully respond, did not disappoint.  “Maybe two hours,” she informed me, and then thought to enlighten me further:  “You just plug them in.”

Ah!  So that’s my trouble.  I merely have them lying atop my printer, and was expecting them to absorb the data by osmosis!

But she wasn’t done.  “... unless your [sic] printing off pictures... that would take you many hours... maybe a month and a pretty big expense account,” she finished.

Two hours to load over a quarter-million pictures; many hours and up to a month to print them.  Huh.  How ’bout that.  Never mind the fact that it has taken me close to three years to scan them, with some time out to quilt for myself and for my customers.  (I ate and slept now and then, too.)  Here’s a fact:  It takes longer to print photos at a high resolution than it does to scan them. 

Two hours.  A month.  hahaha

Larry in a pickup he rebuilt and repainted, 1989

I rarely print any pictures.  If I printed all those photos no bigger than 4x6, at a cost of approximately $0.05/photo (for ink and photo paper, never mind wear and tear on the machine), it would cost – get this – $14,206.05!!  (Can’t help myself; I have to calculate these things.)  But printing was never in the plans.

Larry & Hester

June 1989

Some hours later, the progress notification window told me the duplication process was 35% complete – and the time remaining was about 8 hours.  This 4TB external hard drive has to be plugged into electricity, so I can’t just haul it and my laptop around with me everywhere I go.  So there I was, upstairs in my quilting studio, wishing I was downstairs in my recliner.

And then we lost power.  Everything went dark (except my laptop, of course).  Ice on the lines somewhere must’ve brought them down; or a falling tree branch, heavy with ice, may have done it.  Did you know that half an inch of ice can add 500 pounds of weight to a power line?  According to the Omaha Public Power District, on a 920-foot-long transmission line, that much ice will cause the line to sag four feet lower than normal.

Wouldn’t you know, this happened right while photos were traveling from one folder to another.  I would have to be very careful when I deleted the main folder I had mirrored, so as not to delete pictures that might have gotten moved rather than copied.  Things go awry when this type of hard drive loses power.  I like the kind that only needs to be plugged into a computer, and not into an electrical outlet, too, better; but this one is bigger and more powerful.

Loren, Lura Kay, and my mother, Hester [Winings] Swiney, 1941

I called the electric company.  They usually know when these things happen, but in case we are the only house in the area that has lost electricity, I call.  The lady told me that crews were out working on the problem, and hoped to have everybody ♫ ♪ back in the marquee lights ♪ ♫ soon (with apologies to Waylon Jennings).

Larry, having had his bathtub nap interrupted, rummaged up a few more flashlights, donned parka and galoshes, wished for cleats (it was a glaze of ice out there), and headed out to fire up one of the generators.  He opened the garage door – and the lights came back on, after having been off for 25 minutes.

So I headed back upstairs to continue the data copying.

Eventually I left the photos copying and went to bed.  When I checked it Friday morning, it was stalled out at 94% on “What do we do with these duplicates?” – which I knew was bound to happen, after the power glitch.  I clicked ‘skip’.

By 12:40 p.m., it was done.  The mirror-image folder, that is.  Next, I would go through it quickly, and do a bit of weeding of unwanted folders or pictures.

Seen in Omaha

But first... I couldn’t do a thing without a popup box telling me that the Recycle Bin on the D:\ drive was corrupted.  The drive has done this ever since I got it.  It asks if I want to empty the bin, but it doesn’t make a lick of difference whether I click Yes or No.  Just as soon as I start to do anything, anything at all, with this drive, that box pops up again.  Sometimes I can ignore it; sometimes it halts the operation. 

So... it was time to fix it.  After a search, I found a YouTube video, followed instructions carefully, and soon had the problem corrected.

Saturday, I went to Omaha to visit Loren. 

He was coming down the main hallway toward the front lobby when I entered, and greeted me happily, but looking at his watch as he did so.  “You’re a little late!” he informed me.

It was about the same exact time I generally visit, 4:30 p.m.; though a couple of weeks ago, I got there an hour and a half earlier than usual.  Was he remembering that?

We had a nice visit, and he enjoyed looking at Instagram pictures friends and family have posted.

Look, now there are cows next to those irrigation-pivot bridges.  Reckon they ever use the bridges?  (I doubt it.)

I have an SD card with several gigabytes of music on it plugged into the Mercedes sound system.  That day a few miles before I arrived in Omaha, one Old Fashioned Revival Hour folder finished and another began – and, as it happened, it was Old Fashioned Revival Hour Christmas music!  That delightful album played almost all the way home again, until it switched to Paul and Bob about the time I hit the eastern outskirts of town.

Now, I have always loved Paul Levin the blind tenor singer and mandolin player, and Bob Findlay the preacher, the soprano, and the guitar player; but I’m here to tell you that they are somewhat jarring, coming immediately after the Old Fashioned Revival Hour.

I got home at about 6:30 p.m., half starved half to death.  I popped some cod into the oven, put some broccoli into the microwave, poured cranberry-watermelon juice into glasses, and soon had a frozen apple crumb pie waiting to go into the oven.

But Larry had brought home a package of soft, fresh-baked peanut butter cookies and left them on the table.  And I was starved. 

I ate a peanut butter cookie as an appetizer.

Sarah Lynn, 1961

Later that evening, I was sorting and organdizing (à la Winnie-the-Pooh) my photos and preparing to put them on thumb drives, just really buzzing right along, when I came upon two wedding folders in 2017 that were not labeled – and one wasn’t even edited.  I got all that done, and thought, There, now I can really sail – and promptly stumbled on the Fourth-of-July picnic of that very same year, wherein photos were again not labeled.  A few kids in those shots will have to go nameless, because I no longer know who they are – they done growed up a bunch since then!

I plug along nicely through album after album, year after year – but when I think I’m done, and then discover I am not, well, that makes me feel like banging on pots and pans!

In looking at other folders of photos in that same time frame, I see that I was pretty well swamped with customer quilts.  I must’ve intended to go back and label and edit those photos after I finished the quilts – but more quilts just kept a-comin’, and eventually I forgot about the photo labels and editing.  At least I did edit the Fourth of July photos.

Sunday afternoon, I found a couple more folders that were not labeled.

Ah, well.  I can still type fast, and it doesn’t take long to edit good digital shots.  Just a bit of straightening, cropping, or fixing someone’s face.  (hee hee... that sounds funny.)  If I like you, I fix your blemishes.  If I don’t... who knows, I might add blemishes!  {snicker})

As I scan (as in, ‘look’) quickly through these photos, I’m enjoying them so very much, that I’m plumb delighted to be giving them all to the children for Christmas.

For instance, here are a couple of pictures from our July 4, 2017, church picnic.  I laughed when I took the pictures, and I laughed again when I came upon them yesterday.

Here goes Leroy...

And then, moments later -------

Last night, the Windows 11 picture viewer decided it didn’t want to stay up.  I’d click on a picture... it would open... and then, swoosh!  Away it went.

That’s not the first time stuff like this has happened.  I have been accused (I can be bribed into giving out names) of trying to blow up my computer, what with all the strenuous marathons I put it through.

I was finally able to keep the viewer working if I stood on my left foot, spun counterclockwise, whistled Dixie between my teeth, crossed my eyes, and recited the Pledge of Allegiance.

A recalcitrant viewer would prove to be the least of my worries.

By 3:30 this afternoon, all my photos were sorted and labeled.  I glanced through titles of the major subfolders one more time, and thennnnnn...

I plugged in a 2TB thumb drive and let ’er rip.

Or at least hoped it would.  Would rip, that is.

Shall I unplug my ergonomic keyboard and start another one? I wondered.  (I only have 3 USB ports on my laptop.  Most USB hubs are unbearably slow, unless you dole out lots of $$$$.  My ergonomic mouse can be used either with Bluetooth or receiver; so it doesn’t need to use a USB port.)

Yes, let’s, I decided.

Teddy & Elsie

July 4, 2017

Seconds later, two thumb drives were receiving data at once.  (And I tried to type that sentence on the unattached keyboard, heh heh.)

There are a total of 229,836 photos in 4,379 folders – making 1.07 terabytes (or 1,181,562,613,760 bytes, to be precise).

That’s not as many pictures as I had originally said, because there was a folder with subfolders of vacation photos – duplicated from the yearly folders and subfolders, so that now and then I could set my screen saver to draw from vacation shots only.  I deleted the duplicate folders.

If the 13 missing albums (which are not as critical as some, such as those with the new baby pictures, or the senior pictures, or the wedding pictures) ever show up, I will scan them and either add them to these 2TB thumb drives or just put them on smaller thumb drives, and give them to the kids.  For now, though, they will have nearly all my photos, carefully labeled and sorted chronologically.

Here are a couple more shots (above and below) that shows you why I truly didn’t tire of this monumental marathon of photo-scanning I’ve been on for well over three years (though it was interrupted quite a few times by quilts, both my own, and customers’).  

Ethan, 07-08-07

Just about the time I thought, Everything is now in hand and going along swimmingly, and I can do all the other things I need to do (such as wash the dishes) while these thumb drives load – the boat sank.

The loading of data was 2% complete, all the way into May of 2007, when it stalled out and informed me that there was a problem transferring photos to thumb drives, because a photo was ‘corrupted and unreadable’.  I noted the date and label, and checked it out.

The photo was fine.  I went and got my other external hard drive and checked it out on that one, too.  It was fine.  The remaining photos in that folder would not load, either, and were labeled ‘corrupted and unreadable’.

I tried renaming the photos... converting them to .gif. ... loading from the other hard drive...  None of that worked.  These methods have worked before, when I had a similar problem – that is, if the photo itself was the culprit.

I tried again with a different thumb drive.

One after the other, the drives stalled out in the same spot, or nearly the same spot.  I have tried five of the nine thumb drives with virtually identical results.

I tried skipping that folder and loading a different one. 

Several photos might then load, and possibly a folder with few pictures, but no more.

I belatedly concluded that the culprit was neither photos nor hard drive, but thumb drive.  It is not a particular folder or photo that causes the trouble, but the amount of data on the drive.  These thumb drives that are supposed to hold two terabytes of data hold only 42 gigabytes.  42 GB and no more.

I pulled up my order on Amazon. 

It’s gone.  I get nothing but a blank page telling me the original page is no longer there.  I can’t get to it through Reviews, through Previous Order Details, or by searching the entire Amazon site.  It’s gone.

I looked at a couple of similar thumb drives, and while a few reviewers are all gung-ho, they obviously have not tried filling the drive to capacity.  Those who try, discover that it holds only a small percentage of the promised data load. 

Scammers purchase cheap, generic thumb drives or flash drives, then alter the specs so they look like they hold one or two terabytes of data, when most are well under one terabyte, and some, like mine, are under 50 gigabytes.

I knew this, so I made sure to read the reviews. 

They were all good.

Reviews can be faked, too, of course, or, as I mentioned, they could be written by people who didn’t even come close to filling the drive with two terabytes of data.

So now I know – or at least am 99% sure – that these thumb drives are frauds.  Here’s an article about such things:  Flash Drive Scam

Well... these thumb drives are not entirely useless.  They do hold 42GB, after all.  🙄

Tomorrow I will call the two stores in town that might sell or be able to order thumb drives for me.  At least if I get them locally, I’ll be able to return them if they don’t work.

And at least I only wasted a few hours on the problem, and no pictures are lost.  I still have time to get this done, if I can get the thumb drives quickly enough.

Siggghhhhh...

But... no photos have been lost.  All is well.

,,,>^..^<,,,          Sarah Lynn           ,,,>^..^<,,,