Why I Oughta...

I guess this is more after/before than before/after based on how Google Photos organized the two photos in this collage.  Thus...On the bottom of this photo collage above, you can see a pile of wood that I harvested out of our backyard in it's mostly raw state.  When the guys came to clear out some trees before we built in 2016, I think they left behind a bunch of these cut up chunks of trunk/branches in the yard.  They're mostly Walnut trees with a few Maple pieces.  I picked up this metal log holder from Menards and decided - because we now have a wood-burning fireplace - to pile the stuff up close to the screened porch.  And, I'm glad I did.  Because as I was collecting the pieces of wood from around the yard, one thing that was consistent:  they were all wet.  And by laying on the ground, they weren't able to dry out at all.  But, a few weeks of laying in this rack, which is underneath the eave of our roof, and they've mostly dried out completely. So, th

Those of you that follow the technology world like I do likely heard about/read about the new Pixel and Pixel XL phones that Google announced last week along with other things like Google Home and Google Wifi.  Being an Android guy and owner of every Nexus phone (and a few tablets!) that have come out, I couldn't wait to get in line to buy a phone.  But, as part of the marketing for these new phones, Google has been doing a lot of talk about the camera.  And how it is, by at least one regard, the *best* camera to ever be put in a phone.  That's nice, right?  They also talked about a feature called Smartburst.   From their post : Pixel’s camera lets you take stunning photos in low light, bright light or any light. Catch action shots as they happen with Smartburst, which takes a rapid-fire sequence of shots and automatically selects the best one. Use Lens Blur to achieve shallow depth of field and bokeh effects, making your subject pop. You can capture dramatic landscapes

Well...Thanks Google!  Look at what they sent me recently for being a participant in their Local Guides program :  Free Google Drive Upgrade to 1 TB.  Granted, it is only for 2 years, but still a nice little perk for being a Local Guide Level 4 . See below for the current state of my usage of storage at Google.  I'm currently at 38 GB of storage used.  And now with my 1.1 Terabyte storage allocation, I'm using a paltry 3% of the available storage.  Great googly moogly! That's a lot of photos and documents and videos.     Before this upgrade, I was on the $1.99/month 100 GB plan and I was using almost 40% of that.  I think I can cancel my $1.99/month now, right?  Lose that .1 in the number? Wonder how the renewal works.  Do I have to maintain my Level 4 status somehow?  According to the storage page, the 1 TB/month plan costs $9.99/month, so let's call it almost a $250 gift. #ThanksGoogle!

In another of the continuing series of #Throwback Thursday moments that are here courtesy of the migration of my old photos from Flickr to Google Photos, here is this photo of me and Joel Murray and one of his kids.  This is from 2004 or 2005, so it is 12 years ago.  (The date didn't stick with the Flickr download for some reason.) Joel Murray is a working actor .  And he's a super great dude, too.  We have a relation to him through my sister and her husband.  Won't go into the whole thing, but that's how we ended up here.  Nat and I - before we had kids - stayed in the Murray's pool house for a few nights in Los Angeles.  I have a very vivid memory of this trip with Nat.  It was pretty early in our relationship and this was just.one.of.the.many.things that cemented my feelings about her and made me fall deeper in love with her.  I still remember that trip - this being one of those stops and how it fueled our relationship by building up that shared memory bank o

This photo - which like last week's was rescued from my old, abandoned Flickr archives is from September of 2005 when I was a Village Trustee in the Village of Frankfort and I was about to dominate the annual pie eating contest.  Yep...two time winner is *this guy*.   I don't remember if I won in 2004 and 2005 or 2005 and 2006.  But, as you can see by the kid next to me, it wasn't super top-notch eating talent.  And, if there's one thing I can do well, it is eat fast.  That's nothing new.  It was just being in a position to eat banana cream pies in a competition that brought out that talent.  I remember smelling banana pudding for a long time after these things.  I also remember the winning award:  a year's worth of pies from Enrico's.  Natalie and I used to go in there once a month, pick up a pie and bring it to my folk's house.  My dad loved those banana cream pies!

A week or so ago, I came across this story on Wired entitled: "How to get your photos off Flickr (and where to put them)" that made me try to figure out how to get into my long-ago-abandoned Flickr account.   Once I gained access, I found that I had a few thousand photos there that I'd long forgotten about.  Ranging in dates from January of 2002 all the way up until October of 2008.   Flickr has made it *somewhat* easier to pull them down.  You can batch download them, but if you get too greedy and select too many photos to download at a time, it gets flaky and the whole thing grinds to a state of constant stalling.  But, after a few trials/errors, I found a good groove of pulling down a few months at a time, unzipping those folders, then using the Google Photos Uploader to put each batch up to Google Photos.  There's a bunch of stories that go with the photos that I've unearthed and because what the kids are doing these days are #Throwback Thursdays, I figur