A Rare Exception
Each year seems to fly by at twice the speed of the previous year. The effects of this phenomenon on one’s psyche, especially when measured against the size of one’s IRA, no doubt keeps lots of shrinks in business, at least insofar as there are “boomers” with enough bucks to pay for professional help. But, that’s not what this is about, which is that it seems to me like the Chappells Weblog has been around at least ten years. So, it was with some surprise that, following up on a moment of curiosity that for some reason struck me a few minutes ago, I found that the first “post” was posted here in March of 2004. Why, that’s only seven years ago! Struck me as a rare exception to how fast the years are whizzing by in virtually all other areas of my life.
Picasa Faces
While recently using Google’s photo program, Picasa, I noticed it was putting together a collection of faces. Apparently, it runs a background process looking for faces in all the image files it can find on the computer. You can look at these faces and put names on them. Here’s the neat part: put a name to a face and it’ll aggregate a bunch of faces it thinks are the same person which you can then confirm, and it uses that to aggregate even more faces it thinks are the same person. In a couple minutes, I had 300+ Izzy faces, 100 or so Becky faces, etc. It was even able to identify Stephen’s face with and without his beard! Click a face and it’ll display the photo it’s from. Any faces it presents that you don’t want to keep track of, you can tell it to disregard; such as cartoon faces, faces of presidents, etc. It has located a bunch of pictures I didn’t even know I had, since it doesn’t limit itself to just your regular image directories. Anyway, I thought this was pretty cool and worth mentioning in case people didn’t know about this feature.
Snow, Snow, Rain, Whatever
February 28, 2011
General, Wisdom
Comments Off on Snow, Snow, Rain, Whatever
John
Since the last post, we had a couple more snows, some sleet and freezing rain, and yesterday rain with thunder ‘n’ lightning. There was actual sunshine today, but still cold and, combined with the wind, the sunshine was kind of misleading.
I remember the weather last Thursday because that’s the day I had an appointment with the retina specialist over in Kansas City. We were concerned enough about getting stuck in K.C. due to frozen roads that we took overnight bags along with us. It was just starting to turn to sleet when we left the doctor’s office around 3:00. We got back to Lawrence on merely wet roads. However, the K.C. folks who hit the roads and highways for rush hour weren’t so lucky. They went sliding into each other and off the roads right and left.
I was at the retina doc because I had this “after image” as if somebody had flashed a penlight in front of my face, except nobody had. What the doc found was a retinal hemorrhage. This was the same eye that had the torn retina three years ago. The doc did a retinal angiogram (who knew of such a thing?) to see if the hemorrhage was still hemorrhaging; it wasn’t. He said it should clear up and sent us on our way, into the weather. It still hasn’t gone away (the retinal hemorrhage – the weather went away as noted above). I understood it wouldn’t be an overnight thing. After all, it had been a couple of weeks since I first noticed it. Y’know, it occurs to me if I would’ve seen him the day I first noticed it, it might’ve still been leaking and he might’ve done something drastic like zapping it with a lazer (laser?). Hmm.
I wonder. Over the past few years it seems like there’ve been al lot of things where procrastination worked out fine. It’s like the better course of action is to do nothing and let the problem go away on its own. This seems like a risky proposition. On the other hand, there’s risk in action. I guess you just never know for sure except in hindsight.
A hindsight viewer. Whoever can invent that should get rich, I’d think. I expect some people would say life would be boring if you could always see how something is going to turn out; the thrill and excitement of making choices in the face of the unknown making life worth living. Bullshit to that, is my thought.
And on that note, I think I’ve procrastinated enough at your expense and I should turn my attention to some of the work I’ve been putting off.