January 2017

Today was dreary until late this afternoon when it briefly switched to high cloud along with the incessant nor'easterly. Not the most pleasant to run into on the second half of my run, but at least the high cloud made it warmer.

Enough of the dreary and onto these two. Not long before Mum died in 2013, I sat with her with my laptop and she chose the photos for the 2014 calendar I gave her and Dad for Christmas. It arrived before she passed away and she got to see what she'd chosen printed.

Since then I've continued making a calendar each year for Dad and I have one the same. Last year I included some photos of Mum and him in their courting days and they were a hit.

This year I've repeated some because I know they brought him such joy. I've included some early family photos too, scanned from 35mm slides. I also include photos I've taken over the past year too.

Each day when I look at my calendar I know Dad is looking at the same. For January we have Mum on her 21st birthday, and the 2 of them when they were engaged.

Dad was away at sea as a ships engineer based in Hong Kong and wasn't home in Auckland, New Zealand often. The photo is taken on one of the wharves in Auckland.

Mum sent Dad a print of her on her 21st. Is't she beautiful. Dad said the young Chinese boy who serviced their cabins on the ship had limited English. He saw the photo of Mum and said "sweet like jam". A very apt description.

I've had a long and intensive day with not a lot of breaks. I've been pondering a problem my research suggested wasn't easily solved. I decided to do some experiments and approach the problem slightly differently. Much to my surprise my first experiment worked.

I spend the rest of the day implementing the change across a lot of files, re-publishing them, uploading, and testing. Most behaved as hoped but occasionally one would misbehave and I'd have to puzzle away and it behaved as it should.

Computers I love 'em and hate 'em ;-)

Any hoo, I really wanted to finish that all so I can concentrate on a new piece of work that's popped up. It needs sorting over the next week or so and tomorrow I'll scope it.

And yes, I'm tired.