Monday January 13th 2020

Once again I don’t have the magic decoder ring for the local TV weather forecasts. I sure thought they said today was going to be cooler and windier than Sunday, but today was a little better overall. The temperature peaked a couple of degrees warmer than Sunday. I’m now interpreting the TV weather forecast as improving until Wednesday night, then a complete turn with the potential of rain in the valley and snow in the mountains. I think rain is so infrequent that they over sell it out here.

Other than a few short walks, I didn’t really get to enjoy the weather. The big event for the day was grocery shopping. I needed to restock the refrigerator. Before and after the grocery run I was busy with computer tasks.

I’ve been writing a daily blog for almost four years. Early on I learned that a picture is worth a lot of words and they are fun to take. Over the years I’ve taken around 33,500 pictures. That is about 177GB of data. They’ve been regularly backed up with all the data on my Computer. Some of the images have been uploaded to the cloud, but poor bandwidth makes it difficult to upload all of them. Today’s task was sorting, culling and archiving pictures.

On a nightly basis I delete the out of focus pictures and the clear duplicates. The pictures I choose to include in the blog get some additional processing. I reduce the resolution to make them easier to load and I add a “Rob’s Rambling Road Trip” watermark. Sometimes I will also crop an image to eliminate noise and make the subject bigger. Most of the pictures of flower blossoms are for breaking up long blog posts. It’s very unlikely that I’ll ever want to view and use those pictures again. Once I know they are archived, I will be deleting them from my computer hard drive. Lately, I’ve been taking sunset pictures for a similar purpose, but many of those pictures are gorgeous. I won’t be deleting those from the active hard drive until I’m running out of space.

Each years pictures are getting stored on two different memory sticks. One will be stored in the RV and the other in my car. That’s about as far “off site” as I can easily accomplish. I take a similar approach with other backups, but the encrypted cloud is my storage location for the few files that loosing would be more catastrophic.

I’ve only started to make a dent going through all the pictures. I’ll be doing it off and on for the next few days. After that I plan to investigate changing the format of my blog pages.