Perl saved my vacation
blog.moertel.com
blog.moertel.com
After my heart skipping a beat realizing I didn't have any decently recent backups, I unmounted the partition, whipped out perl and scanned the device for instances of "<?" and grabbing the following 5000 bytes, dumping the results to a collection of incrementally named files.
I had to manually go through the files, clean them up, and remember what their filename was based on the code, but that wasn't as bad as it sounds. The hardest part was the conflicting versions, since there were lots and lots of remnants from old replaced files there. But about 8 hours later, I had everything recovered.
Backups went on a cronjob after that.
Plus, that way I can help share a part of my memory with others, at their leisure, instead of telling people about details of my trip a dozen times.
In the digital era, it's easy to just wave the camera around and snap photos en masse without really paying attention. OK, I exaggerate, you need to at least hold the camera level and pay a little attention to lighting, but it's way less stressful than using analog film. No stopping for posing, which is the thing that really slows down.
I will have a startup that addresses this. In fact, in planning my current trip I lamented that I didn't have it...
I kid :)
And knowing Tom, he probably walked around for 12 hours :-)
Why would I take 500 photos? Because I'm fascinated by plants and gardening. For my vacation, I spent a few days visiting some of the world's premier gardens, both to enjoy myself and to learn as much as I could. As you might expect, gardens like that display hundreds of new (to me) plant varieties and treatments and, for each I wanted to study, I took several photographs to capture its interesting characteristics.
While it might sound strange, having my camera helped me see better. It reminded me to slow down and examine the different parts of each plant, to look carefully for the traits that separated one plant from its peers, and to consider how I could show my friends each plant in a way that would let them see what I thought was interesting about it.
I have found that sometimes the best way to see is to get behind a camera.
Cheers. --Tom
P.S. One additional benefit of taking a camera to a horticultural garden is that you can photograph plant tags to record botanical information about the cultivars on display. With a good zoom lens, you can even capture the tags on plants that are in restricted or otherwise unreachable areas. Very useful.