It’s Sunday morning and I have the Spa 24hr race on in the background. Everyone is slowed due to a yellow flag and I wish someone would wave one for me. It’s been a busy week.
Critical Role Live
Corey and I headed to Melbourne on Wednesday to see the Critical Role team live. They are the rock stars of Dungeons & Dragons and I have watched way too many hours of them playing on YouTube but not enough to be current. Mid-way through S2E28 of 141 and I have all of S3 to go. At 4-hours per episode…
We arrived in Melbourne just as the rain did, parked and trekked up Russell Street to the Melbourne Museum for the LEGO Star Wars Exhibition. The part I enjoyed most was the display of models I could buy, including my own Building the Millennium Falcon in LEGO and R2-D2. All the human models were to scale yet their faces looked flat and devoid of character. Each of the robots looked much better.
I won’t disparage my fellow Dungeons & Dragons and Star Wars fans but we all know there is a look. It was there in the museum and certainly present amongst the 11,000 fans at Rod Laver Arena.
I grew up playing D&D in the 80’s and the mainstream increase in popularity over the last 10 years has been wonderful to watch, but never would I have dreamt being in a full stadium of people cheering at the role of a “Nat. 20” on a plastic die. Our show was filmed and I’ll update this post with the link.
21st Birthday
Getting home at 2am was not the best way to roll into my daughter’s 21st birthday on Thursday. We did presents in the morning and I went to work, only to be home just after lunch. So tired, my fingers wouldn’t even type.
That night was a family party and on Friday she was out with her friends. She is always joyous in their company.
It’s an achievement for all our lives and I’m proud of her.
Our eldest daughter was with us to celebrate and so I finished with another night drive to Melbourne to drop her off at the airport yesterday.
Photography
Most of what I’m doing outside of work is photography related. I think Photography is a perfectly balanced hobby because there are so many interesting aspects and paths you can take.
I’m in the middle of re-jigging my approach to location metadata. As I’ve been taking more images recently, I found the application of location too slow. Photos of the last few days prove I’m now on a winning approach, yet I need to recalibrate the remainder.
I made changes to the IMatch to Site script so that it’s smarter about deletion. If I try to delete a file that is in use outside of an album then it won’t delete and I get a warning.1 I have also improved the processing speed by employing multi-threading. The script converts an image into 6 different sizes for the site and applies a limited set of metadata to the copies. What originally took 19 minutes for 267 source images now takes 2 minutes. A 10-fold decrease in speed.
I also decided I wanted to have full-page image previews on The Quantum Garden Website site when a thumbnail is clicked. It took a lot of work and help from Microsoft Copilot but it’s done and with many other small improvements along the way.
Reading
Still on Wind and Truth. I have about 20 hours to go now. On the Kobo I’m reading Winter’s Heart.
Footnotes
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See Automatic deletion using IMatch to Site for my initial thoughts on this approach. ↩