Today, on this date ten years ago, I said farewell to Hiltje with pain in my heart and I know in hers as well. We said a quick goodbye since we both knew the unavoidability of that event. She was off to fly to Toronto and then London to visit her terminally ill sister and my now late and former sister in law.

I remained in Holland to close down my affairs in Zeist and would leave for Canada on the 16th of October, while Hiltje returned to Holland a few days later. Star crossed as they sometimes say, but not quite, because we had known each other since mid November 1999. We were good company to each other with much affection between us, but with little social interaction. Our other ties and connections were too much bound into Canada in my case and the Netherlands in hers.

So, we parted with hearts heavy of sadness, but for me it was following my intuition over being directed by my heart. At the time, that gave me the experience of being torn apart by emotions, memories and what ifs. In the end I found a way forward with difficulty, but with important rewards, though it took to the Spring of 2006 before I’d found secure footings. None too early at seventy!

My first laundry load is churning away and due in about ten minutes. I decided to do two loads this morning, because I have lunch with Herman at Noon. The morning sun is low again at this time of day and year, shining onto the kitchen counter. It’s a good thing that the dishes are out of the way:)!

Tomorrow it is Michelle’s turn for our neighbourly dinner and we will try out an Ethiopian place. We decided to do ‘ethnic foods’ when I had invited her earlier to an Indonesian restaurant. And that got started, because our becoming Elbow River flood evacuees last June. Michelle was in Braeside and I in Woodbine with Shirley, so we are still neighbours Michelle concluded and we met for coffee at Tim Horton’s.
The second load went in and is due at 10:35am.

Just to be different, I’ll recount under this heading how the image scaling programme problem was resolved. This means of course that I did get it working, enabling me to reduce the four (4) MB image files to around 100KB, which is much better for emailing and web posting.

My local Apache server reported that the PHP image scaling programme had run out of memory after processing just one 4MB image. Yet, when it processed my Kodak images from Fairmont last August, no such error message showed up.

I decided that either the programme had a ‘bug’ that I was unaware of until now, or there was something wrong with the files of my new Canon camera. To isolate the cause I decided to load the folder ‘Original images’ with a few files from the two different cameras each. The Kodak file processed ok, whereas the Canon files did not, hence the problem had to be with the image files of the Canon camera.

As I looked at the image files that were combined in the mentioned folder I noted that the Kodak image file size was about one (1) MB, while the Canon’s were four times larger. Well, that fitted with the error message of insufficient memory. What to do?

It was not a matter of physical computer memory, because there is lots of that, certainly for the four images with which I was conducting this trial diagnostic run. The I recalled that a year or so ago the programme had run out of time! In that case I discovered that the PHP programme had a preset time limit in its INIT file.

This recall twinked the notion that there may also be a preset limit for the memory allocation that a PHP programme is allowed to use. And indeed, in the PHP-Init file “Resource” chapter I found instruction settings, with its now the familiar time limit, but also with a memory allocation of 128MB. This I changed to 256, saved the file, shut the computer off with a restart, so it could implement my new setting. Next came the rerun of my little trial file and … success.

The rated Canon memory is sixteen (16) MB, but each digital camera only utilise about a quarter of this when it takes a picture. Yet the resulting four (4) MB had been too much for image processing within the preset standard of 128MB of the PHP compiler. These limits of time and memory prevent a faulty programme from hi-jacking the computer by running indefinitely, when the programme tries to divide by zero for example.

The newly proto type photo album can now be viewed on my website by using the following link:
<break at 10:35am, laundry stuff, changing, coffee and continuing at 11:06am>
The link is:

This coffee is ready and I am finished with my writing, so I’ll proceed with the editing, titling and description.
<11:08am~