The first laundry load is due at 8:50am, and yes it is that time again. Today I plan to see the movie ‘Watermarks’ and then also have a quick look at the Khublai Mongolian restaurant on 10th Ave here.
The latter as preparation for our ethnic dinner that Michelle and I celebrate, because we will eat anything and everything - omnivores they say. No restrictions as long as it is food, healthy kind, well prepared and tasty, all in a proper ethnic setting. I guess we do have conditions, but not restricting ones. This time I’m on deck for the preps and the lame horse, that closes the ranks, a Dutch saying - the bill that is.
Yesterday was filled with the morning Daily Entry, the Last Post ceremony, lunch, a snooze, a walk with milk in the nice weather and mandala colouring. Supper preps followed it - my self made pea soup - and then some web work. Besides posting my daily, I off loaded pictures from my camera and devised a trial process for processing my images.
The latter means a way to get my images into my daily entries to liven them up. I did that last year when reworking my 2009 daily entries, but never implemented it systematically. I now have a way around the Adobe Photo Elements, which has become too complicated to use every time I get an other version.
My method now is for now to get the media using Photo Elements - admittedly - and let it put them in date folders. Next I open each date folder and use MS Review to rotate and delete selected images, as well as tag them. My newly devised procedure is to create an album collection for a theme, such as Fall2013, and one for the monthly collection for shots relating to my Daily Entries for that month.
The second stage in this process is to scale the images down to display (ca 100kb) and thumbnail (ca 8kb) size; some times I make tinies of only 2kb. These monthly scaled image collection folders, display and thumbnail respectively, are placed inside the daily entry folder for the year in question, 2013 for now.
There, these images can be accessed by the pre-designed daily entry template format. The last step is to then insert the image file names, one for the diary and one for the writings section.
{Laundry intermezzo, load two is due at 9:45am.}
The problem with this is that I cannot take a picture relating to my daily writing ahead of the time that I make the entry! But, I could device some method making use of the similarity of the image file name numbers, since these change by only a few digits. I could insert dummy but related image files - say relating nature scenes - until a more suitable image becomes available.
However, there is still the cumbersome and time consuming process of scaling the original images files down to web size. To do this on a daily basis would be too time consuming and remains a procedure that will need to be simplified.
I am writing about this in order to get a clearer understanding of the procedure and its processes that I aim to implement. Providing images with the text of my daily entries will certainly make them more attractive, but they must be relevant and current.
My model here are the daily news sites, such as RT, BBC and Al Jazeera, which always have an image with the story title. The images have the emotion that the written text lines do not. So, I’ll keep working on it and may find some more efficient procedure with time. Nothing ventured, nothing gained; today I have at least a workable start that is worth a whirl.
The mandala’s autumn season - the last season - is now coloured in. The transitional zones to the winter on one side and the summer on the other still have to be completed. Yesterday I timed this colouring in of the Fall section. It took about three hours to do, which includes time for two short (5 min) breaks. And of this I do have a picture - scaled and all - ready to be put in place with this entry!
9:31am~
Load three due at 10:40am and 10:19am with coffee waiting.
