Month: October 2024

Judging by the amount of bags of chips left over we had 80 kids (unless some kids took a few extra chip bags).  Looks like our street is not the hot spot anymore.  Over on Cassandra/Onyx they had 120 kids (according to Steve).

This Hallowe’en was one I had never witnessed before.  20 degrees and windy.  What a perfect night.  The kids could wear their actual costumes without coats to keep them warm.

I stayed behind and watched some Hilarious House of Frightenstein while Sierra, Emelie and Ezra went one way down the street.  An hour later Ezra was tired so I went with Emelie and Sierra for the rest of the street and beyond.

Lots of candy to be had and fun to see everyone in the village out and about!

I tend to scan a bunch of photos and then forget about it for months and struggle to remember what workflow when I return to work on them again!  So here’s my workflow.

1.  Plug in Kodak Slide N Scan
2. Select film type
3. Select Color negative
4. Select 135 film (I guess this is referred to 35 mm?)
5. Insert negative into scanner and try and find the date of a photo
6. If you find a date, great!  Click the home button.
7. Select Set Date & Time
8. Change month.  You can do this by using the sun/left arrow or the rgb/right arrow button to move the number up and down.
9. To move over to the day, press the play button.
10. If you need to move to the year, press the play button again.
11. When done, click the ok/camera button.
12. Go back to film type, color negative, 135 film.
13. Now start scanning!  When you line up a photo in the screen and it looks good, click the ok/camera button.  This will save a copy to the SD card you have in the machine.  Note: There are bunch of settings that you need to set before first use.  I can’t remember the things I changed but I do see that when scanning a photo I’ve selected 22M.
14. Continue onto the next photo.  Make sure it’s the same date.  Continue scanning photos until you get to a photo that has a new date.
15. Press home button and change the date again.  Then go back to scan the photo.  This is important to imprint the date into the metatag data which will be used to upload to Google Photos.
16. Let’s say you’re done with a batch of photos and you want to color correct them.
17. Press home button.
18. Select Usb upload and click the ok/camera button.
19. This will now allow you to access the photos saved on the SD directly from the machine that is plugged into your computer.  TECHNICALLY, you don’t need to use the computer if all you are doing is saving photos to the SD card.  But in my case, I want to transfer them.
20. I usually transfer them in batches.  Let’s say I have a bunch from a specific date.  Copy them over to your folder that you want to save them to.
21. Then you’re going to want to color correct them in the software gimp.
22. Open gimp and drag the photos in.
23. With a photo selected, go to Colors and then Auto and then White Balance.  Chances are, you will see a big difference!
24. Go to File and then Overwrite xxxxx.jpg.  The xxxxx will be the filename of the jpg that you are modifying.
25. An export window pops up.  I just used the defaults which had 95 at the top.
26. When the export is complete you can click the x on the photo and move to the next one.
27. It will ask you if you want to save changes.  Just click discard changes.
28. When you’re done with your batch, it’s time to back them up to Google Photos.
29. Open Google Photos and drag whatever photos you want to upload.
30. While you’re at it, make an album and share with friends!  Also, make sure it uploaded correctly by the date.

Short version: I managed to snag two general admission tickets to see Coldplay in Toronto next summer. Life is good.

Long version: I managed to get an email saying I was chosen to take part in the Ticketmaster presale. Total score!

But I soon realized that everyone in the world probably got the same email if they signed up for the presale.

How do I know? Let me spin you a yarn…

At 8:30 i entered the ‘waiting room’. You just wait there.

At 9:00am everyone in the waiting room goes into the queue. When a screen popped up it said there were 57,316 users ahead of me in the queue.

To put this into perspective, the new Rogers Stadium they are going to build in Toronto should hold around 50,000 people!

The outlook was pretty bleak 1.5 hours later as I sat there staring at the fact that I was now around 46,923 users ahead of me. I was reading on a Reddit thread that general admission had already sold out of its presale allotment (that would need to be confirmed…not sure if they allow presales to sell out an entire stadium or not) and the rest of the tickets were VIP $500+ tickets.

But all hope was not lost! I saw a pop up informing me two dates had been added to the Toronto tour and I could hop over and join that queue! I left my original queue at 24,000 and hopped to another one which was putting me at 21,000 users ahead of me. Again, this is completely random placement from the waiting room. I ended up losing my concert bud Claude by moving to the July 12th queue because it turned out he couldn’t make it that day and he only got back to me with that fact when I was already in the queue. I wasn’t taking any chances.

An hour later, the queue crept down and I managed to get into buy tickets! Hope was lost for a few minutes when I couldn’t find anything under $500 but I just kept refreshing and sure enough, two tickets popped up and I nabbed them for my bud Etienne and I.

I felt like I won the lottery. Is that the feeling they are going for these days?

The show is smack dab in the middle of Bluesfest.  I’m not entirely sure if Coldplay would come to Bluesfest itself…it’s a possibility considering their Toronto tour brings them to town on a Monday, Tuesday, Saturday and Sunday so who knows if Ottawa will pull off a miracle and bring this great band in the middle of the week.  

Either way, I have some options open if that happens now that I have some tickets in hand!