I used to run a fairly active side business that centered on web design and web development services. By the time we had our son, I began to lose interest in running my own business — I was never brave enough to quit my full-time job for it, and I wasn’t going to make the money I was making in my corporate positions.
I still have a couple clients that I host and for which I manage their web sites.
In July, the web master at my local Triumph club passed away unexpectedly. He and I had been talking for a few months about redesigning the web site, and I had already started setting up a test site for us to work on the next version of our club’s page. Since I already had administrator credentials, I was able to get into the site and explore around to determine what Gary had done with the site. It’s quite a bit harder trying to discover a site’s architecture rather than designing it yourself.
Within a couple of weeks, I had the site stabilized and was able to update the hosting account and domain registrar with new information. Now I’ll go back to working on the new site and hope to have that ready for a preview late this year. With any luck, I’ll have it online and live by New Years or shortly thereafter.
Our current site, like almost every other web page for little British car clubs, is very dated looking. As I was exploring other clubs’ web site to assess what kind of features/information they had, I was entertained by how many of them looked like they were straight out of the late 80s — some even had Under Construction gifs on them!
Since Dad passed in July, I’ve been immersed in a massive project to scan family photos from a variety of sources: mine, my mom’s, my dad’s, stacks of photos and albums from his brother and parents, childhood photos from when my brother and sisters were growing up…
My office floor was covered with boxes of photos, tin cans from the 60s that my grandmother had stashed photos in to keep them safe, even loose piles of photos that I’d found here at our house.
So far, I’ve scanned around 3,300 photos (comprising 1.78GB of data) and I’m mostly done now. I’ve also started a new Facebook group to launch a project to track down families of my paternal grandmother’s siblings in hopes of giving them these priceless photos of their ancestors that were in my grandmother’s albums.
Basically, I separated the photos into batches based on source. For example, batch 1 is dad’s photos albums, batch 2 is my grandmother’s photo albums, batch 3 is her loose photos. I ended up with 11 batches of photos, all of which are full-sized scans up to 8.5×11″ and containing anywhere from 1 to 8 images. The next phase is to split the images out and optimized them digitally, though that’s a much longer-term project and a significant time investment.
A number of folks have asked me what I used to scan them. There’s a simple answer here, but for most people, a little more detail will be helpful. I had a lot of older, fragile photos, like the 3×3″ photos from the 40s and 50s. These need to be handled carefully, so a flatbed scanner is preferable, and a higher resolution is necessary since blowing them up will result in quality loss if they are scanned at a lower resolution.
The Canon CanoScan LiDO 400 flatbed scanner is perfect for this task and priced very reasonably at $90-120, though finding it in stock takes some patience. It scans at resolutions up to 4800 dpi, so I’m able to take one of my grandmother’s small photos from 80 years ago, or a wallet-sized portrait of my dad in his police uniform, and blow them up to an 8×10″ print with no real loss in quality. It scans a page in 8 seconds, but this assume 300 dpi, with higher resolutions taking longer to scan. This will make more sense in a moment when we compare it with another option below.
If you have newer photos and no plans to print them in a much larger form (i.e., you have 4×6″ prints and aren’t likely to want to print 8×10’s of them) then scanning at 300 dpi is perfectly sufficient. You can find more information about scanning resolutions here. And since you aren’t scanning older, fragile photos, you should go for speed.
The Plustek ePhoto Z300 photo scanner is probably your best bet, and would do in an afternoon what I spent close to a week doing with a flat bed. This scanner is slightly more expensive at around $200, and it’s limited to 300 dpi, but it scans a 4×6″ print in only 2 seconds and has a bulk feeder. It’s definitely the way to go if you’re just trying to make digital backups of photos, which everyone that has prints should do.
Hope this is helpful and have fun!
Update
In the end, I scanned about 8,766 photos from my Dad’s collection, and another 3,000 from my sisters’ collections. I had about 1,000 photos that I scanned. That’s nearly 13,000 photos.
On June 22, my dad went into the hospital to have his gallbladder removed. While there, they were going to fix a hiatal hernia. He was supposed to be there a day or two. In the early morning hours on July 12, still in the hospital, he passed away.
My dad was in very good health. He was active, worked out 3-4 times per week, and took good care of himself. I guess I kind of took for granted that at 71 years of age, he wasn’t going to be around forever. I certainly didn’t expect what seemed like little more than a day surgery to be the trigger.
My father and I mostly had a good relationship through my life. He was the primary factor for my decision to pursue a career in law enforcement when I was a young adult. And as I grew older and changed careers, married, started a family, he was my closest confidant.
I spent a week in Florida helping my step-mother with arrangements and taking care of whatever tasks I could, before his service (on my birthday, unfortunately) where I gave a sketch of his life. I was a tad nervous, but it went well. I’m posting excerpts of it below.
This month is Juneteenth, and I’ve started volunteering on a project I learned about from the Wake County Parks department, which I follow on social media.
The project is researching slave deeds and other legal documents for the Enslaved Persons Project.
For many Black and African Americans researching their genealogy, the search ends when they hit Colonial times. That’s because in those times, enslaved persons didn’t get birth certificates, marriage licenses, or death certificates — their lives were documented instead in property deeds.
It’s been roughly six months since we said goodbye to our Boston Terrier, Olive.
Our daughter has started including her when she says her “I love yous” on occasion. It’s usually at the dinner table and she’ll announce that she loves Mommy and Daddy, and her brother, and Olive. Then she’ll add that she misses Olive.
We do too, honey. We do too.
We had 3,092 days with her after we rescued/adopted her. And we enjoyed every one of them.
When we brought our son home from the hospital, Olive spent the next few weeks laying on the floor in front of his rocker guarding him, sitting on Jen’s lap to watch over him, and following us around whenever we took him from room to room.
She did the same with our daughter.
Boston terriers are good dogs in general, known for being very loyal. But between the loyalty and what was clearly a desire to help mother our kids, Olive was a really special dog.
https://davidcarr.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022-04-03-olive-brian-fort.jpg7681043David Carrhttps://davidcarr.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/davidcarr-us-logo.pngDavid Carr2022-04-03 11:08:272023-01-08 22:14:073,092 days of Olive
We really need a normal year. Like everyone else, our world was significantly disrupted in spring of 2020. Our kids were out of school. Our jobs were chaotic (wife manages clinical trails, I work in the healthcare industry). We were terrified about what could happen if we had a coronavirus infection in our home. I was high risk after spending much of my adult life as a smoker, and my daughter was having crazy-high fevers every few days. We were worried her fevers might indicate some more serious underlying issue.1
We isolated in our home, dutifully wore our masks, and practiced social distancing. We did everything we were supposed to. The problem is that a lot of people didn’t do those things. Even after a year or so, our kids were still secluded in their home, my son having been in virtual classes for all of his first grade year. Our neighbors had all grown complacent, my son could certainly hear the screaming and shrieking of the kids in adjacent yards playing. Our hearts regularly broke for our children through all of it.
https://davidcarr.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/2022-02-22-06-alanis-featured.jpg6001200David Carrhttps://davidcarr.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/davidcarr-us-logo.pngDavid Carr2022-02-22 17:08:432023-01-08 22:10:35Hoping for A Normal Year
We wandered over to William B. Umstead State Park today to do some hiking and check out the chainsaw log carving. The weather was nice (mostly cloudy, warmer) and in the low 50s, so we packed everyone up and decided to get our butts out of the house. It’s about a half-mile walk from the parking lot to the carved log and the route is a multi-use path that is easy for little ones.
“A fallen red oak tree—approximately 25 feet long and several feet high—has been transformed by artists Jerry Redi and Randy Boni of Smoky Mountain Art. In mid-Nov., the pair spent a week using chainsaws to cut and carve away a series of animals, tree branches and leaves into the downed tree that lays just off the Graylyn multi-use trail—one of six multi-use trails inside the park that make up a total of 13 miles of paths available to hikers, cyclists and horseback riders.” (Source: VisitRaleigh.com)
This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Umstead Park — I ran some trails there back in March 2019, but I had no idea the park is as large as it is. It’s nearly 5600 acres, and part of the East Coast Greenway, a 3,000 mile-long system of trails connecting Maine to Florida, runs through the park.
I’m not sure what Umstead is like in the warmer months, but everything we read about finding the log art suggested not going on weekends, and sure enough, the parking lot was full when we returned to our car, so I’m guessing it’s hard to get in and out of there on warmer days.
There are campsites where we could camp and plenty of trails for hiking and running. We’ll definitely go back there again soon.
https://davidcarr.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/2021-01-02-umstead-log-art.jpg6001200David Carrhttps://davidcarr.us/wp/wp-content/uploads/davidcarr-us-logo.pngDavid Carr2021-01-02 16:03:402023-01-08 22:01:01Umstead Park’s Log Art
Life has been different here lately. Like basically every other family in America, the coronavirus pandemic has forced significant changes to the way we live. I haven’t traveled for work since January. My kids haven’t played with friends since March. They haven’t seen their grandparents in eight months.
Since my son is in virtual classes, he’s in school here at the house all day, and at six years of age, requires a fair amount of hand-holding. Throw my toddler daughter into the mix, and the day is a chaotic rodeo from about 7am until they’re in bed around 8:30pm each evening. Then my wife and I finish the work we didn’t get a chance to complete earlier. It’s exhausting.
This has triggered the reprioritization of everything in our lives too as we juggle the kids all day, work all evening, and essentially just try to catch our breaths and recover on the weekends. Most of my personal goals have gone by the wayside, things I was looking forward to doing this year are on hold indefinitely, and the less urgent things we need to do are a struggle to manage at times. Worse, the federal government’s reluctance to manage the crisis and a mediocre response by the state means there’s no real end in sight.
One of the things that I’ve had to set aside was writing. This is something I intended to do at least twice per month and was actually looking forward to, but it just doesn’t add enough value to prioritize it over other stuff. I’m trying to get back to it now.
My plan is to write at least two articles per month about the happenings in our life (family stuff, running and cycling, holidays) on my personal blog, and at least two articles of professional interest on my professional blog.
This seems doable. At least for now. Wish me luck?
Like many people stuck at home during the coronavirus event, I decided to play around with sourdough. This requires making a sourdough starter, which is a 7- to 8-day process that creates the cultivates the wild yeast in a form that can be used for baking. Since wild yeast are present in all flour, the easiest way to make a starter is simply by combining flour and water and letting it sit for several days.
Note: This is an ongoing post that will be updated intermittently for a week or so, with the post date being the day that it starts.
For Father’s Day, we decided to get out and go for a hike. My son used to love being in the child carrier when we’d go hiking at the Jacksonville Arboretum & Gardens so we decided to give my daughter a go at it. We went to Raven Rock State Park, which s about 45 minutes from us. She loved it and we all had a great time.
