Photo: augusti 2003 Archives

Tovah drew her first self portrait today! Isn't it nice?!

Today we went on a picknick with the children's playgroup at Hägnan. It was about 10-15 children in all ages and we had a very good time. We grilled chicken, sausages and ate it together with breadsticks and melon. It was very delightful. It is the kind of place where you can just let the children run around on their own. No strange places where they can fall down, no cars, no high speed bicycles and just tons of fun things to do. In the beginning I was a bid of a protective dad and followed Tovah around but I got over that after lunch but that unfortunately proved not to be to good as Tovah for the first time in her life got lost. She was on her own about one house away but it was still very scary for her.

They also had straw barn where the children (and adults :-) could jump into the dried straw. Tovah was a bit scared, but she jumped nicely when she held my hand. Later there was an unfortunate accident :-( Tovah and another girl were supposed to jump together. They held hands and Tovah started counting to three and the other girl jumped immediately, pulling Tovah with here. Tovah landed on top of the other girl. It must have hurt quite a bit as they both cried for some time and I couldn't get Tovah to jump again.

When we got home I was really tired, and found myself just sitting in front of the computer for a while. Some the and chickpeas helped my mood back to happiness. Played with my photos for the rest of the day and learned tons of new things about Photoshop and the most misnamed filter, Unsharp mask which is actually a tool for making the image look sharper.

During the evening I also made IP-telephony experiment. I used Marratech Pro as a SIP client towards DigiSip and called my mother using it as a phone replacement. After a while Tovah wanted to speak with her as well so I called the Pingtel phone as well and included that into the conversation using Pro as a mixer and gateway. It worked very well and the only real problem was sound levels as my speech came out much louder in the Pingtel than my mother.

It is my mother's birthday today! Happy Birthday, mom!!

Today was also Dick's funeral. Tina was there. I couldn't go as I was giving an exam today and honestly I didn't feel like going.

Now I am just waiting for Tovah to fall asleep so I can get into bed with my lovely wife.

I have now been playing with scanning my photos for a while and I have come to some conclusions. For the record, the scanner is a Canon Canoscan 9900F and I have connected it using USB2.0. My target is publishing them online but also saving them is original PSD (I use Photoshop) for later editing. The source is all negative film.

As you can imagine, the settings you use when scanning a photo affects the result and I have currently found that the following produces the best result.

* Resolution 1600: This produces files of about 2288x1464 pixels and each raw file is 9.56MB in PSD format which in turn can be compressed non-lossy to 7.2MB using Winzip with maximum compression. The resulting JPEG as created with Adobe ImageReady using JPEG quality 90 is 1.35MB. For comparison the PSD file becomes 34MB if the resolution is increased to 3200.

* Remove Dust and Scratches (FARE) Hard: FARE is a technique that uses infrared light to detect dust and scratches on the source and does a VERY good job in removing them. This features as I understand it is unique for Canon scanners. Most of my old negatives have been stored badly and are a bit damaged.

* Fading correction Normal: This makes the colors a bit more saturated.

* Grain correction: Normal This was actually the hardest one to decide on. If I set it on soft you can see the grains on e.g. white walls but if I set it to hard then the image gets to blurry. I decided to use normal.

* Quality High Quality: This just means that it scans in higher quality than normal.

* Not using Unsharp Mask: The unsharp mask is very important but Photoshop makes a much better job than the scanner software. More about this later.

Using these settings scanning on negative takes 5 minutes 20 seconds.

The scanner can scan 24 negatives at one time but that requires that the negatives are cut in sheets of 6 which most Swedish negatives aren't (they are cut in sheets of 4).

That was the scanning part and I will post more details about handling tomorrow.

Update: changed the text about Fading correction.

Scan 002 is now finished. It contains among other things photos from when we got Timbo.

My first photo scan is now online, 35 photos from 1994. It is mostly of my dog Timbo but you can also see me, Johanna, Johan 'K' Karlsson and Jalle.

We had a nice afternoon with Jalle and Ida. We ate 8.5 rolls of sushi and then we played EBay and Chee'z Dork. EBay was really fun but Chee'z Dork was so so. I am disappointed in you, Steve Jackson!

Tovah found a new game, throwing sand around and of course most of it ended up in her hair. Check out the cloud and pebbles.

We threw them out around 19.30, Tovah took a bath (because of all the sand) and she ended up washing her hair twice in a day. She hates washing her hair.

After she fell asleep J and I dove into our analog photo collection and starting matching up missing negatives and sorting the rest a bit. I have started putting captions on the first set.

Good night everybody!

Welcome oh wonderful world.

It is now Sunday afternoon I have have managed to not work this weekend. That is something new for me and something I will try to maintain. We woke up around 08.30 and I started the day by reading "Pablo, the penguin that always froze" with Tovah. Continued the day with some photo handling. The first roll is now scanned and I will caption it later. The second roll is currently being scanned. Some great photos from 1993.

I feel good for two reasons,
1) Johanna said yesterday that she I going to give notice on her other apartment.
2) I today realized that I have found the hobby I have been missing for so long. Handling my photos. I enjoy this very much and I feel it being an investment for the future. It will be great to be able to view the old photos when I am getting old as well as Tovah will enjoy it when she gets older.

Jalle and Ida are back in town. They came during the night and I of course immediately invited them for dinner today. They will arrive in 50 minutes and they will get sushi - the Parnes way. I enjoy their company very much and I have to admit that I have missed them both during the last weeks. Actually I haven't met Ida since midsummer.

By the way. I have to explain the subject. Tovah cannot pronounce "s" inside words and this becomes rather funny when she is trying to say "fuskar" (Swedish for cheating) and it becomes "fuckar" which loosely means fucks :-) She says "Ja, det låter spännande!" as response to almost everything we are going to do (Swedish for Yes, that sounds exciting).

Catch you all later and don't do anything I wouldn't do.

More captions on old photos again. Misc December 2002 are done.

It is a tad bit quicker to handle digital photos that to scan old analog ones.

Some more captions done, Misc January 2003.

Today we went to the children health care centre for measurement and three year checkup. Tovah was healthy as a whatever and passed all the tests with honors. She got a tattoo for her efforts.

We continued down town where I bought a Lava Lamp. Finally, I have wanted one for the last 20 years. We bought at Cervera that is going out of business so it was on half price. Lunch on Waldorf. The rest of the day I spent working and during the evening we went on can hunt and passed by work. We met Ghyslain. It must have been at least 1 year since I saw him last. Also got the scanner today and I have just had time to install it during the evening and test scan one item, a cd.

Oh, I almost forgot, down town we went by Tradition and they had a sale on games. We bought Chez Dork and the EBay card game. We haven't played any of the but they look "interesting".

I just finished putting captions on my Hurghada photos. Puuh. Hard work for a soft man.

Anyhow, during the afternoon the family went to the recycle market but we didn't find anything worth anything and it was a bit cold and windy so we cycled directly home again. I must admit that I for some strange reason felt really agitated around lunch. I get like that from time to time. :-(

Talking about lunch, today's lunch was a vegetarian potato and cauliflower soup/stew with bread sticks. My knee still hasn't healed. The evening we spent watching both episodes of "Virus i paradiset" and now it is time to go to bed.

Tomorrow, the chimney sweeper is coming. Between 07.30 and 09.30.

During the afternoon we took a bike ride to Gültzaudden and looked at the art in the wood. Though I and Tovah ended up looking more for cans, which we found 10.50 SEK worth. After a nice walk we took a quick drinking pause and continued to Norrbottens Museum to look at the Hideaki Sasaki installation. Here is a movie of it in action. We only got 15 minutes at the museum after which we played and looked at the art in the museum garden.

After a while in the museum garden we headed toward Kvantum in the rain and shopped. We were only going to buy some milk but as always ended up with tons of stuff. At home I made bread sticks and they were much better this time than the last.

I also added a few more scripts to my gallery. One for getting a random photo from the gallery. It can be seen on top of this page. Just reload to see another. Also added Top 10 viewed and Recently changed. The two latter will be added and integrated later.

I watched "Heist" and entered some captions for my Hurghada photos (not public yet).

This summer I attended one of the best parties ever, it was the midsummer party in Böle Bom. We were 12 persons in total and the party lasted 18 hours. Between 12 and 6 in the morning. Here are some photos taken by other people using Jalle's camera.

We didn't end up doing much at all yesterday. We took a walk in the wood close to the house and the local playground where Tovah spun until she got dizzy. I also took a couple of movies of Tovah running and singing.

Today I actually decided to work a bit and I put up a new bug tracker for Marratech to replace the old Gnats system. We had initially decided on Bugzilla, but I never really got it working as I wanted. The new system selected is PHPBugTracker and it seems like it is just perfect for our needs.

My knee is feeling better, but I will continue resting today to make sure it gets healed up. It still hurts a bit when I stand up more than a few minutes.

The sun has come back and it is 24.7 degrees right now. Take a look at this temp curve. Now I am going to help Tovah fill up her out doors tub.

Now I have mixed mine and Jalle's photos from our trip to Riksgränsen and put captions on all 483 of them. There are now 1468 photos in 8 albums.

Organizing ones photos is fun but there are so many :-) A nice thing with having some meta data attached to them is that you can make nice searches. Here is some: Tovah, Spirit, Burley, Peter, Teknikens Hus, Pooh, and Tiger.

SInce my last post I have added Misc March to June and 122 photos and a movie from Magnus Berglund's 30 year party.

So what have I done besides playing with my photos. Yesterday we had a really relaxing day. I was resting my knee so we stayed home. This morning I woke up at 8 which was before Tovah. I am catching up with my sleep needs. The girls woke up around 9 and we spent the next hour by me reading out loud from my current book, "Ont Blod". Not the most perfect Tovah book but she enjoyed it for at least 30 minutes. Ended up in front of the computer and it might be time for breakfast?!

Unfortunately, it looks the autumn is approaching. It is getting colder. The SUN is out but it is only 16 degrees :-( It is also getting dark at night. Luleå where I live has had the most sun hours of all cities in Sweden though. We have had a great summer.

Haven't decided what we are going to do today.

Added misc July images and another 100 images to the misc August album.

Yet more photos with captions. This time from the F21 open house. Planes, planes and even more planes. This is my favorite. Tovah is sleeping with ear protectors while jet fighters are screaming close by.

Just finished putting captions on Johanna's pictures from her two trips to Jönköping, Växjö, Värnamo, Stockholm and Oslo. 101 images in total.

I just finished putting captions on all my Orlando, USA photos. All 363 of them. "Duktig Gubbe".

I have been experimenting with some new software for publishing my photos and have created this gallery. Tell me what you think.

Update: The system allows for comments from viewers, scaling, searching, slideshows and many other features.

Here are misc images from March to May 2003. 109 images in total. Have fun looking through them.

I have had a nice day together with J, T and Jennifer. We have eaten good food and had a water war in the garden. Tovah especially liked the latter and she was running around as mad chasing us. I must admit that I helped her a bit and the scary pants (:-) Jennifer hid behind my camera so I would throw water on her. Just wait until next time Jennifer :-)

Lunch was a chili made from smoked falu-sausage, bacon, kidney beans and chick peas together with rice and for dessert we had American cheese cake.

After lunch J, T and Jennifer went for a bike ride, during which I got time to sort some digital photos. This had not been done since march 2003. Bad boy Peter. It is actually nice to wait a bit as memories have been lost and you get nice reminders from looking at all the photos. As I wrote earlier today, our trip to Orlando was really nice.

Jennifer left around 18.20 together with Rolf (after a short visit) for a dinner at Rickard's place. Hey, Rikard you still owe me a dinner :-)

For dinner I had Tom Yam soup, Johanna had sandwiches and Tovah had gruel. After dinner we quickly cleaned up the kitchen. It is nice to not have anything to clean up when you go to bed later. A nice clean kitchen in the morning is something I recommend to everybody.

Right now me and Johanna are sitting in the kitchen, J is sorting here stones and beads (to make necklaces from) and I have just finished sorting photos taken from March to Maj 2003. T is half asleep in the sofa watching Winnie the Pooh. It is nice to have the family home again. I have been very lucky, very lucky indeed!!!

And here are my photos from Orlando May 2003. 365 photos in total, primarily from Disney World.

Here are some misc photos from July 2003 (and the first days of August).

The rest of the photo album...