Perry's Blog

Jenolan Caves and Return

Perry — Tue, 23 Apr 2013 12:15:00 +0000

It's been some time since we last did the Six Foot Track to Jenolan Caves, so we thought we'd give it another trundle... though this time we'll turn around when we get there and walk back again (after a hot bath and some fish and chips ).

The last couple of weeks we've been attempting to get our legs going again (with quite a bit of leg pain), so it'll be interesting to see how we pull up out of this one

Our planned itinerary:

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Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Mt. Solitary Loop Itinerary

Perry — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 11:18:00 +0000

Well, it seems an eternity since we walked off the Bibbulmun Track (but we have been busy with other things: like two sons' weddings and wonderful experimentations into the world of photomosaics creating an animation for one and a community art performance for the other wedding) and we desperately wanted to get out into the bush again, but didn't have the time to go too far: so we decided to do the Six Foot Track to Jenolan Caves and back again (we did the one way version back in 2011.

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Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Nathanael and Monica's Wedding Piece

Perry — Sun, 03 Mar 2013 13:37:00 +0000

OK... if you're following these posts you'd think there's a bit of a recurrent theme happening It's been just over a month since Keren & Danni's piece was publicly released: kdm, a LiveMosaic and of course their Wedding Mosaic, and I've just uploaded Nat & Moni's Wedding Pages!

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Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Rescue on the Valley of the Waters

Perry — Tue, 26 Feb 2013 06:29:00 +0000

When we were having breakfast I suggested to Don that he could probably do with an extra piece of toast because it was going to be a big day: we were walking the National Pass from the Conservation Hut through to Wentworth Falls, then we were going out to dinner and off to see Les Miserables later in the evening. We'd just had a busy time with Nathanael and Monica's wedding, so we were due for a relaxed stroll, surely? Don was keen to check out the waterfalls that would be flowing strongly.

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Original post blogged on b2evolution.

SpiderOak really does keep everything!

Perry — Sat, 09 Feb 2013 09:45:00 +0000

Some time ago (well: 2.5 years ago, checking the date ) I implemented my backup strategy, and it's saved my bacon a number of times. Nothing much has changed over the years, except for replacing BvckUp with FreeFileSync and Paragon with Macrium Reflect FreeEdition.

SpiderOak is the software that backs up all my documents. What is especially reassuring is that as well as the most current versions being safe on SpiderOak, all the previous versions and even deleted files are safe there as well (just in case I didn't mean to delete it last month )!

Having just finished a couple of graphics projects (Keren & Danni's Wedding Piece and Nathanael & Monica's Wedding Piece) I thought it was time to clean up the file system and free up some resources. These graphics projects produced a lot of temporary files, and files kept for safe keeping and graphic components that were used in the main projects. Once the project was complete most of the components could be deleted and definitely all the temporary files. It's nice to keep a good, clean file system after all.

But of course all those files were still on SpiderOak! I was a little shocked to see that my data usage had grown to 94.933 Gb! You can forget about SpiderOak sitting in the system tray uploading all your file changes: when I checked what was there I even discovered the contents of a previous computer! That will have to wait for another day...

The housekeeping chores are really easy:

Delete unwanted files on the file system
Delete the unwanted deleted files in SpiderOak
Delete any historical versions not required

I'm a little too paranoid at the moment to delete the historical versions (or maybe the projects are still too new?), so I didn't do that step; but after housekeeping my usage was down to 68.256 Gb: a total of 26Gb cleaned up!

I should also note that I could also be purging my historical files (which is a rules based process), but that's SpiderOak wide so I'd need to think carefully

Oh, and one other thing that SpiderOak is proving extremely useful for: uploading the artwork for the printer. There's about 1.5 Gb of files that has to get to the printer: with SpiderOak I can simply create what they call a Share Room from the files that I have already backed up and send the printer the url to the Share Room! That way I don't need to upload them twice, or send them some other way... saves on bandwidth and I can even edit them and the printer will get the latest version! Too easy

If you want to give SpiderOak a go you can use this link and we'll both get 1Gb extra!

Original post blogged on b2evolution.

Keren & Danni's Wedding Piece

Perry — Mon, 28 Jan 2013 08:05:00 +0000

Keren & Danni's wedding was one of the most sublime weddings I've been to! ...but some months previous (after their engagement), I had an idea for a piece at their reception: The initial inspiration for the piece was in two parts:

To create an image of Keren & Danni that was made up of images of Keren and Danni's friends and family.
To create an animation of mosaics that progressed from a single image (technically not a mosaic, I guess?) to the final image, adding small numbers of photo tiles each animation slide.

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Original post blogged on b2evolution.

The Bibbulmun Track 2011 :: Mosaics

Perry — Tue, 09 Oct 2012 10:55:00 +0000

I guess it was inevitable that after 9,106 photos on the track that I would come to the conclusion that they'd make an interesting photo-mosaic? Well, it was a simple thought that pushed me down this path, and although it didn't quite turn out as simple as I originally thought (or maybe hoped) it was a great learning experience (which I hope to keep using). More information about our experience of the Bibbulmun Track is found on our Bibbulmun Track page, with links to the 67 Blog Posts, GPS Tracks (downloadable), distance tables and On-Track Reviews.

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Original post blogged on b2evolution.

The Bibbulmun Track :: How Difficult?

Perry — Mon, 20 Aug 2012 11:08:00 +0000

During the planning stage for our Bibbulmun Track walk I created our itinerary by assessing the track distance, elevation profile and the Guidebook's notes and calculating estimated walk times for each section.

After the walk we recorded our personal assessment of the section's difficulty, which was very much a subjective analysis of the day's walk as it was based on how we felt, which was affected by all sorts of odd things:

wet weather / wet clothes
illness
bad moods
thirst / hunger

The actual day's total was calculated as the sum of the average of Sandi and my rating. The colouring is a basic conditional gradient based solely on this walk, so reddest red is the hardest day we had on the Bibbulmun and the greenest green is the easiest day we had on this walk, with the in betweens grading from green→yellow→orange→red.

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Original post blogged on b2evolution.