Year 5

 We had an early start. Zoë was on an early shift, and Ellie was back at school this morning. I was downstairs unlocking the doors and making coffee before 6:30. Ellie bounced into the house and, despite her protestations yesterday, was clearly happy to be going back to school and meeting up with her friends. 

We sorted out some breakfast, and she got herself ready for school. Despite the plan that she should walk to school by herself, she texted me last night to ask if I would walk with her this morning. I told her that I would be honoured to accompany her, and in the end, Diane came along as well. Like the first day of previous school years, it was chaos as so many parents and new starters milled around. Fortunately, with Ellie moving into Year 5, we were able to skip the melee and head to the correct door immediately.

With Ellie wandering into Lime Class (Year 5), Di headed home for breakfast while I headed off for my traditional walk. The latest adventures of Milkael Blomquist and Lisbet Salander kept me company for the next hour or so. I thoroughly enjoyed the walk, and look forward to repeating it tomorrow,

Back home, I grabbed some breakfast and then cleared the accounts ready for the new month. Then I returned to my project. I managed to create a couple of albums in Immich, but discovered that one of them had some images where the dates were wrong. This led to some further analysis and, in the end, I started to develop a program that cross-referenced the EXIF dates in an image with those in my backup images. Because of the approach I am taking, this is being written (with significant help from ChatGPT) in Python. (I should explain that whilst I have written a number of Python programs, I feel that my competence is much the same as my grasp of Spanish, French, or Latin - rudimentary.

Mid-afternoon I went along to collect Ellie from school, but fortunately, Zoe arrived in time, and the two of them went straight home. I returned to my coding, while Di chatted to Denise on the phone.

Projects

 I was delighted, as you can imagine, to be woken by Jasper at 2:30 this morning. He was yelling at the top of his voice and eventually quietened down, but just as I was drifting back to sleep, he started again. As a rule, when he gets like this, he is hungry, and his overnight feeder hasn't opened on time (or, more to the point, when he thinks it should have opened). I got out of bed and went down to the kitchen, only to find that everything had opened on time and he was just being obnoxious. It took me ages to get back to sleep.

I was up soon after seven. I think I managed to sneak down without disturbing Di, so I made myself a coffee and waited until I could hear movement from upstairs before I made her tea. We had a quiet breakfast, and after some domestic chores, returned to our respective projects.

I had downloaded 16 more albums from Google and spent much of the day processing them. I didn't finish because, needless to say, I found some examples I hadn't thought of and hadn't catered for in the coding. I made more changes, and bit by bit, the albums emerged. I must say that I wrote some pretty slick code and even ChatGPT responded, "That's clever," to one part of the development.

I popped along to the local store for some white wine for the sauce I made for tonight's dinner. I did chuckle when a BMW drove past the "Road Closed" signs, weaving in and out of the barriers, only to be thwarted and have to turn around and come back the other way.

In preparation for tomorrow's return to school, Zoe and Ellie popped in to bring some school uniform items here for the morning. Now that Ellie is moving into Year 5, she can walk to school by herself, so we don't necessarily have to get involved beyond pushing her out the door,

Success

We had a gentle start to the day. Jasper didn't wake us, and it was after seven before I emerged. As I made the coffee, I heard Di stirring and prepared her tea. With breakfast done and a few domestic chores ticked off the list, we returned to our respective studies.

Di carried on reorganising her study and tidying it. I returned to my code. Without going into huge detail, I am delighted to say that I now have the code working such that I can export an album from Google Photos, then replicate the album in Immich (the photo library manager). Now, there are many albums to ingest, but I will do them one bit at a time. The next major development I will have to manage is the injection and merging of facial data. That, however, can wait for now... I want to savour my current success.

Nothing else to report from here.

Study

 We had a significant amount of rain throughout the day. It seemed like a good excuse to stay put and spend the time in our respective studies. I had the morning call with the cousins, which seemed a little quiet today, and then opened up the MacBook.

Di retired to her study (sewing room), and I spent the next hour or so trying to wrangle a problem on the MacBook. It turned out to be a bug in the Surfshark VPN I run. It provides a degree of security and anonymity when using WiFi networks away from home. Evidently, it also blocks a load of my traffic when it goes rogue! With that sorted, I returned to my photo library project. My mate ChatGPT and I had a frustrating afternoon unpicking the interface to the Immich library manager. The documentation seemed to be lacking for this latest release, and we had to resort to first principles and hack our way through the code. By the end of the afternoon, I had the first interaction with the library manager working. 

I called it a day and went to prepare dinner. Roast salmon and salad for Di, and chicken jalfrezi for me.

Duck

We were up at about seven. After sorting out the little package that Jasper had left, I made the coffee and the tea. Di was eager to get going as she had to have breakfast in plenty of time for her Cardiac Rehab session.

Zoe turned up with Ellie at 08:30. Ellie was in a bubbly mood, but quite content to amuse herself. As Di left the house for her Cardiac session, I started on the week's pile of ironing.  I timed it to perfection, just putting everything away as Di returned.

This morning I read about a database called "duckdb". The write-up was very encouraging and triggered my design neurons. I spent an hour or two getting it installed on my MacBook. (The installation did not go smoothly, unlike the iMac, which was easy.) Once installed, I wrote some test code and was amazed by the speed of this database. This, my design neurons said, was a better way to complete the program I had been writing. The rest of the day was spent rewriting parts of the program, testing. and being amazed by how much faster it was when run.

Alongside all of this, there were the usual interruptions from Ellie and requests for snacks and drinks. All I really had to do was give permission, and she managed it all herself. Zoe collected her soon after 17:00, and she has a weekend with Pete before going back to school next Tuesday.

Shopslinger

 We tried to have a lie-in, but Jasper had different ideas. A few minutes before seven, I was making our tea and coffee to start the day. Zoe had the day off, so we were not expecting Ellie. W~e had a quiet breakfast as we consumed the overnight news and scratched the surface of social media.

Once the day had actually kicked into gear, I completed the shopping list, and we headed to Sainsbury's for our weekly festival of excitement. All things being equal, it was a fairly good trip with little interaction with zombies or morons. By the time we arrived home, Lottie was in full swing, doing some cleaning for us upstairs. Needless to say, we paused for an update on her holiday, the traffic, and the ongoing saga of their new car. She really is one of those people who can brighten the day.

We had a quiet hour or so before having to head for The Nuffield. Di had another physio session booked. The physio was delighted with the progress she has been making, particularly with her return to Pilates and the Cardiac Rehab sessions. He couldn't find the words to describe how well she was doing.

Back home, we had a quiet afternoon with our Kindles. There was no coding for me today; I needed to allow some ideas to percolate into a plan. Hopefully, tomorrow will see a return to the codeface.

Walking home

 Yesterday evening, plans changed. Ellie had decided that she didn't want an early start today, so it was decided that she would sleep here. This was good, because it meant there was no need for an early alarm; in fact, it was just after seven before I got up and headed for the shower. By the time I went downstairs, Di was already drinking her tea and munching on some toast.

It was another landmark day. Di took the car and drove across to Angmering for her first Pilates session in several months. Ellie stayed behind to look after grandpa. After some breakfast, she got herself ready, and we headed to the bus stop. We were on our way into Bognor to collect her school uniform from the local suppliers. I was impressed with the size of the shop, the number of staff, and the number of people in there browsing or collecting their orders.

With the uniform bag in one hand, we headed to the beach. (It seems a shame to go to Bognor and not stroll along the promenade.) When we got there, we could see the local showmen setting up their attractions for this Bank Holiday weekend's funfair. Ellie loved it and immediately texted Zoe, asking if they could go tomorrow. Meanwhile, we arrived at the palypark where Ellie spent a while on the swings before we stopped off for a drink and then headed for the pier.

After strolling around for a while, we headed back to the bus stop, only to find we had at least 20 minutes to wait. While we stood there, the time increased. I suggested to Ellie that we walk. It's only 3km, so she was up for it. We strolled back slowly, chatting as we walked, taking about 35 minutes (including a stop in Tesco Express for some lunch snacks).

Once home, Ellie sat and watched the TV, and I returned to my little coding challenge. Di arrived home and had clearly had a very good session at the Pilates class. I'm sure that now she has ventured to try it, she will be back every week,

Zoe came to collect Ellie soon after three, and we settled down with our Kindles until it was time to make dinner.

Playmates

 I was up at seven. There wasn't a sound from Diane, so I didn't make her any tea. I made my coffee and sat down with the overnight news. By the time my coffee was finished and the news sources had been squeezed dry, Di was stirring, and I fired up the kettle.

Elli had been host to a sleepover with Ariana last night. Zoe dropped them on the doorstep at 8:20, and the girls started their day with us. To be fair, they were no trouble at all and just played nicely and quietly all day. The morning was focused on their tablets and phones; the afternoon saw them roaming the estate and roller-blading.

Mid-morning we had to drop Jasper in his carrier, and we all set off for the vet. Jasper had his scheduled monthly injection, his nails clipped, his blood pressure taken and so forth. I drove them to the vet and carried Jasper in, then I returned to the car where the girls were playing games on their phones. I explored the various settings on the vehicle that I hadn't previously examined, then wandered back and forth in the car park, thinking about my coding project.

We were back home by lunchtime, and I prepared some chicken nuggets, chips, and baked beans for the girls. They lapped them up and then disappeared upstairs to play. Di also disappeared upstairs so that she could rearrange and tidy her study. I continued with the next phase of my photo management project. I have now created an inventory of all the photos in the master library. I can use this when extracting albums from Google Photos, locating each of the component photos to squirt into the Immich system and recreating the Google Albums. There is a fair bit more thinking to go and some more code to develop, but I'm well on the way.

Zoe picked the girls up soon after five.

Who'd Have Thought

 I was up early, ready for Ellie to be dropped off. The trouble was that Zoe and Ellie weren't. Zoe had forgotten that she was meant to be on an early shift and went in for 09:00. Oh well, I suppose I had a quiet hour to read the news.

Ellie was dropped off and was clearly happy to have a lazy day. She was still in her pyjamas mid-morning when I went to collect a parcel for Diane from M&S, and when I got back and headed for the study, she finally went to shower and brush her teeth. Meanwhile, Di had finished a couple of loads of washing and was bordering on a cleaning frenzy.

I returned to the photo library. The more I examined it, the more I spotted errors. In the past, they were masked by the folders in which they were filed. Now the discrepancy between the folders' dates and the photos' dates is showing up as a problem. Several experiments and several hours of deep thought and testing revealed a change that I could apply, which should go a long way towards solving the problem. A few lines of code were changed, and I used my backup library as a reference point when re-running several of my utility programs. Now, several hours later, it looks as if I have eliminated another bunch of anomalies. Who'd have thought that my backups would prove so useful!

Zoe came to collect Ellie soon after 17:00. We have her again tomorrow morning... but not until 08:30.

Scratch it and start again

Jasper, once again, provided the impetus to get me out of bed. To be fair, it was just after seven, so I had had my lie-in. Coffee was brewed along with tea, and the tea was taken up to Diane.

Overnight, my subconscious had been processing. It dawned on me that there was a better way to organise the new photo library. I discussed it with myself and with ChatGPT and concluded that I would scratch the library manager I had built yesterday. I would then split the actual library into smaller chunks (a technical term) and then rebuild the library manager. So, for example, all the years from 1890 to 1989 are now clustered in a folder "Photos1890-1989", and there are similar clusters in 10-year and 5-year groups (depending on the quantity of photos). This now makes the management much simpler, and the library manager doesn't have to treat the many thousands of photos as one huge set. I set this plan in motion, and then got my breakfast. Various aspects of this have been running all through the day, and are still running now. I am confident they will all be finished by morning.

Di has enjoyed the sunshine and been pottering in the garden again. The garden waste bin is nearly full of all the trimmings and prunings.

We did manage some Kindle time in the Orangery this afternoon.

Heroes

 There was no need to be awake early. Jasper, however, had different ideas, and after he regaled us with several bouts of yowling and shouting, it seemed pointless to stay in bed any longer. So it was that I was up just before seven, and Di was up not long after.

Being Saturday, I had my usual call with the cousins. It seemed like a wide-ranging chat, but we did spend time talking about Tim's trip to Istanbul and the places he should visit. Obviously, Chris could provide ideas based on his experience, whereas the rest of us had to rely on travelogues and TV travel programmes.

Today was a day for heroes. Trevor and Lel took part in a 25 Km walk in London to raise money for Prostate Cancer Research. I sent them a "Good Luck" message, and another message during the walk. 

I must say that they had a nice day. Unlike recent weeks, the temperature had cooled off a bit, and though we have had some rain this week, it stayed dry.

Trevor sent this photo through showing the heroic couple at the finish line, and I know that they beat their fundraising target.  As I commented on Facebook, not all heroes wear spandex and have capes.

Well done.

Meanwhile, back here, I had re-run my program against the photo library. This time, it showed no data anomalies. This was good news as it meant that yesterday's exercise had corrected all of the thousands of anomalies that were in the library. (These anomalies were predominant where old photos had been scanned and had no date information other than the scan date - they had, however, been filed in the correct folder for the year they were taken). Confident that the library was now ok, I connected it to Immich and left it to run. Immich will now go through and create its database, identifying every photo, creating thumbnails, looking for faces in photos, and clustering faces together. This will run for hours... and is currently running all 8 processors on my iMac at 100%.

While the computer was busy, I decided (in a fit of uncharacteristic activity) to clean the car. There was debris from the New Forest in the footwells, and the outside was grubby from the recent rain. It took me an hour or so, but it looks very smart again now. Meanwhile, Di was pottering in the garden. She wanted to have a bit of a tidy-up and do some pruning before the wet and windy weather, which is forecast, sets in this coming week.

Driving Again

 Ellie was dropped off just after 8:30.  We were obviously up and about by then. It was another landmark day. Di was returning to her Cardiac Rehab sessions, so Ellie and I drove her to the Community Centre and left her to do her exercises. Back home, I made some breakfast for Ellie, and while she was eating, I ran the last few tests on my project.

Ellie came with me when I went to collect Di. This was another landmark as Diane took the keys and drove us home. This was probably the first time she had driven for about 3 months. She had been a little nervous about it, but she was absolutely fine, and it has given her the confidence and independence to plan a trip to Pilates next week.

Ellie spent most of the day in the lounge. She was cycling between her phone, the TV, and an iPad. Other than occasional hunting trips where she sought food, we heard little from her. I moved on from my testing to the full scan of my whole photo library. I ran the scan in separate chunks, but it still took the whole afternoon. I now have to consider when I should connect the library to the new Immich library manager, and when I should start to process all of the facial data I have extracted. Another aspect of this project is the retention of "albums" that were created in Google Photos. The photos are already in my library, but the collection of these into meaningful albums is not something that I currently have in my library. I think that I have a rudimentary plan for how to manage this, but I can feel some more code bubbling in the back of my mind, and a small test case is already sitting in my test library.

Zoe finished work earlier than planned and picked Ellie up at about 16:00. We had a quiet hour before I started preparing dinner.

Run, run, run

 I was up soon after six. There was no real need, but a message from my bladder suggested that some intervention was required. It didn't seem worthwhile going back to bed, so I made some coffee and read the overnight news. Di came down soon after seven. Zoe has the day off, so Ellie wasn't with us at all today.

Once we were properly up and about, I returned to my coding for a bit, adding some additional cross-references in the reports. Then I shut things down for the rest of the morning. Di had an appointment with the hairdresser, so I drove her to the salon, then stopped off at Sainsbury's for the weekly shop. By the time I had finished, driven home, unloaded the car, and put the shopping away, I received a call from Di to say she was ready. I whizzed into the town and collected her,

Early afternoon, I returned to my code and ran the first program against my whole photo library (in 10 separate runs). As I finished, it was time to take Di into Chichester for her dental appointment. I went up to the dentist's waiting room with her as the stairs are very steep. She introduced herself to the receptionist, and I announced that I was her security detail. While she was seen by the dentist and then the hygienist, I sat and read my Kindle.

It was 16:30 by the time we arrived back home. I had a quiet 15 minutes before starting on dinner. Tonight was gammon, egg, and chips (it's one of Di's favourites).

Anniversary

Today is our 53rd Wedding Anniversary. It's a day that is worthy of celebration. I can never really understand how I got so lucky all those years ago, and how we have been blessed ever since.

Talking of blessings, Ellie was dropped off at 6:30 and went up to have a cuddle with Nana in bed. Outside, it was raining. This is the first rain of any consequence that we have had for many weeks. I suspect that the ground is too hard to really absorb it, but the forecast suggests we will have a fair bit of rain over the next week, so hopefully it will do the fields and gardens some good.

During the morning, we had to go and collect Jasper from Mark (the Cat Whisperer). Ellie was intrigued by the whole setup and stopped to greet all of the cats and kittens in their runs. Jasper was soon tucked in his carrier and started to complain the whole way back home. As usual, he leapt from the carrier and did a full circuit of the house to ensure nothing had been changed.

Ellie was very good throughout the day. She was clearly tired after the day with Natalie yesterday. She spent most of the day playing quietly in the living room. I managed to get time to make some significant progress on my coding challenge, and I'm now ready to run some serious tests before letting the code loose on the whole photo library.

Ellie was collected soon after three. We settled down for some quiet time with the Kindles before getting ready to go out.

An upmarket Italian restaurant, "Piccolino's", has opened in Chichester. I used to eat at their outlet in Bristol when I was working down there, and always liked it. It seemed that on a day as auspicious as today, it was an ideal opportunity to try this local establishment.

We were shown to our table in the plush surroundings. Despite being early evening, there was a buzz about the place. We settled down and examined the menu. Garlic Focaccia with rosemary and sea salt made a good shared appetiser. This was followed by bruschetta gamberini for both of us. Then Di selected a dish with meatballs (mixed beef and pork), and I had chicken Milanese. We both finished off with gelato. The food was exceptional. This was definitely a location for special occasions - and we will be back.

We were home by eight, and settled down for quiet evening.