Fri 08.Mar.2013
Rhodes, Greece
Vicarious travel in delayed time - more delayed than just the usual ten time zones.
I've been in California about two weeks now. So far so good on the medical front.
I seem to be settling in to my new web hosting service, and
I still have pages worth of photos from Rhodes to catch up on.
If I keep on doing this enough, I just might get the hang of it some day.
Here we go.
When I hosted photos on Photobucket, their uploader automatically reduced the size of my
original images, to be easier on people with modest download speeds and limited bandwidth.
Now I need to do that myself, and manually upload the results to my new host.
I have a powerful image editing program called GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program,
an open-source equivalent of Photoshop). Re-sizing a single photo interactively with it
is easy to learn. But re-sizing a page worth of photos is tedious, and too time-consuming
to use for these pages.
The good news: Gimp can be scripted. The bad news: the scripting language, Scheme
has a horrible syntax. It is still too tedious to use for a whole page of photos.
(For the record: my least favorite programming language ever is still make;
Scheme is a shoo-in for runner up.)
After some trial and error, I came up with an awk script to generate a scheme script
to resize a whole page of photos in a single command, making sure that the vertical images
come out vertical and the horizontal ones etc.
Now all that remains is to deal with the incongruity of looking at photos of Rhodes a month ago,
while you read about techno-gibberish in California now.
As my fifth winter in Rhodes moved along, it got on my nerves that I have already shown most
of the standard "here is what this place looks like" pictures.
That is not entirely a bad thing;
it means I can indulge my recently-discovered photo-impressionism in the harbors and rain puddles.
You know what Rhodes looks like; now let's just have some fun with it.
