My poor iMac took a dump a minute ago. It totally lost all connection to my mouse and keyboard. Bluetooth totally died. The keyboard was connected via cable. I think this is the second time this has happened. Naturally I wanted to fix it. In my experience sometimes it’s best to really break something to fix it right, at least with IT. I say that from the standpoint of someone not working on anything critical. I’m just an average user and factory reset is usually an option. God forbid.
I forced a reboot. No other way without any input device. I made my iMac forget it’s bluetooth connections to the keyboard and the mouse. I’m not sure why I did this. It really messed things up for a minute, but it did make me go deeper than I’ve ever gone into the bluetooth settings. There was a bigger problem I had to address first.
My keyboard worked after forgetting it on bluetooth because it was wired directly. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to use my keyboard to reconnect my mouse. I thought pretty much everything could be done with a keyboard, but I was disappointed. Honestly I think it may be some deeper issue due to my years and years of playing with this unit. But I was stuck. Stuck without a mouse in an environment where the keyboard apparently didn’t do everything.
To fix my mouse problem I had to go to the store and buy a cheap wired mouse. After checking my stash I realized I got rid of all my wired mice. I didn’t think I’d need them I guess. I like to git rid of things I don’t need. Sometimes it comes back to bite me. Fortunately this bite only too $9 out my hide.
So wham bam and my wireless mouse works again. I did some searching while trying to figure out ways to reconnect before I threw in the towel and went for a new wired mouse. That search led me to a way to reset the the bluetooth settings using the terminal. This is the kind of deep fix I was hoping to find before I started breaking things.
I’m not a hacker or anything. I don’t know much about code or command line interface (CLI), except that it exists and is the foundation upon which the graphic user interface (GUI) is built. I have done some small sessions trying to teach myself how to use the CLI, but it’s too much for me to want to get too deep into. But I do know enough to copy and paste a command into the terminal. And I found the command that rest the bluetooth settings.
I found the command I wanted using AI. Maybe I shouldn’t have trusted an ai for command line stuff, but I did. I didn’t even think about it being risky until just now. Yeah, it’s probably best to be careful when tampering with the operating system. Lucky AI did me right this time. For the record the CLI put into the terminal was “sudo pkill bluetoothd”
There was another thing suggested if that didn’t work. It involved slightly more work, so I took the CLI route. Funny thing, I went ahead and looked into the the second option anyway, and here I am typing all about it. Funny how time and effort is a concern sometimes. Then you end up spending time and effort documenting it all.
Anyway the second suggestion was to go to the library folder, then find the preferences folder, then find the “com.apple.Bluetooth.plist” Delete it. I didn’t actually delete the file. I did find it and it showed it’s creation date and time consistant with when I did the CLI sudo pkill bluetoothd. I decided that was good enough for me.
I got a glazed donut from Willson’s Bakery this morning. It was a delicious breakfast. I got a cream horn for later, perhaps dinner, perhaps tomorrows breakfast. I’m really trying to diet again, but I figure a treat on the weekend won’t kill me. I just have to do good during the week, and this week I did good.
It’s the middle of February and the last few days it’s felt like spring. I wonder if it will hold or if a cold blast will come thought and kill everything that is starting to grow. Who can tell. What I can tell you is I don’t want to do yard work.
Today I’m posting a picture that is a little blurry. Even so I like it. I took this when I walked out my door a few days ago. It was morning. The light was yummy. I wish I had better focus on it, but I can’t change the past. I can only hope to do better in the future. Either way I like this now, and I want to share it. Maybe someone else sees some beauty here.
It’s a great day. It’s a great day to be manic. I’m not here to attempt a self diagnosis. I just feel more upbeat, focused and energetic than most days. It’s another Sunday, the one day I can pretty reliably set aside several hours to work on things I want to work on, and I am. I have tended to write something the last several Sundays, or tried to at least. I may not have always posted whatever I wrote, which is probably for the best.
That leads me to my next order of business. I’ve been giving it some thought. It being how I have been running this blog. Up to now, I’ve posted just about any old crazy rambling thoughts I wrote. Sometimes it may have been relevant or interesting. Begging the question relevant to what or interesting to whom? Which opens another possible topic to explore sometime other than now.
I’ve decided to try to keep this blog less of a personal journal/diary, which it has been moving toward recently. I’m pretty new to blogging and journaling and writing in general. Most of my life I didn’t have much use for it, so I didn’t have much discipline or real direction. Realistically, I still don’t, but I’m working on trying to improve. So in the future I expect I will continue to write journal/diary entries. I find them therapeutic, which is so antithetical to my younger self’s opinion it’s almost an unbelievable thing for me to say now. I will continue to post the journal entries because I wrote it and want to do something with it. however, I am going to make those journal/diary entries private. Only I and possibly a shrink will likely ever see them,or maybe a board hacker with too much time on their hands.
I hope your not too disappointed to find out I’ll be a little more careful putting my raw insanity on display. Don ’t worry I’m sure I’ll still say insane things, as I am constantly thinking insane things. I like insane things. Am I insane? You can decide for yourself. It’s probably pretty insane to think that anyone has or ever will read this, or any of the other stuff I’ve posted. I’m not too worried about being dragged off for evaluation or straight up incarceration for corrupting the masses. Being insane very publicly, but in obscurity, is kinda fun.
True, most of the things I think are insane but are probably nothing that hasn’t been thought or said many times over. As the cliche goes, there is nothing new under the sun. Interesting. I find out that is biblical. I probably knew that at one time, but it’s like the sand it has slipped though the screen of my mind. It comes from Ecclesiastes 1:9 if your curious. There is so much good stuff in the Bible.
My insanity is probably pretty mild compared to many. I try to be fairly moderate in my thinking. It’s kinda funny to say that I’m moderate in my thinking when my thinking about politics in the US of A during the 2026 era I’m probably considered a radical-left wing-communist-terrorist-insurrectionist-hippy, and lets add baby killer to the list for good measure. Currently both sides of the political theater are accusing the other side of raping and torturing and killing babies. Sadly, they are both probably right. See Epstein files. Disclaimer, I never have and never will kill a baby, at least not willfully, God willing.
This blog post is my first in the new era of separating blog from journal. I’m not above posting minutia, so… I haven’t yet figured out how to technically separate journal from blog on WordPress. I’m sure it’s not terribly difficult though.
I’m thinking that for this and most of my blog posts I will likely type the body one day then edit it a little bit the next day or two. I have no doubt I’ve left some pretty serious typos in the posts up to this point. Honestly, I expect, even with self-editing there will still be typos. I’m not trying to make money off this thing. Im overly concerned about grammatical, syntactical, or orthographic perfection. I am trying to do it right, and I’m not under any kind of pressure to get content out quickly. But I doubt anyone has ever given my blog more than a glance anyway. Funny, now that I’m not bering graded I care about this stuff.
One thing I’m still figuring out how to handle is working with the photo elements you know I love. The photos are the heart of my blog as far as I’m concerned. This site and blog started as a way to show the photos I’ve taken. Showing both the photos I am happy with, and work that may just be meh, but still something I want to remember personally. I spent some time doing even the bad studd and feel some recognition is deserved. I envision myself sitting around old and alone looking back at the glory day’s. Hurrah.
The thing about adding photos is it’s actually like work. Work I enjoy, but work nevertheless. Not to get too deep into it, but there are many stages to photography. There is planning, execution, ingestion, culling, editing, then finally distribution.
Planning could be something spontaneous like a field trip or it could be something drawn out and complicated like a wedding.
Execution can range from a mini-session in a studio. Or a days long event with multiple locations and complicated variables.
Ingestion can be done different ways. I do it by bringing my camera back to my home office and ingesting the photos from the memory card into my iMac. Ingesting hundreds of photos can take some significant time, at least enough time to get a sandwich.
Culling is the real bitch. There are AI tools now that do this, but I don’t think I want to go down that road, not now at least. If you do the math, 400 images given ten seconds of consideration with zero rest between each image would take over an hour to simply cycle through. I would be hard pressed to decide with that little time. Honestly, for me, culling can be boring and none too enjoyable. with that many files culling is usually done in stages, slowly whittling down the cream from the curd. That may not be the best analogy because I like curds. Come to think of it I like a lot of the unused photos too. Sometimes deciding just comes down to throwing a dart.
Editing is usually reserved for those that make the cut. Granted, a curd can be elevated to cream upon a second look and a little lipstick. Most of the time edits I do are pretty minimal. I learned to follow a core principle of photography: getting it right in the camera. I allow Lightroom pick the settings as a starting point. Then I work from there, if needed, or desired. Occasionally I have an image I want or need to edit more deeply, but that’s not too often, at least at this stage of my life.
You can’t forget distribution. Otherwise what’s the point? Once you’ve got a batch of photos ready for the world, you’ve got to get them to the world. For me that means posting to my blog mostly. I’m also trying to get in the habit of posting to Instagram and Facebook. Someday I may explore posting to other sites and platforms. When a client is involved, the client and photographer need to agree on how the work is presented. There are an extremely large variety of options for delivery to a client. It can be a little intimidating.
First, there is digital delivery, which has options ranging from CD-ROM (old school), to thumb drive, to cloud services. There are undoubtably other digital delivery options which I’m not even aware. God knows there are a ton of companies that cater to photographers. I won’t get too into the their business models that I’ve studied. I use the cloud service Drop Box at this time. It requires a little bit of tech savvy, but really isn’t difficult to use once you get it set up. I like it because it is free. One day I may use it enough to get a subscription with some bells and whistles, but for now free is the ticket.
There are likely more digital distribution methods I have no idea about. There will probably be more in the future. Technology is always moving forward and changing. I try to keep up with the progress, but Im too old and slow and far removed from be on the bleeding edge of this stuff like I tried to be at one time.
The second option for distribution to a client is physical media. Traditionally this was prints only. Now you can get photos printed on damn near anything. It’s common to have photos on coffee mugs, pin on buttons, signs, cards, whatever. Also, I’ll put under physical distribution digital photo frames you put on your desk or night stand that cycle though a collection. This can be on a smart TV too. Again there are many thing’s I’ve omitted due to brevity or ignorance.
Rolling back around to how I want to distribute photos on my blog. Do wait until I’ve done all the steps and distribute as a single massive gallery like the one I’m going to post along with this monolog? Or should I do small batches as I do work on them? Do I post only photo galleries without any monolog? Do I post small batches with a little monolog? Should the monolog be limited to the content of the gallery? Should each gallery have a theme or simply be the photos I finished since the last post? It’s pretty exhausting to think about it. Should I vary gallery/monolog formats or try to keep it uniform? I will have to chew on these questions a while. Of course, since this is my blog I can do whatever I want. Still I’d like to have some consistency.
Ultimately I’d like for the forthcoming blog posts, after switching to this blog/journal category separation protocol, to be a more focused. The tags I’m currently using are tech, random thoughts, philosophy, politics, photography. I think random thoughts and philosophy cold be interchangeable. I made a bunch of tags in the early days, but I’m going to stop making so many, one for every little thing. I’m going to try to be very deliberate if I create new ones. While I may photograph just a bout anything, I want the category/tags to be broad and minimal.
I need to figure out how to make journal category posts private by default. I suppose this is where I’ll leave off today. It gives me a project for this afternoon.
Sunday once again. I’ve decided that instead of going to church on Sunday I will use that time to write something, edit some photos, or otherwise do something productive, even if it’s just reading a book. I expect there will be day’s I read the Bible, but today I am writing and working with photos.Also I’ll do any laundry that I didn’t get to on Saturday, my usual laundry day. Today that includes bed sheets, fun.
I spent the last week trying to fix a longstanding problem I’ve had with Facebook. It’s difficult to describe, so I won’t try. I will say that I spent many hours, probably 6-8, trying to trouble shoot the problem with Facebooks AI tech support robot. I was optimistic when I got started. It seems to understand what I was saying, probably better than a low level human phone tech. The robot and I worked together to refine and narrow sown the problem, many times. But as it was many time you can see it never seemed to find the actual problem. Eventually it started going in circles, suggesting this already tried. I got frustrated and cursed it. It suggested I open a ticket with an actual human. Wow, I had been trying to figure out how to get to an actual human from the start, but FB-AI-BOT stood in the way. Perhaps now the gatekeeper of paid employees would let me pass.
Oh no, of course not, the FB-AI-BOT pointed me in the direction of contacting actual human tech support so I can start going around in circles with them until they understood the depth of the technical problem with their labyrinthine IT ecosystem. I will tell you that after going around in circles with FB-AI-BOT it determined that at least part of the problem was with an old invisible account or some such thing. Yes invisible, that’s what it said. And poor FB-AI-BOT simply can’t see invisible. Anyway, FB-AI-BOT told me how to contact actual human tech support, but guess what? What it told me didn’t match reality, big surprise right? I spent maybe another hour trying to figure out how to contact actual humans. I posted screen shots. I used clear language. FB-AI-BOT apologized profusely. FB-AI-BOT kept trying, bless it’s robot heart. But I, with the help of FB-AI-BOT, never actually found a way to report the problem to a human. So I’m giving up.
Today I told Facebook to delete my “business” page, a page I started years ago when a personal business was my main concern. It was a learning thing mostly, as I never managed to make much of a business. There was a lot of experimenting, both with content and settings. I expect the invisible error that has kicked me in the balls probably started and got compounded during this time period. I also have scheduled one of my Instagram profiles for deletion, the one I made to promote my real estate photography business attempt. So I have two accounts scheduled for deletion, scheduled to nuke years worth of content and work, which is okay because it was mostly nothing good, but this is still frustrating. I still have two accounts, once Facebook and one Instagram, with Meta, the parent company of Facebook, which made itself the big daddy after I had my original Facebook account/profile for probably twenty years, give or take. Come to think of it I have a Threads account also, which is another company under the loving care of Meta. Sheesh I never even thought of that when I was trying to find the invisible demon that has caused me so much trouble this week and the many years I’ve been trying to fix this problem.
My Facebook business page should be gone within 24-hours. My Instagram real estate account will take a month. So I will need to wait at least a month before I can see if the invisible problem got nuked or not. I suppose after that, if my problem persists, I will nuke my main Instagram page, which would be a loss I actually feel. It may be a blessing, but it will be painful to loose all of that work I’ve done over the years. I really hope I can keep that Instagram account. I really want a clean Meta portfolio connecting my personal profile to a business profile and page that is connected to an Instagram account and a Threads account. This is the goal. This is what I’ve been trying to accomplish for years now, but some invisible force wants to stop me. I’m not being overly dramatic or using metaphor, remember FB-AI-BOT told me it was an invisible account that was causing all my problems. I refuse to believe my good friend FB-AI-BOT would tell me it was an invisible whatever if FB didn’t actually have and use invisible whatever’s. Sigh, who knows.
I didn’t spend much time on photographs today, or this week really. I did do quite a lot of stuff getting my poor old iMac back in fighting shape. I’m very pleased with the bugs I’ve squashed and the improvements I’ve made. I don’t have the time or energy to bore you good reader with those details at the moment.
There is predicted to be a large winter storm front coming through the eastern part of the country tonight. It is supposed to be very disruptive and dangerous. My southerly location means uncertainty, the front could just miss us, or just hit us. I live on a sort of natural break in the geography that acts as a line of differentiation for such types of weather events, it’s called the fall line. It is a real thing that is fascinating in it’s own right, but I will leave it at that.
At this time school is not expected to be canceled, as predictions have us at the edge of not getting too much bad wether. However there is always the possibility that some gnat farts and the shifts everything just a bitt and we will have actual winter weather. The school board stands ready to shut down the school district if even a single snowflake is seen. A single snowflake is a local crisis to those who have never been anywhere but here. People here can’t drive in the rain let alone the snow. It’s pretty crazy as it rains here a lot. I suppose I should say that people here can’t drive, but theres always those people everywhere.
Today I have only one photo to post. I long for the day when I can cross post between my blog, my Facebook business, my instagram, and yes my Threads. As much as I dislike Meta and it’s children, they are the biggest if not the only game in town for social media. If you can’t beat them join them. Hopefully someday someone will come along and beat them, but hopefully they aren’t as evil. Heh, wishful thinking, i know. Anyway this photograph is of a football field at night with the American flag proudly waving. Again a nice sense of calm that I appreciate. It’s not fancy but It does make me feel something. This is from the batch of photos from the HOCO marching band competition in October 2025.
Today’s post has good news and bad news. First though, I am going to add a new category tab in my blog taxonomy. Yeah that was really the first word I thought of. I’m not normal. Thank God. Anyway I want a category for tech type things. I am definitely very much interested in tech. I’ve worked with tech of many different kinds in my video career, solid state tech and info tech of many different kinds. I’ve forgotten more about both than most people will ever even know exist. Even in my fifties I still am interested in keeping up with the trends to some extant. Tech, especially info tech is constantly progressing. Ones understanding of and ability to effectively navigate requires constant training, refreshing knowledge, skills and equipment. So anyway I’ve decided the new category is going to be #tech.
The bad news is in relation to what I think was my last blog post. It regards the trouble I was having with my old iMac. I struggled with the application Adobe Lightroom Classic specifically. As I explained then I spent several days trying to figure out what was happening, and I believed I fixed the problem. It turns out that wasn’t true. I was still having pretty serious problems. I was really worried my workstation was starting to give up the ghost. When I bought this iMac in 2017 I built it beefy hoping to keep it good to go for a long time. And really the 8-9 years it has served me is admirable for any info tech type device. As previously said that is really old for a personal computer or other computing device. But it seemed likely it had started to fail.
The good news is my trusty iMac 2017 isn’t failing. I’m confident this time I’ve figured out the gremlin that was causing my and my computer’s distress. I’ll explain what the problem ended up being shortly. But first, I want to talk a little about the process, which I personally find interesting.
I started trying to trouble shoot about a week ago, last weekend. I spent hours trying things that I’ve done in the past to try and isolate the problem, rebooting, reinstalling, purging caches, adjusting settings and whatever else made sense at the time. All of these are things that I’ve done many times. Oh I forgot to mention I went to Google which brought me to the Apple tech forums, which I used as a guide. I didn’t want to try to get on the phone with anyone, which is one of the first things I would have done when doing this for a job, but that was when whoever I worked for was paying for good tech support. I can’t afford that and frankly don’t really need it most times. Occasionally the problem is not on my end of the but something remote that needs attention, which I requires sitting through low level techs moving you up the food chain, often for hours, before the problem can be resolved. The Apple forums had some good information and I thought I had fixed the problem. But during the week I realized my victory was short lived when I actually tried to use Lightroom to perform it’s function and it balked. During the week I didn’t have the time or energy to really dedicate to continuing my quest for normalcy. And sometimes a little time away from the problem can lead to a new outlook and epiphany.
My big epiphany as I started trying to figure things out this morning was to use Chat GPT AI to help troubleshoot. Hot damn! I can’t say enough good things about AI today. It really helped a lot. That robot was a competent trouble shooting tech-support-agent right out of the gate. AI is pretty insane. I’ve got a lot of mixed feeling about AI. But I can’t say enough good about how it helped me with this problem that had been plaguing me for the last week. I hope robots and humans can live together in harmony.
So what was the problem bogging down my iMac? Turns out it was a bad cable between my external hard drive where I store my photos and the main unit/CPU/iMac. Something so simple causing so much trouble. I took several steps with the AI before coming to that conclusion, but it really didn’t take more than an hour I think. Compared to the weeklong ordeal I that had brought me no relief it was nothing short of miraculous. Now I can play with my photos again! Happy day!
Life has kicked my butt. That’s what I’m thinking and feeling at the moment. I’m just home from work for the day. Kicked my shoes off. Took a shower. Ate some dinner, a cheese burger. I guess compared to a lot of people I’ve got it pretty good. And I know it’s true, but what’s the real price of this lavish existence having a roof over my head and a board of food to slake my appetite?
I’ve been struggling with my iMac the last couple days. More specifically I’ve been struggling with Adobe Lightroom classic software. It’s taken a good part of three days to get it back where it should be. At least I hope it’s back where it should be. As I write this the software is still bogged down, but I think I know why, and I think it’s temporary until it finishes syncing with the cloud. I’m not really sure why I’m syncing with the cloud. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but I really never use the portable Lightroom version for pad and phone OSs. Maybe I’ll get around to doing that someday.
A couple days ago I was looking at some more marching band pix from a different event. I took upwards of 500 for this one. I was making adjustments to an image and selected an option I’d never seen before in classic Lightroom. This software is constantly being updated, upgraded, changed. You can’t stand in the way of progress, especially when it’s tech and there’s profit at stake. Anyway I selected an option called super resolution in the sharpness panel, the same panel with noise reduction. I had previously applied NR, which I’ve used a lot in the past. But then I saw the new super resolution option and thought super! So I clicked it to have a look. Lo and behold a box pops up saying it needs to configure ai something or another, and it was going to take an hour of processing. I honestly can’t remember if I canceled it immediately or let it run. This was three days ago. Either way it basically locked up my Lightroom software. It started some sort of chain reaction that devoured all of my computers memory and kept asking for more. Basically a memory leak, as I understand it.
This memory leak in my Lightroom classic was a massive pain in the ass. Every time I open Lightroom it just got hung up. It would sin its wheel and not really allow me to do anything. It took minutes to select anything. Then it seemed to not do anything when selecting an option, so I was unable to deselect super resolution. I tried several different things. Turning off and then tuning it on again time ten. I went to the adobe community for help and found a few articles that seemed relevant. It was painfully slow being able to try the suggested remedies due to the memory leak. I don’t think they helped much if at all. Then I had an epiphany.
The epiphany seemed to me was one image with one bad selection was the harbinger of my sorrow. I realized maybe I can isolate that file and remove it. Basically I had to remove the .xmp file that was its sidecar. The .xmp is what holds all the information about changes to the master file. Which is good because I don’t have to loose the master photo, just the edits. I’m glad I decided to use .xmp when I learned about it. While this whole saga cost me several hours of watching my computer restart and have its wheels spin, I didn’t lose any actual files. Once I removed the corrupted.xmp file and uninstalled and reinstalled Lightroom it seems to back in business.
My iMac is a 2017, so it’s nearly ten years old now. That’s pretty ancient for this kind of tech at this time and place in the world. My computer’s age likely played a part in causing this episode. Lightroom won’t even let me fully upgrade to the latest and greatest due to my hardware being incapable of handling the heavier load that apparently comes with the luxury of ai tools. I don’t like falling behind the tech curve like this, but I chose to be poor or at least made choices that limited any chance of not being poor. My iMac can keep up with the newer versions of software up to a point, but clearly with this episode it is struggling anyway. I hope I can keep it going another year or two before I can afford a new computer. It’s not like not having it is going to loose me money, because I don’t make any money with it, and that’s what it’s all about. Isn’t it?
