Perl saved my vacation

http://blog.moertel.com/articles/2009/04/25/perl-saved-my-vacation

by mudge • 17 years ago

34 14 17 years ago

blog.moertel.com

almost2• 17 years ago

Totally off topic. But 500 photos in a day!! I just don't understand why people's reaction to going to beautiful places is to spend the day looking down the view finder of a camera.

eru• 17 years ago

Without photos you haven't been there.

pavel_lishin• 17 years ago

I, for one, have a really bad memory. Photos help remind me of the places I've been, and bring up memories of being there.

Plus, that way I can help share a part of my memory with others, at their leisure, instead of telling people about details of my trip a dozen times.

KC8ZKF• 17 years ago

If you are taking 500 photos a day, you are not really there. It is better to be present in a moment, and forget it, than to have documentation of every moment of a trip.

jerf• 17 years ago

In the old analog days, this was true.

In the digital era, it's easy to just wave the camera around and snap photos en masse without really paying attention. OK, I exaggerate, you need to at least hold the camera level and pay a little attention to lighting, but it's way less stressful than using analog film. No stopping for posing, which is the thing that really slows down.

jrockway• 17 years ago

Perhaps producing art is more enjoyable than standing around doing nothing?

randomtask2• 17 years ago

Perhaps they aren't the only two possibilities?

ibsulon• 17 years ago

This is how my boyfriend approaches travelling as well. Go to as many places as possible and take pictures to prove that you were there. Spend as much time awake as possible, going to bars and clubs at night and repeat the process the next day.

I will have a startup that addresses this. In fact, in planning my current trip I lamented that I didn't have it...

randomtask2• 17 years ago

Is it this? http://www.mooredynasty.com/Blog/CalvinAndHobbesKickInTheBut...

I kid :)

cwinters• 17 years ago

If you're walking around for 10 hours that's 50 photos an hour. Given a conservative four photos per shot, that's only ~12 actual shots per hour, or one every five minutes. Doesn't seem like 'looking down the view finder' to me.

And knowing Tom, he probably walked around for 12 hours :-)

jcapote• 17 years ago

I agree wholeheartedly; I used to do this on every vacation, but now I vow to leave the camera at home.

tmoertel• 17 years ago

(Note: I'm the author of the linked-to article.)

Why would I take 500 photos? Because I'm fascinated by plants and gardening. For my vacation, I spent a few days visiting some of the world's premier gardens, both to enjoy myself and to learn as much as I could. As you might expect, gardens like that display hundreds of new (to me) plant varieties and treatments and, for each I wanted to study, I took several photographs to capture its interesting characteristics.

While it might sound strange, having my camera helped me see better. It reminded me to slow down and examine the different parts of each plant, to look carefully for the traits that separated one plant from its peers, and to consider how I could show my friends each plant in a way that would let them see what I thought was interesting about it.

I have found that sometimes the best way to see is to get behind a camera.

Cheers. --Tom

P.S. One additional benefit of taking a camera to a horticultural garden is that you can photograph plant tags to record botanical information about the cultivars on display. With a good zoom lens, you can even capture the tags on plants that are in restricted or otherwise unreachable areas. Very useful.

almost2• 17 years ago

Good answer :) Not for me maybe but I think I understand your point of view a little better

chops• 17 years ago

I had a similar experience several years ago, though not vacation related. I was testing a script I was writing, and had a critical typo, which ended up wiping out (rm -fr) all my website code (it wasn't a business thing yet, so I wasn't taking backups in any reliable manner).

After my heart skipping a beat realizing I didn't have any decently recent backups, I unmounted the partition, whipped out perl and scanned the device for instances of "<?" and grabbing the following 5000 bytes, dumping the results to a collection of incrementally named files.

I had to manually go through the files, clean them up, and remember what their filename was based on the code, but that wasn't as bad as it sounds. The hardest part was the conflicting versions, since there were lots and lots of remnants from old replaced files there. But about 8 hours later, I had everything recovered.

Backups went on a cronjob after that.

Perl saved my vacation

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