As my second weekend approaches, today has mostly been a quiet one.
Nothing major has happened on any front. I’m still waiting to hear back from Cenovus about the severance discussion. I assume conversations are happening somewhere, in rooms that I am no longer invited into, which feels strange after sixteen years of being in most of those rooms.
Around the house, we’ve been dealing with the last few loose ends from the renovation we did last year. Overall the builder has been great about coming back to fix the little things that show up after everything settles.
Loose railing — done.
Stair nosings — done.
Crack in the wall from the house deciding to move slightly — in progress.
Pretty happy with how that’s gone, all things considered.
I’m still getting the occasional message from people saying some version of
“Woah, I didn’t expect you to be laid off,”
or
“What are they thinking?”
I don’t have a better answer than anyone else, but I appreciate the sentiment.
Most of today has been a waiting day. A few small financial things, a bit of paperwork, nothing especially exciting. I 3D printed a small army of Minecraft characters for my son, did a bunch of cleaning so that our guests tonight will assume we live like civilized people, and set up the basement for movie night.
If you don’t look in the corners, everything looks great.
I also took my son to an appointment, picked up groceries, and generally did the kind of things that fill a Saturday.. Friday without you ever being quite sure where the time went.
The one area where I actually made some real progress today was on my photo backup project.
For anyone who missed the earlier post, I have accumulated an absurd number of photos over the last twenty-plus years. Old phones, old cameras, old computers, external drives, backups of backups, and folders with names like “Photos_Final_ReallyFinal_2”.
My goal is to build a tool that finds every photo on every drive, identifies duplicates, collects metadata, and eventually uses AI to group them in a way that makes them actually usable.
Naturally, I decided the best way to do this was to write my own system from scratch.
Phase 1 was to identify every hard drive I have attached, recursively walk through every folder, find every image file, compare them, detect duplicates, and produce a JSON list of every photo along with whatever metadata exists.
That part worked surprisingly well.
I immediately found four identical copies of the same folder from when my son was born. Each copy contained 11,450 photos.
All identical.
This is why I don’t trust myself to manage files manually.
Phase 2, which as of this afternoon was about 96% complete, has been copying all 81,332 unique photos onto a dedicated external drive that will become the master archive.
That step finished while I was writing this, which feels like a small but satisfying victory.
Next week is Phase 3, which is where things get more interesting. That’s the part where I start adding facial recognition, metadata tagging, clustering, and all the AI-powered overengineering that makes projects like this much more fun than they strictly need to be.
For those who don’t know, I’ve always been a bit obsessive about metadata and data quality. About twenty years ago at Golder I built a tool to make metadata easier to manage, which tells you everything you need to know about how long this particular personality trait has been around.
Otherwise, it’s the weekend.
Which means family stuff, a few appointments, some house things, and maybe a little more time to poke at the photo project if I can justify it.
And as always, thanks to everyone who has been reading along. I didn’t really expect this blog to become part diary, part therapy, part engineering log, but here we are.
Brett Wiens 