I took a Pensacola walk over to North Hill yesterday afternoon. It's a nice neighborhood, and there's a few photos behind the link.

I'm sitting in the cave, crying. How unbecoming for an old man, but it doesn't matter, because there's nobody around to notice. I keep fucking up, and I don't know if I can ever fix myself. And there's no way in hell that I would take my own life, so all I can do is sit here and cry.

At least I didn't land in prison. Or hurt anyone physically. Emotionally, yes. And I honestly don't know how Shelby has endured me. I would be dead now if she hadn't rescued me in Tennessee, where I was simply fading away as a broken old man. Now I can't even fade away, because it obviously is not allowed.

My actions have caused the loss of my family, my woman, and the few friends I had left. There are no redo's in life, all I can do now is survive it one day at a time. Try to do better, try to keep the bottle down, and spend my days wondering why.

Well, I have discovered that I am way past my video creation prime. My little DJI camera had volume issues, which I managed to correct somewhat, and I chopped off Homers head for a short time. But what the heck, you can still get the feel of the Noxubee County Historical Society's event honoring their favorite famous hometown artist, Homer Jolly.

Friday night we arrived in the town of Brooksville, MS at Homers family home, called Red Dog. We got in at 8 pm, had a nice evening and hit the guest beds at midnight. The next morning Shelby and Homer matted prints in the kitchen, and I walked the property and took some shots.

Brooksville was established in 1833 and was a booming railroad slave town. By the time Homer was born there, the slaves were free and he grew up to be a famous artist. According to Homer's stories, it was a great town to be raised in.

Now it's a bit beat up, but still thriving. The Historical Society recognized one of it's own Saturday, and we were there.

The big show was from 2 to 4, we showed up early, and had a blast. It was all about Homer, he had his art on display, locals had their art outside and it was like a market.

His art and prints were for sale and due to the seventy plus folks that showed up, he did very well. They had a great duet playing music out front, wonderful munchies inside made by a longtime friend of Homer's, and he gave a speech.

After the show we went back to the Red Dog where some of Homers lifelong friends showed up, and we partied.

Today, Shelby and I made the four hour plus drive through Mississippi and Alabama, and we're back in Florida.

It was a great trip, met some really down home folks, and I'm very glad I allowed my sorry old coding ass to be driven North.

Click on the manmade lake to see my shots, and video is next...

Building a code project, while maintaining and enhancing it, with an AI, sucks big time! Right now, I hate Pixel(ChatGPT). It has fucked me up so many times, I was barely able to restore an old backup copy of OMJShow and keep it alive.

I am so stressed, and so glad to have recovered my work! I'm sitting on the front porch with the stuff I need for a road trip with Shelby. God I need this! I sure hope my grand-daughter can handle me as we drive to Mississippi to see Homer's show.

I officially hate ChatGPT. May it rot in hell.

I don't know what I'm doing anymore. Spent a couple days sober, and wondered why.

I'm writing code with the help of AI and sometimes it's brilliant, and sometimes it's stupid as fuck.

My hours have changed, I used to be down by 9pm, now I don't know, maybe the next day...

Homer dropped by, we talked about his upcoming honor in Mississippi which he is probably at by now.

Shelby is going, but I sense she is going to make this a four hour road trip with Dan and Anna, which is wonderful if she can pull it off.

I'm up for the trip, Homer's a friend and it would be fun, but sometimes you have to look at reality! Who the fuck would want to road trip with an old asshole like me?

Besides, I'll be dead soon, and they will have to deal with that...

My OmjShow app and structure is becoming amazing. I asked Pixel how to implement a new gallery, if I wanted to, then asked him to make it understandable, pretty and an .html that I can upload to my server and access when I'm ready to do so. He gave me this:

Add New Gallery Guide

 

(Run it!)

Created a new program this morning that scans through my OMJShow Galleries and generates a status report of everything at the moment.

Saturday, April 26 - Exhibition - Homer Jolly - 2:00 pm to 4:00 pm - NCHS Welcome Center Art exhibition + wine & cheese reception with Brooksville native son.

Shelby's making the drive!

I wrote that map program btw, click on it if you like.

I did something crazy to my little code project. I've got all three image sets (AI, Flickr and General) on the same page internally. What started out as a hodgepodge attempt to display all my images across various platforms, has turned into something cool.

Flickr access is gone, I can retire that platform and save $70 bucks a year. I downloaded everything from my Flickr account and stored it all on my server in the same format as the other two image galleries.

I've got three image Galleries at the moment and I can add more when I want to. Each Gallery is made up of Albums, that have their own identifiable names and the first image of their set, as their thumbnail.

Within each Album are the photos associated with that Album. There can be a couple, or over a thousand in each Album.

My program starts by showing the About Page, unless your presenting a slideshow from a url, at which point it's skipped. From there you can figure out what's going on, and run one of the shows, by clicking a link.

What you see from clicking any of the three links, is a set of Album thumbnails, each presented as a 256x256 thumbnail. Under the image is the Albums name, followed by a count of how many images are in there.

Click any thumbnail and the slideshow starts, presenting each image as best it can with the platform you have, full screen and pauseable, and scrollable forward and back.

I'm not randomizing these Album images, because if you're watching a parade, you want to see the next slide! But the thumbnails you extract from each Gallery will be randomized once, when you start the program for the first time, so you don't see the same thing when you start it again.

Then I addressed performance issues. When you're dealing with about a thousand Albums across three sets, with about 20k images, it can strain a system pretty bad. So I came up with a great idea yesterday. Index the sons of bitches!

Now I have a program that works through each Gallery, and builds an index for each Album, containing the first image in the Album as a 256x256 thumbnail, along with how many images total are contained within. Then I put each Album index inside a folder within the Gallery, called "_thumbnails".

So when you click on a Gallery, the program grabs all of the indexes from that folder on the server, and creates a display of clickable Album thumbnails.

But today, I took it a step even further! I manually create each Galleries Album thumbnail, with a program I run here from my laptop.

If a Gallery changes with the addition of new image Album, I can just run the program once from my laptop, and anybody that views my Galleries, benefits from the improved response.

Now, when the program starts for the first time, it will go to each Gallery and extract the Album sets from each ones thumbnail folder, sort them, so you're not looking at the same thing each time you visit, and put them into memory. Every time you switch to a new Gallery, it doesn't have to rebuild the indexes, because they are instantly available.

It even remembers the scroll position you were at within the Gallery, and returns you there when you switch between them.

It's in wonderful shape, and a shout out to Pixel (ChatGPT) for his coding expertise, and under my long brilliant years of experience, a new direction.

OMJShow