despite the dementia clock, my grand uncle still called my parents early this morning, just to let my father know that the clock was working. we'll have to wait until tomorrow morning and see if he learns not to call when it's so early.

i'm slowly emptying out my hallway closet so i can throw away anything i don't want, move some infrequently used items into the basement, and to basically create more usable space in the closet. that i should be doing this we a new roommate due to arrive in 3 more days is kind of risky. worst case scenario, i shove everything back into the closet if i don't have enough time to organize it all.

with the superbowl just 11 days away, i couldn't get enough of football coverage. anything, from sports websites, to reddit, to sports shows, if they were talking about the superbowl, i wanted to watch. at my parents' place i pulled up ESPN and the NFL Network.

my 2nd aunt gave my mother her google account information. i used it to upload all the photos she took with her camera (about 1500) as well as old photos she had stored on her thumb drive (500). it was about 15GB worth of data so it took a while, but much faster with the verizon FIOS at my parents' place which download and upload at 50Mbps (compare with my comcast cable which uploads at 5Mbps maximum). after it finished uploading, google photos gave me a warning that about 50 photos weren't uploaded because of errors. i saw the list and matched it with the copies on my computer. sure enough, those files were all corrupted. something must've happened to the card when i copied the photos. i tried running a photo rescue scan on the card, but after the initial 99.9% scan, the final bits were taking forever and each sector issued an error. figuring the card was corrupted and those 50 photos weren't salvageable, i decided to erase the card. that was the weird thing: the card wouldn't erase. it wasn't a write-protection tab issue, because i checked, and also used two different readers (this was a microSDHC card) and none of them worked. so looks like the card is fried. the weird thing is it mounts to the desktop, but mounts as a locked partition, no way to unlock, therefore no way to reformat.

i played episodes of the young pope with chinese subtitles for my parents before i left for cambridge.

i did some more work on the dementia clock (v3). i used google fonts for some better looking typeface, but ran into a probably where the screen flashes for a split second every time the page auto-refreshed (every 60 seconds). i couldn't find a fix so ended up going with generic system san serif font. i animated the colon in the time display so it's more like a real digital clock. i haven't used blink tags in ages and was surprised that they're no longer supported on any modern browsers. instead i got to use a bit of css animation.