- I’ve ranted about the 24-hour news cycle and how I think it’s responsible for any number of ills, but today on my way back in from lunch I spotted the headline on CNN: “Deadly Flu: Nowhere is safe!”
Now, this may well be actually true, but honestly, it would be nice if the news actually brought perspective and insight to its reporting rather than sensationalism. I remain a dreamer.
- eloren says to me toward the end of a long and somewhat troublesome workday: “I can’t even go home and crawl into bed and pretend today didn’t happen, because I have to help Ryan [her son] build a bug. It’s build a bug day.”
Immediately, I imagined a sort of Goreyesque spin-off of the Build-A-Bear workshop. I’m uncertain if it’s unfortunate or just as well that I don’t have the money and time to pursue these ideas I have.
- Speaking of ideas, can anyone actually explain Japanese culture to me? I don’t mean the shoguns and the samurai and the Bushido Code and all that. All of *that* I understand. I want to know where this stuff comes from.
- Only a few people actually asked me questions in the "ask me anything" meme the other day. I’m still open for them if you want. A couple of them gave me good ideas for more involved posts, which I hope to be writing in the near future. So don’t be shy — I really do want to hear from you, if only to assuage my insecurity that anyone actually reads this journal any more. 🙂
- While pulling out my little snapshot camera and checking its battery, I realised I never uploaded the few photos I managed to take at Gafilk. Look for those shortly.
- Speaking of photos, I love that Flickr gives me touch-up tools right on the website. One of the reasons I never bothered fixing the red-eye on some of them is that Gallery made it reasonably difficult to replace photos after editing them. They aren’t perfect tools, but it’s better than nothing and means I’m much more likely to try and fix things than before.
- I wish there was a better LJ client for linux. Logjam is ok, but it lacks a preview feature, and Drivel crashed on my Ubuntu system.
Month: April 2009
Since it’s National poetry month, I think I’ll mark today with a poem.
A Sonnet of the Moon
by Charles Best
Look how the pale queen of the silent night
Doth cause the ocean to attend upon her,
And he, as long as she is in his sight,
With her full tide is ready her to honour.
But when the silver wagon of the moon
Is mounted up so high he cannot follow,
The sea calls home his crystal waves to moan,
And with low ebb doth manifest his sorrow.
So you that are the sovereign of my heart
Have all my joys attending on your will;
My joys low-ebbing when you do depart,
When you return their tide my heart doth fill.
So as you come and as you do depart,
Joys ebb and flow within my tender heart.
A very happy birthday wish to my darling kitanzi, the best wife, lover, partner, and friend anyone could ever hope to have.
[lj user=autographedcat]
[lj user=autographedcat]
[lj user=autographedcat]
I promised a meme of some sort recently, and I saw this one over at ljgeoff which intrigued me, so….
Just because I’m curious, have a meme:The One Question Meme (edited to suit me a bit better)
1 honest question, should you care to. 1 honest answer, from me, to that question. You get to ask me 1 question. Any question, anything, no matter how $ADJECTIVE it is.
One catch, that should go without saying: no mentioning the questions or answers to others (actually, this isn’t a big deal to me).
But I challenge you to repost this. And see what people ask you, assuming they do (my luck with similar memes is atrocious; I rarely get asked anything.)
Questions and answers are screened and will be unscreened only with permission.
A long time ago I decided that I really wanted to do something about all the photos I had been taking since I acquired a digital camera. More precisely, I wanted to put them where other people could see them, and that meant on my very own webpage. At first, I used a set of perl scripts I wrote to generate the HTML for each set of photos, but after the collection grew to a certain size, I decided this was cumbersome, and started to investigate other options, and I found Gallery, a PHP project that did everything I wanted for organizing and displaying my various pictures. I did a bit of customization to it to make it fit in with the look and feel of the rest of my site, and was reasonably happy with it.
Not long after that, a lot of people started using the website Flickr. I was bit skeptical of it. “Yeah, that’s ok if you don’t have your own site”, I said, “but I like having more control over my things than that.” (In retrospect, I think I was more than a bit snobbish about this, but we all have our moments of lapse.) And, in truth, I *did* like having the control, but as time has gone by, the software has gotten old and cranky, and the task of upgrading to the new (and very different internally) version of Gallery seemed daunting. And in that time, Flickr grew, developed a large and vibrant community, was acquired by Yahoo, and generally is more or less the default place for people to share their photos. Maybe it was time for a second look.
The more I evaluated it, the more I thought that, were I to move my photos to a new platform, Flickr’s made more sense to me than other available options. So last week, I took the plunge and upgraded my account to a pro account, in order to get the unlimited upload capacity that would be required to transport my collection of nearly 10,000 images. I then spent the next couple of days transporting the photos from my backup to my home pc via a 2GB thumb drive, and uploading them set by set onto the Flickr account.
I’ve finally got everything pretty much sorted and categorized the way I want them. I’m reasonably impressed with Flickr’s web-based tools, though I finally gave up on the Upload Client software they offer, as it was terribly buggy. I also wish there was an obvious way to eliminate duplicate files, which I ran afoul of once when I uploaded a set twice, and ended up having to delete them all and do it a THIRD time, to make sure I only had one set of those photos.
If you’ve never taken a look at my photos, please feel free. I’ve got convention and concert photos from various events I’ve attended over the last 10 years, plus a variety of personal photos, tourism photos, and, of course, an enormous number of photos of my cats. The best place to start is probably here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/autographedcat/collections/
And I love comments, so feel free to leave them if any images particularly strike you.