Here’s another cool Flickr thing, a calendar showing when you’ve posted pictures in the last five weeks.:
Each day is a link that brings you a page with pictures for that day. Nothing real fancy, but it does look pretty cool I think. You can also view calendars by month.
When the whole podcasting thing started to take off I found I was quite into it, but then RL got in the way a bit and it kind of fell off my radar. Interestingly enough, this happened when I stopped being good about using the treadmill three times a week. Today as I was getting ready to walk I realized I needed something to listen to and decided I needed to upgrade iPodderX and start listening again.
iPodderX looks like it is really progressing nicely, even if I’m going to end up having to shell out some $$ for it soon. It’s got some really slick features, and I’ve already found one feature that I want in it. It lets you set the genre of what you download, which is cool, but I want to be able to access other tags also. iTunes has one called ‘grouping’ which I use for any extra data/keywords to describe the track. For instance, anime soundtracks are in genre soundtracks with anime in the grouping tag. So I’d love to be able to put ‘podcast’ into the grouping (as well as any other info).
Now I need to get off my ass and figure out where to set up my turntables so I can start doing a mix of the week podcast.
In the world of bizzare news:
Pickled cats thrown at police
Hamilton woman angry at police confiscation of pickled snakes so threw a jar of pickled kittens at them
It has been revealed a Hamilton woman was so angry about police taking her three preserved snakes that she stormed into the station and threw a jar of pickled kittens at the counter.
The jar shattered. [NZCity News]
I personally think the sentence “It has been revealed a Hamilton woman was so angry about police taking her three preserved snakes that she stormed into the station and threw a jar of pickled kittens at the counter.” would make a great entry into the Bulwer-Lytton Contest.
About 2 weeks ago I received a Nikon D70 Digital SLR camera in trade for some computer work I’ve been doing for a neighbor. I’ve long wanted an SLR of any type and this has helped energize the creative side of me a bit. It also means I’ve been putting pictures online more and making much more use of Flickr. Which has also led to many of my friends asking “so what’s so great about this Flickr thing anyways?”
Flickr is a photo hosting/sharing service from ludicorp that’s been in beta for a while now. I think I first started using it around 8 months ago, but didn’t really get into it until the new camera. I’d fiddled around with running my own photo gallery software a few times, tried a few other services, but nothing really jumped out at me until Flickr. Flickr is all about finding ways to organize and ways to share your photos. Like most other photo hosting services you can upload pictures, create photosets (albums), etc. It also has a bit of social networking type stuff built in so that you can choose to only share photos with your friends or family.
But where Flickr has really hooked me is with some of the other features. The biggest of which are tags. Tags are keywords you can add to a photo to provide more data about it. For instance, in this photo that I uploaded there are a bunch of tags. I can then choose to look at only pictures of mine with the tag ‘squirrel’, or I could see all the public photos on Flickr that have the tag ‘squirrel’. You can also put notes onto a picture that show up when you mouse over a certain area. Oh yes, and they also have it set up so that you can post your pictures to your blog or LiveJournal from within Flickr and they accept photocam posts too.
One thing the tagging system has done is that some tags have a following. People will take pictures that can be tagged with a certain keyword. One of my favorites is squaredcircle, where people post pictures of circular things in a squared image. This one has enough of a following that someone has created a group for pictures like this (groups are things you can join which have their own photo collections).
The other thing that made Flickr my choice for a photo hosting service was that someone wrote a plugin for iPhoto so that you can export your pictures straight from iPhoto (instead of saving them and uploading with the web site or one of their uploading tools). When it’s this easy I can’t help but want to post stuff all the time.
Flickr is currently free, also also has a Pro option. With a free account you can upload 10MB of pictures a month, have 3 photosets, and people can view the 100 most recent images you have uploaded. The Pro account offers quite a bit more, you can upload 1GB per month, there’s unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth use, unlimited photosets, and permanent archiving of high-res images. In the future Ad-free browsing will be added to that. You can check out their FAQ for more info.
The last thing I have to say about Flickr is that it has really inspired me to really learn more about taking pictures and to actually get out there and take them. The other day someone invited me to a group called ‘sky‘. For the next few days I was on the road and everywhere I went I kept looking for good shots of the sky (and I finally got one I really liked). It really ends up being quite addicting after a bit.
Oh, and no, Flickr isn’t paying me to rave on and on about how I like them. I just think it’s one of the cooler sites out there and want more of my friends to use it.
Pepsi has a new version for the holidays: Holiday Spice Pepsi. You too can enjoy pepsi with the taste of cinnamon and ginger while you sip your holiday pepsi.
A picture of me that I don’t completely hate. My friend Brian took this while playing with my new camera.
Oh my, I wonder if someone at CNN will lose their job over this. The lesson, be careful what you name your files (even if it is accurate).
Boston.com has an article on how parents feel that long term papers are too much work for high school students.
…But Laurie Mokriski, also a PTSO member, said she worries because the papers contribute significantly to students’ already-heavy academic loads. Newton parents met earlier this month to discuss homework and agreed their children have too much, Mokriski said. They also need time for sports, theater, music, and academic teams, she said. ”They’re trying to enjoy their high school years,” she said.
Denise Clark Pope, author of ”Doing School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed Out Materialistic and Miseducated Students,” argues that today’s high school students are overworked. [boston.com]
Is it me or does this just seem like too much whining. I remember having term papers that were at least 10 pages long in High School. I thought everyone had to do that kind of thing. I like how because the kids have so many extra-curricular activities, we have to give them less academic work.
A few years after I graduated from high school, my school started doing mock elections. Since 1988 their mock election has accurately chosen the eventual winner. VOTES 2004 was today, and the winner was… John Kerry! Let’s hope their record of success continues.
It’s a pretty interesting setup. From the web page:
Two schools from each state participate in the highlight of the month-long projectâ€â€a mock election at which a winner is declared just days before the general election. The VOTES election is unique in that it simulates the electoral college process of selecting a candidate: the winner must earn at least 270 out of 538 electoral votes.
And here is the breakdown of the results:
Candidate
John Kerry
George Bush
Ralph Nader
David Cobb
Michael Badnarik
Michael Peroutka
OthersElectoral Votes
326
212
0
0
0
0
0Popular Votes
26,920
22,771
2,253
758
572
230
56Percentage
50.20%
42.50%
4.40%
1.40%
1.00%
0.40%
0.10%Voter Turnout 70%
Pretty cool I must say. I can’t wait to see how accurate it is this year.
Last night I was at a birthday party for a neighbor that was held at Real Art Ways in Hartford. I’d never been there before and it’s a neat little place (and their movie theatre has some interesting sounding things coming up). One of the exhibits there was by Laura Carton and featured pictures that were originally porn that had been downloaded from the net, and then had the people in them removed with the help of photoshop. It definitely changes one views them once you find that out.
The thing is, the concept sounded so damn familiar. I knew I’d heard about it before, and had a feeling it was from BoingBoing. So, this morning I did a bit of searching about and discovered it had been on BoingBoing. And not only on BoingBoing, but by a posted by guestblogger there: the amazing Susannah Breslin.