SuperSatellite ||

It has been a busy week for me, and I apologize that I haven’t found time to get any thoughts added to the ol’ blog recently.  I did accomplish a lot this week, however.  And I’ll also be gone a chunk of next week, so you can safely predict it’ll be a few days until a new post after this one (unless I get ambitious and inspired tomorrow.  Don’t bet on it).  Luckily, there’s always Twitter!

I started and completed the little task of adding a set of stairs to the side of my porch finally, so that we don’t have to jump up and down it (yes, we have front steps, but we never go that way).  Basically did a task each day (I was going to say a “step each day,” but I think the double meaning would have been too confusing.  For me, not you).  I used my grandparents’ front steps as inspiration, though theirs are done in a half moon shape.  I didn’t want to dig up that much brick to do that.  Click the image to see photos through the process.  All the brick came from around the house.  I think I’ll eventually use some to make a path down to the sidewalk.  I also think I’ll start all the porch railing this month as well, which should finish the porch out nicely.

The bad part is how very much it hurt.  There’s no good reason for that.  When I moved to Pittsburg, I helped dad do construction all over the place, and even found myself doing whole sidewalks of brick without a complaint from my back.  It never mattered.  Finishing that top step all at once today just broke me down though.  I had been subscribing to the “work through the pain, you’re just out of shape” mantra lately.  After this, I’m starting to kind of question that.  It’s not even that what I did was so hard.  Dig up a few brick, wash them, and mix a few buckets of concrete and mortar.  I think more it was the frequent up and down.  A good hot shower seems to have loosened things up, but I still feel like I was in a car wreck.

Random fact I just learned: Stephen Lynch starred in the lead role in The Wedding Singer on Broadway.

I shall be out of town again this week.  I’m headed back to Miami Mon-Wed for some developer boot camp with the folks who created dotCMS (partly in preparation for our user training on campus at the end of this week).  Sadly, I won’t be there long enough to enjoy the Miami scenery, but hey, hooray for company condos.  Also, I get to eat at that good sushi place near CocoWalk, who’s name I now can’t remember.  And why aren’t there any nonstop flights to MIA from MCI?  Joplin also needs to run more shuttles to MCI through the day, that’d be a much more convenient drive.  I really hate the drive to MCI by myself whenever I have to fly somewhere.  Anyway, I’ll try to follow up after the training by sharing some of what I learn (or at least what I understand, heh).

I finally sucked it up and upgraded to a Flickr Pro account.  Having done so, I readily admit I should have done it sooner, and it is well worth the $25 a year, and I’ve only had it about four days.  I have already uploaded what I am pretty sure is my whole photo collection, got them sorted and tagged and everything.  Sorry Picasa.  Not sure what pushed me over the edge, other than scrounging up twenty-five bucks and having enough curiosity to make it worth blowing.  The interface is simple but flexible enough that it really seems like it will serve me well.

My neighbor caught me outside today while I was working.  Apparently he works at Pitt Plastic.  For whatever random reason, he hooked me up with a few rolls of trash bags.  Not complaining, it was just a little out of nowhere (when was the last time your neighbor went out of his way to supply you with trash bags?).  However, now I don’t need to buy more trash bags until I’m 38.

If you have been following my tweets lately, you might have noticed that I’ve been fighting over which service I would prefer to use: Flickr or Picasa. This has resulted in far more headache than I would have initially thought, and I still don’t feel any closer to coming up with an answer. I thought by sharing my opinions, maybe you could toss some feedback my way that might help the decision making process. You may also ridicule and taunt me, as it pleases you.

I am not a photographer. I enjoy taking pictures, and I believe that I take relatively good ones, given my amateurish state. But I admit that it’s just a small hobby. Until now, I have used a Coppermine powered gallery that I kept on my personal server for managing and sharing my pictures. This works relatively well. To be perfectly honest, the only real reason I even care to switch is because I’d like to connect to more social tools through my photos. My own hidden little gallery site doesn’t do that. I also don’t have a lot of interest in keeping the software maintained, so I end up with older software that is a pain in the butt to update. But, I’m also not looking for 100,000 people to drool over my pictures. Mostly it’ll be stuff from plays I work on, or trips I take, things none of you care about (even though you try to act interested).

And here’s the matchup. Flickr is clearly a more socially driven web site. It’s purpose is more closely linked with my goal, I think. But, they lack a good desktop app for organizing pictures like Picasa does. They have an uploader application, which seems to work well enough, but I’d like my offline archive to basically mirror what I have online (at the moment, my photos folder is a pretty big mess, I admit it). Flickr is also pretty crippled if you don’t spend $24.95 a year on a pro account. Without it, you only get to use three sets (albums), which is, frankly, useless to me. You also only get to upload 100MB of photos a month, which if you are trying to migrate to their service, is also pretty useless. I said I’m not a photographer, but I still have a solid 2GB+ of photo (not that I need to share them all, but if I can, I probably will share most). However, with pro, you get unlimited everything for the most part. Storage, bandwidth, sets, collections, even video (if you care. I don’t).

Picasa has a slightly different purpose. It is geared more towards what Coppermine did for me; simply provide online gallery/album functionality. It’s desktop app is nice for organizing offline, and it integrates right into web albums. You get unlimited albums out of the gates, and a full gig of storage with no upload limits per month. But, extra storage (10GB) starts at $20/yr. Cheaper than Flickr Pro, but Flickr Pro gives you unlimited storage for five bucks more. Alternatively, you can do more for free through Picasa, just at a loss to some of the social networking features Flickr has. If you need more than 10GB, the price starts hurting.

My problem is basically that I can’t easily decide what kind of user I am, or what my goal is. I fall right in the middle of one big gray area, like Nick-at-Nite TVLand poop. Ideally, the systems should just merge into one super warehouse, like my crappy Photoshopped graphic above intimates. $25 a year isn’t much, but a lot of what I’d pay for I could have through Picasa for free. And using Flickr leaves me stuck managing stuff offline through something else. I could use Picasa as a purely offline file manager, but that’s like using it and wasting half the purpose of it. Half a dozen of one, six of another. I sure as hell don’t want to do both, I’d like one solution that answers my needs.

You could solve this problem for me, of course. Just sponsor a Flickr Pro account for me, and that will make up my mind for me. It’s not that I’m cheap, it’s just that I’m cheap.

Update: I almost forgot to mention; Brad Ward has a nice blog writeup on Flickr over at SquaredPeg on Flickr, and using it to manage your photos.  I read it the other day and it was really what got me thinking that Flickr might be the way to go.