I haven’t felt much like writing anything here of late, but I started to get into the habit of carrying my camera with me everywhere. Since the camera is handy, I’m taking more photos¹. When I walked out of the house the other day, the light on this bush in our appealed to me

¹ Just snapshots really.

Red Flowers © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

11 Dec 2007. Iowa. Cedar Rapids. The weather did suck. Mightly. 12 Dec 2007 everything was coated in a beautiful¹ layer of ice. Fortunately my employer allows me to work from home and I did so yesterday. I still went outside, cleared off the cars and moved them to the other side of the street. Just in case the plows decided to make another pass at cleaning up our street. It wasn’t too bad out but I had a blazing headache, plus work to do and all. I took my camera outside with me and snapped a few hurried photos before rushing back inside to the warmth. Then I spent the day fighting my headache and trying to get some work done. But you don’t care about my suffering, you want pretty pictures. So go look at them already!

¹ Beautiful provided you didn’t have to clear it off your car and try heading into work.

Ice Storm Photos © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

I couldn’t resist joining in on all the fun, helping to promote Mr. Scalzi’s write-in bid to become the SFWA president. My apologize to Grant Wood for bastardizing his painting but it made for a good joke (I hope). This poster was created entirely in GIMP and uses a Creative Commons licensed picture of Mr. Scalzi that I found on Flickr.

I should probably give you a bit of background, as not all of my readers necessarily read Mr. Scalzi’s blog on a daily basis. On 15 March 2007, Mr. Scalzi received his ballot for this years SFWA elections. After looking it over, he decided he had some problems with it and posted a note on his blog that he was now a write-in candidate. The next day he posted some promotional images/posters made for him by various fans. A couple of days passed and still he kept talking about this whole SFWA election. Naturally, this kept the fans pouring in with comments and additional images. Finally I could resist the siren’s lure no more and created the image you see here.

Update: For the closest thing to an explanation of the bacon on a cat thing, you’ll need to read this post over at the Whatever.

Scalzi for SFWA President © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

30th January, 2007

A pair of items for your attention:

1. In our ongoing efforts to Make Flickr Better®, we’re introducing two additional limits: the new maximum number of contacts is 3,000 contacts (good luck with that), and each photo on Flickr can have a maximum of 75 tags.

We love your freedom, but, in this particular case, limiting these things will actually improve the system performance, making pages load faster across the site for everyone and cut out some unwelcome spammy behaviors. Both of these new limits apply equally to free and pro account members.

If you have questions or comments about these changes, we’ve opened a topic in Flickr Help.

2. On March 15th, 2007 we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

We’re making this change now to simplify the sign in process in advance of several large projects launching this year, but some Flickr features and tools already require Yahoo! IDs for sign in — like the mobile site at m.flickr.com or the new Yahoo! Go program for mobiles, available at http://go.yahoo.com.

If you still sign in using the email-based Flickr system (here), you can make the switch at any time in the next few months, from today till the 15th. (After that day, you’ll be required to merge before you continue using your account.) To switch, start at this page: http://flickr.com/account/associate/

Complete details and answers to most common questions are available here: http://flickr.com/help/signin/

If you have questions or comments about signing in with a Yahoo! ID, speak up!

Then Yahoo! decided to start using pictures posted to Flickr for their new Wii portal. As near as I can tell no announcement was made about this; they just started doing it.

To many these things seem petty an unimportant but it’s caused quite the uproar in the Flickr community and said uproar is bleeding over onto other sites (e.g. Digg). Are these things really worth all the anger spilling out? It’s all a matter of perspective. The new limitations on contacts and tags aren’t anything I forsee as causing me problems. I don’t have anywhere near that many contacts and cannot imagine having them. As for 75 tags, that seems like it would take an obsessive amount of work to get that many tags on a photo.

Since that’s more of a none issue let’s move on to one causing a much bigger stink, the forced merger of people’s Flickr & Yahoo accounts. For those unfamiliar, Flickr used to be a separate company. Back in those days one could sign up with Flickr using nothing more than an email address¹. Signing up with Yahoo! requires considerably more detailed personal information. This by itself is enough to cause some people to be very nervous about merging their accounts. There have also been reports about people having problems merging their accounts and concerns about how Flickr/Yahoo! will handle some people having multiple Flickr accounts. Especially since Yahoo! has a habit of deleting accounts they think are inactive if you don’t log in frequentally enough. It’s a lot to take in and many of the “Old Skool“² Flickr users aren’t happy about it. While I do have a Yahoo! account, I’ve yet to merge my Flickr account with it. I liked having them separate, but very soon I won’t have any choice. While I sympathize with the Old Skoolers, I’ll be combing my accounts before the deadline and find the excitement over this issue to be more than a bit overblown.

The last issue is probably the most interesting as from a quick reading of Flickr’s TOS and an immediately small knowledge of copyright law; this seems like a sticky widget of a situation. According to Flickr’s TOS, any images pulled from Flickr must link directly back to that photo on Flickr. What Yahoo! did with their Wii Portal is to take thumbnails and initially link to a secondary page before linking back to the original photo on Flickr. Plus, Yahoo! was originally just grabbing any photo on Flickr tagged with Wii. This included photos marked as © All Rights Reversed and photos marked with Creative Commons licenses forbidding commercial use. This angered even more of the Flickr community and Yahoo! did eventually change their Wii portal to only grab photos with appropriate licenses.

Personally, I any one of these issues would be enough to stir up a hornet’s nest of trouble within the Flickr community. But having all of them happen so close on top of one another was enough to really get some people’s blood boiling. Will I be abandoning Flickr over all this? No, I like the community too much and I still plan on integrating this gallery on this site more into Flickr. However I will be keeping a much closer eye on where Yahoo! takes Flickr as we move on into the new year.

¹ For the free accounts anyway.
² This is what some of the Flickr users who signed up in the pre-Yahoo! days call themselves. For the record, I also signed up (for a free account) in those days and I don’t consider myself an Old Skool user.

“Flick” This Controversy © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Using my feed? © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Mr. Coulton also has a selection of his other songs (also CC licensed) on his website which are worth downloading.

Creative Commons Works! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Office Master 64% Tastefulness, 41% Originality, 45% Deliberateness, 29% Sexiness

[Tasteful Conventional Deliberate Prissy]Your style is professional. Your clothes always fit the situation and you probably never offend people by, say, wearing pink to a funeral. You just know what becomes. You don’t like extravagance too much and you’re not accidental. Your well chosen, stylish outfits communicate that you’re a serious person. Following classic rules about dressing, you make sure that no one would call you flashy and many people admire your calm, composed look. The opposite style from yours is Fashion Rebel [Flamboyant Original Random Sexy]. All the categories: Fashion Enemy Bar Cruiser Kid Next Door Sex Bomb Hippie Kid Fashion Rebel Fashion Artist Catwalk God(ess) Librarian Sporty Hottie Office Master Uptown Girl/ Boy Brainy Student Movie Star Fashionista Glamorous Soul

The Deviant Geek You answered 81% of the questions as a geek truly would.

You’re a geek and you know it. You’ve got all sorts of fringe hobbies and socially unacceptable tendencies. Chances are, whenever possible, you hate to be grouped with other people and sometimes go out of your way just to be different. You’re smart too. You’re more willing to depend on your own brainpower to solve problems, instead of relying on others to pull you through life. You probably read a lot, and generally enjoy learning new things. So what’s it all mean? You may be considered by some to be uncool, but you probably don’t care either. In social situations you may be either slightly passive or slightly loud (geeks always fall into the extremes). In a nutshell, you answered enough questions correctly supporting a geek philosophy to be considered a more potent geek than 60% of the population.

Not even 8Gs? Shucks, there goes my get-rick-quick scheme. ;)

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 9/10 correct!

Quizziness © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Things Hagrid the Half-Giant Would Say If He Served Jesus Instead of Harry Potter.
• Con as in Convention!
• Ding!
• Regarding New Orleans
• Badger Badger Badger
• Coffee So Strong.….…. [Editor] I don’t know seems like it’s kind of weak coffee to me if you actually have to drink it to wake up from the Matrix. With truly coffee, smelling the aroma of it should be enough to do that.
• Exploring Communities, Questions and Concerns of Lesbian Video Gamers

Not from Pukka

• Scone recipe: how to make/bake/cook fruit scones
• President Bush: Sell the Ranch
• Reader² [Editor] It’s kind of like del.ico.us or Flickr but for books.
• iTunes Tip: The “Perfect” equalizer setting [Editor] On the off chance that this blog is your sole source of news; Apple released a new version of iTunes this week. Along with the first iTunes enabled cellphone from Cingular/Motorola and more importantly, the iPod Mini replacement.… the iPod nano. Yum!
• Escape Key
• The Signal [Editor] This is a podcast by fans of the cult favorite TV show, Firefly. Firefly came out back in 2002, quickly gained a devote following but the dorks in charge of FOX killed it after showing only 11 of the 14 produced episodes had been made. The Singal’s goal is to pump up support for the movie follow-up to the tv show, Serenity. I just started listening to it this week and have nearly caught up to the current shows. Probably my favorite one so far is the one where they interview Gina Torres. Although the interviews are cool my favorite segements are the “learning chinese” bits; they lend a whole new insight into various scenes in the series. All the more I have to say about that is 易爆的大象腹泻 ¹.

Oh and in case you’re wondering about almost total lack of posts this week… We’re going into our next beta at work (much extra crudola to deal with). Additionally, I’ve been trying (and pretty much failing) to write an online, registration form for a local sci-fi con² that captures the data we need and accepts payments via PayPal. *sigh*

¹ Explosive elephant diarrhea (chinese translation obtained via Babelfish).
² ICON 30

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Hmm? Oh yeah, the link is flickrTagFight. The idea is very simple; you input 2 terms and the site returns a seletion of photos from flickr with those tags (as well as telling you how many photos have the tag). The site even provides a handy dropdown box for you to select some of the classic battles of the ages (good vs. evil, cat vs. dog, etc..).

My battle of choice? Read on to find out!

It’s “Sushi vs. Pizza” tonight here on flickrTagDeathMatch!!!! In this corner, known for being all too raw and ready to go. The oriental mad man.…. SUSHI! In the opposite corner, known for being hot & greasy. The american favorite.… PIZZA! And the fight has started! BAM! CRASH! ZAP! The images are loading on my screen now! *whew* What a match that was! Folks, if you weren’t here tonight; you’ve missed a battle of epic proportions a cool website. The like of which I’ve not seen in my 20 years covering the ring 10 minutes or so of writing up this silly narrative. Such fury and rage has never before been seen in the ring website! The clashing of heavily muscled bodies, flinging each other about the ring nicely taken photos of artfully prepared sushi and heavily-loaded pizzas all on the same page! And the undisputed champion of tonight’s match is the one, the only SUSHI!¹

¹ At the time of this writing, Flickr had 6480 photos tagged with Sushi vs. 5100 for Pizza.

flickrTagFight © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Not from Pukka
• Howto: Digital Black and White
• My BlogPulse Neighborhood

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.