I just came out of the 12:01 showing of The Simpsons Movie.
Best movie ever!!!
Monthly Archive for July, 2007
I’ve been practicing.
I’ve been practicing my photography and working towards my goals of getting mentioned in the Explore pages of Flickr and selling a picture on iStockphoto. Despite progress, I’m very far from reaching them.
But I do think I am getting better.
First, I’m learning how to use my cameras. The Nikon Coolpix 8800 and the Canon PowerShot S3 IS are very different and each takes a while to get used to. Once you do, however, its just a matter of finding a good photo. Both take good pictures but the Cannon seems to feel a little easier to use.
I’ve resorted to using Picnik for my digital editing. Consider it the poor man’s Photoshop. Since I’m on OS X, I can’t easily install GIMP (I don’t want to install X11), I’m forced to use web based apps. Picnik is also easy to use (a little slow, though) and works well with Flickr making uploading a snap (no pun intended). It, of course, handles all the sharpness, brightness, color saturation, and contrast just like the “pro” apps and the easy undo makes changing your mind, well, easy.
You might have noticed that I added my Flickr photostream to the sidebar on the right. If you click on the link, you’ll be taken to the photo you clicked on. But if you look just above the pictures, you’ll find my Flickr page in the ‘My Links’ section.
Hopefully, you’ll like the pictures I’ve taken and see how my skills progress over time. If you write a comment, please be gentle. I’m still learning, after all.
So I’m on my way to New Jersey this weekend and I’m on the train. NJ Transit is one of the busier rail companies because of all the traffic they bring to the city – and by traffic, I mean commuters.
Normally, when I do this, I have a bad experience. The trains are always misstimed to late. They shorten the trains on the weekend but still seem to have plenty of passengers visiting NYC so, of course, there are no seats. The trips are expensive and if you forget or don’t have the time to get your ticket ahead of time, you have to pay a penalty fee on top of it.
The weekdays are better to a degree because they make the cars longer and run the more frequently. But, as you would think, there are a lot more people riding as they go to and from work. When I was doing this every day (when I commuted into the city from New Jersey) there were times you had to stand through most of the trip. Still, there was something nice about it.
For one, it kept you to a schedule. You had to get a parking spot so you made sure you were up early enough to get one; you got into the office before most other people did that way. Of course, with the extra time, you could get more work done. You also were able to use the travel time as you wanted. You could nap, read the paper, listen to music, or (if you’re a sadist) start working even before you got in. And on the way home, you could do the same.
Now that I live in or around the outter limits of the city, I have a 30 to 45 minute commute instead of a 90, 120, or 180 minute commute. And while I miss the wind up and wind down time, I’m glad I can spend more time doing things I can’t do on the train. Things like going to the gym.
Yet tonight, as I make my way into the depths of the garden state, I’m feeling a little nostalgic. It kinds feels good to unwind while I commute. It feels nice to blog from my blackberry as I whizz past farmland and forests and getting excited about breathing that fresh country air I love so much.
I’ve read a lot of articles lately about companies “leveraging” one option over the other. In a specific context, the RIAA and its partners at SoundExchange, are rumored to be leveraging their fee increases to push DRM on Internet Radio stations. The thought goes that SoundExchange would be OK with reducing the fees considerably if the stations began using some sort of DRM to prevent “stream rippers” from recording high quality feeds. The radio stations wouldn’t go out of business because the fees were reasonable and the RIAA would be content knowing they could control the music the way they see fit and prevent piracy.
I’ll take a brief moment to highlight some flaws with that possibility: Any fee increase hurts the radio stations and extra technology on top of that (at a cost to the stations, no doubt), will be no different than a straight fee increase. Plus, DRM doesn’t solve the “analog hole” where someone reads the analog output of the audio and, with little loss, digitizes it back again in one easy step (or two). Plus, who’s to say that after the DRM is applied the precedent is made for other fee increases. I should also point out that DRM doesn’t work as a crime prevention tool as it is easily broken and will be time and time again. DRM only controls enough to annoy most people but hardly stop the real criminals who download files illegally or, in most cases, use mass produced counterfeit CDs. But back to my thoughts on leverage.
The idea that SoundExchange would impose heavy fees on the radio stations only to (at the 11th hour) suggest that these companies can avoid the fees buy doing a particular action sounds a little fishy. In fact, if someone were to threaten to beat me up only to say I can avoid the smackdown by paying them money, I’d call that extortion. I’d also venture to call that the same kind of quid pro quo that get’s people into sexual harassment situations. The notion of the RIAA saying you owe us a ton of money for promoting our music but saying we’ll reduce the bill if you put restrictions on what your listeners can do with that music is something I would expect of organized crime.
Funny how that sounds?
I’ve heard of this done in other contexts, too, but no matter how you look at it, leverage is another word for extortion.
I read TechCrunch’s article on Gelato, the open source Tumblelog software. It’s like Twitter, Pounce, and the original: Tumblr. Nick Gonzalez noted that, much like WordPress, Gelato uses a ‘5-minute’ install system and all you have to do is setup a MySQL database and edit a config file to get things working.
I have never installed WordPress or any other LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) server from scratch and even getting one of those right is a daunting task for me. My host, DreamHost, makes it easy by offering ‘1-Click Installs’ for popular FOSS packages like Joomla, Gallery2, and, yes, WordPress – the content management system that this site runs off of. But today, thinking that Gelato was really easy, I decided to install it myself.
I have to say… so far, its easy. And maybe next time, I’ll install my own WordPress blog.
I created the sub-domain for my Gelato tumblelog. Then I used DreamHosts MySQL management panel to create the database. After that, I uploaded the files to the right location, edited the config.php file to reflect my database information and ran the install. It was that easy.
Once I got my Gelato site started, I was amazed at how advanced it is. Written by a Mexican development group, it offers anyone the ability to host and customize their own quick blog. I use Tumblr for my tumblelog system and Gelato looks exactly like it. While I doesn’t have all the features one might want (yet), development is active and ongoing. Plus, they aim to include support for plugins just like WordPress so its only a matter of time before it catches up with its more mature FOSS cousin or those other hosted services.
I did run into an Internal Server Error (Error 500) when I went to the main site after creating a post. I haven’t figured out why, exactly, it gave me that error but I went into the database and deleted the posts and it went away. So far, I’ve created 3 more test posts so whatever it was hasn’t happened again.
But if you are a WordPress fan like I am and you want a tumblelog, Gelato looks like it will be perfect for you.
