LaserBlog.com

I don’t know why I don’t check ThinkGeek more often. They have the COOLEST stuff.

M got a USB Fish Tank for xmas from his co-worker, and told me that when in Toronto, he spotted a USB Christmas Tree at Radio Shack. I went to RS today and could not find one, so I checked online and ThinkGeek has all KINDS of neato geeky flashy USB toys!

The lighted USB:
* flashing snowman
* Liquid Fish or Santa-Filled Optical Mouse (non lighted)
* Fish Tank
* flashing christmas tree
* Lighted mousepad

I was wondering… pondering… I wonder if Flickr is going to be a threat to TextAmerica. Now wait, before I go any farther let me just say that I LOVE Textamerica and I don’t want to see any company threaten to be tough competition for them. I’ve just been wondering.

Flickr lets you set up your existing blog, whether it’s at Blogger, an MT blog, a WordPress blog, or other type, so that you can email (like from a cell phone) images straight to your blog. Those images get stored in your Flickr account but also get simultaneously posted to the blog of your choice. You can tell it what size images to post to your blog, what part of the email to use as the body of the blog post, etc.

When I first started this blog, I would take photos while out on the road and then come home, and post them to the blog along w/ commentary. The day after I got my camera phone I signed up w/ Textamerica and got myself a free moblog. After that I decided to pay to make my moblog a premium moblog, more space, no ads.

I’ve used the moblog as a supplement to this blog. Pix from the road of bad drivers and strange merchandise in stores, along with short commentary, have been being posted to my moblog instead of to this blog.

We DID get email-to-blog working for this blog long ago, but including a photo in the email posted a huge, way-too-large copy of the photo, and I had no patience or time to figure out how to change that.

So now, with Flickr, I can email photos sraight to here, the photos display at the size I want, and a copy is in my Flickr account.

I worry that I’ll use this new flickr method more than textamerica.

But-

I don’t want to. Textamerica is neat in and of itself, and I think that a seperate moblog is kinda fun. M and I were discussing this the other day and M’s opinion is that moblogs are different from blogs, and that regular blogs tend to have longer entries and less photos, and that moblogs have a whole different feel and purpose and probably will continue to stand on their own in spite of the ease of Flickr.

I’d be curious to see what other ppl think. I LOVE textamerica, and I admit that I love Flickr too. My gut feeling is that my moblog will continue to grow as a seperate entity, that I may flickr certain photos to this blog, but most typical moblog photos will end up at my textamerica moblog.

Maybe. Maybe not. I don’t know.

Somehow I found myself surfing Google Answers, Previously Asked Questions, and I found this:
“I need to find testimonial of a red cross or world health organization
or another UN worker who is quoted for saying that the overwhelming
stench of the dead bodies is damaging his/her ability to work.”
Currently Unanswered, and the person paid $20! to have Google staff get an answer.

Makes you wonder.

It feels like a Monday tho’.

Yay! M is home! I kept up w/ the trip via the moblog we set up for it: marmot.textamerica.com.

I’m so glad that trip is over. Nobody makes me laugh like M does. M’s dad came thru his surgery ok and is on the mend. They got the whole tumor and he’s in so much less pain now (the thing was between the lung and the rib cage, attached to the lung). Ouch.

So back to normal: me being alone all day at home since I work at home, although lately I haven’t been ‘working’ much. I’m trying to wind down the web design so I can focus on photography. But being alone all day isn’t so bad if I know that M is just down the street at work and will be home soon.

M’s Z gets back from the body shop today after having been egged. If it weren’t in the body shop during the trip I might have cruised around town in it every day. What a nice car! Anyway, we never did take a photo of the egg damage, but here is a photo of someone else’s egg damage and it’s pretty much identical to this:

It broke the paint, those marks are because it broke the paint, and it even dented the car. How an EGG can cause this much damage I’ll never understand.

Just finished watching “Bend It Like Beckham” AGAIN. That movie never gets old. I love the music in it too.

NOAA.GOV has a quicktime simulation of the Asian tsunami:
http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2004/s2357.htm

But what I really want is satellite imagery. Still looking.

According to MSNBC’s Countdown w/ Keith Oberman, as a result of the Asian tsunami, the sea level in San Diego California raised by 10 inches.

An interesting look at flickr, flickr as a mmorpg?
http://www.communityguy.com/index.cfm?commentID=86

As I sit here I am chatting w/ M just like old times. M is in Toronto for a week around Xmas. It’s kinda fun and nostalgic to chat like this, but I’d rather M was HERE.

We met online in 95 or 96. We were friends for a year. We’d chat every night at 11pm and on, after I got home from work. And then we dated long distance for a year and then M moved down in 98. And the rest is history.

This Fat Bastard wine is good. (But mind you, I like cheap wine.)

I was thinking about my blog tonight. Way back in… let me think… I think it was just after I started my first website, when I was still rooming at mom’s… so that was… 96? Or wait… if I was working at TSI at the time, then it was… 98. Idunno, but back around then, I first heard about “blogs”. They sounded like a really neat way to format a website. I sat down one night and thought I’d do one, either on my existing website or convert it. I went to weblogs.com I think it was, and all I saw was a list of other blogs, but for the life of me, at the time, I could not figure out how to START one. Blogger was either not around or not easily found by me. I gave up trying to figure out how to start a blog besides doing it by hand. To think I could have been blogging that far back. I still have a copy of my first website. I remember I put it online around 96 or 98. I loved that old site. It had rants. It had links. It had pix. But it was harder to maintain… add to, cut out old stuff, etc. It had a “new” section at the top, but that stuff had to eventually be moved down, etc.

For the fun of it, I loaded the old site in my browser and took some screenshots. This is my half of the site, and if this were the site itself, you could click on the Canadian flag to see M’s part of the site.

Here’s the screenshot to give you a peek:
http://www.laserblog.com/images/oldsite.jpg

I had this up since 96 or 98 and then in Jan ’03 I decided to do a blog. At first I did it by hand and then shortly after that installed MT and have been using it ever since.

This is so awesome:
http://snowflakes.lookandfeel.com/
Make your own snowflake, then you can save it as an image file or even order a rubber stamp of it!

There are other snowflake sites too:
http://www.zefrank.com/snowflake/
http://www.popularfront.com/snowdays/
http://www.softarchitecture.net/cream/generator.html
http://www.explorelearning.com…

(Thanks to ljc for the links!)

I am all alone, drinking wine, lots of wine, and eating homemade cookies my neighbor made for me, and chatting w/ M online like the GOOD OL’ DAYS. (Did u know we met online?) LOLOL

I’m drinking

It’s amazing how much I miss M.

Stayed over at my Mom’s last night w/ Riley Pug, we stayed up late and drank egg nog and wine.

UPDATE: WOW! This is really cool! At flickr.com you can share photos in a group (like within the family), EASILY organize your photos, share them online, and post them to your blog, as I did here.

You can set it up so that you can email a photo (I emailed the above photo from my camera phone) to flickr and it will post to your existing blog, regardless of whether that is a Movable Type blog, a Blogger blog, a Word Press blog, it works with most of them!

I think Flickr is VERY cool. See the following:

Main page:
www.flickr.com

How to get the most out of Flickr:
http://www.flickr.com/get_the_most.gne

The flickr “learn more” tour:
http://www.flickr.com/learn_more.gne

I am alone.
I am lonely.
I miss M.

M. is moblogging his trip to Toronto this week:
http://marmot.textamerica.com

It really is amazing to me the BLOATED software they try to push on you. All those people out there who use Outlook and OneNote and Nortons and McAfee.

I removed all kinds of crap from the new system today, 4.84 gigs (?) and then some.

Then I made a disk image.

Then I started installing stuff:
* Ad Aware and updates
* AVG anti virus and updates
* Breeze Browser
* Edit Plus
* Huey
* IrfanView
* Mozilla
* Spybot S&D and updates
* Trillian
* Winamp
* Ws_ftpLE

All of the above, and it BARELY impacted the available space at ALL! I’ll probably do another image before adding Photoshop and Pagemaker, which are larger.

But that’s all that’s really left.

BTW, seems Acronis True Image is the app of today for making disk images, supposedly better than Ghost. You can create an image while IN winxp and save it right to cd’s as you go. Pretty cool.

Ahhh, the fun of a new computer. First I have to go in and set all the settings. Yes, show hidden files, put Explorer in Classic mode, force it to show C:\ upon opening explorer, etc etc etc. Secondly: UNINSTALL all that CRAP they put on there! Nortons and AOL and all that crap. GARBAGE! After that, I get to INSTALL Zone Alarm, AVG, Spybot S&D, etc. Then I make an image (or before the installs I’ll do that). Images RULE. I hate the way systems are by default. It takes days and days to get it the way you want it.

DIE LIST (updates added all day today):
[x] aol 4.5 megs?
[x] quicken 4 megs?
[x] napster 6.5 megs
[x] norton anti virus 12 megs
[x] norton wmi update 2 megs
[x] arcsoft trials 5 megs
[x] live reg symantec 3 megs (insufficient access)
[x] live update wymantec 5 megs (insufficient access)
[x] microsoft onenote 4.1 GIGS!
[x] Outlook and Powerpoint 41 megs
[x] misc small leftover files from above deletions

It is so freaking cold in this house. We opened up all the windows and now my fingers are actually NUMB! I LOVE it! It is so nice and cold! (well, for Florida). The thermostat says it’s 60F in here.

INteresting!

I’ve been wanting a new large laptop….

CLICK BELOW TO READ MORE…
(more…)

Printable “tatoos” for your ipod (I don’t see any for ipod mini tho).

http://laserone.textamerica.com/?r=1798107

I finally decided to pay for Flickr pro.

I wanted to do it before they got out of beta cuz then the price goes up.

I REALLY like my fotki account. $30 a YEAR and u get unlimited photo storage and can even ftp up your images if you wanna do it that way.

Flicker has no ftp (yet?), but it has SO many other features, I want to try them out.

It’s hard for me tho, cuz I’m REALLY happy w/ fotki, and I hate spreading myself around. I like having all my photos in once place. Up until recently, all photos were on my own server. But before my Ireland trip I decided I wanted unlimited photos space and I was getting tight on room on my own server. I wanted to be able to, while in Ireland, upload full-res copies of my day’s photos without worrying about space, and fotki was the best way to do that. (It actually kicked ass, they have a fantastic upload interface and all I did was go to the high speed internet cafe and zoom up my pix, it was awesome.)

Now, I don’t really want to start hosting photos in yet ANOTHER place, but flickr just has SO many features, I want to play play play. I want to thy the blogging (you can send photos to you MT blog, your wordpress blog, your blogger blog, whatever, thru them!), among other features.

Riley has his own domain name now!
www.EverybodyLovesRiley.com

I was hoping to go to Canada w/ M this month. But truthfully, the stress of it all was just too much. And then Riley got sick which put off his last shots, and without those last shots, he can’t be boarded, can’t fly, and can’t cross the Border. So I pretty much have to stay home, and I’m really ok w/ that. It’s too much to arrange boarding for Riley and Crystal, and then find someone to catsit Sasha who can’t be boarded. Also, it’s a lot cheaper to stay home! Plane ticket, animal boarding, running money.

But I do hope to get up there soon. I love going to Toronto. Toronto rocks. And I love going in the winter, I love freezing my ass of. (no really, I LOVE the cold.)

M will be going away for a week soon. We have not been apart for that long since we moved in together (before that it was a long distance relationship). We’ve never been apart for that long otherwise, and certainly not on an important holiday.

I’m not sure how I’ll do. I get creeped out when I am alone at night sometimes.

I told M that upon return it may be discovered that I have NO ASS left after a solid week of doing nothing but surfing, ahahah.

Yesterday I was thinking about how I am alone all day, no clients coming to the house, no coworkers (I work at home, own my own biz), and then M comes home, goes into the bedroom, and I continue to be alone for sometimes hours. M watches tv, plays w/ his cat, falls asleep on the bed (but denies it!), and, when I’m REALLY lucky, puts laundry away. So sometimes I think that being alone for a week won’t really be so different.

But it will. You know it will.