Flickr released a major update today mainly targetted at adding international features to their site. This is great, and I am happy for them, but in their blog post on the subject, this text is at the very bottom. “As part of this launch, Flickr Pro payment processing is now handled by Yahoo! Wallet and supports a myriad of credit card options.” Previously, they took Paypal. I use Paypal almost every day for something. I don’t want to sign up for Yahoo Wallet just to pay for Flickr. That’s insanely dumb, and the pre-Yahoo Flickr would never have done it.
One of the best things about visiting Manhattan is getting to do a little shopping, and this recent trip is no exception. I walked around SoHo for a few hours last Monday, and walked into the Camper store. I had previously worn Campers, but as their lines of shoes changed, I stopped. Happily, on this trip, their newest line had some really awesome new shoes in it, and I picked up a pair of these. After having worn them for a few days, I have to say that they are one of the most comfortable pairs of shoes I have ever owned.
I spent the last ten days in New England, mainly for the purpose of fulfilling my role as the best man in my brother Chris' wedding. I come back somewhat exhausted, and after fighting through some parking snafus at Atlanta Hartsfield, am finally sitting in my office at home, waiting for Zifty.com to bring me some dinner. It was a great week away. Spending time with my family always puts things in perspective for me the way nothing else in my life can.
Comcast, we’ve been together for Internet access for almost three years now, but I am having second thoughts about our future together. My service has not gone a week without failing in some way for the last three months. You make appointments with me, then show up at the wrong time, sometimes not at all, or you call to cancel at the very end of my three hour appointment window. When you do show up, your technicians are unable to figure out what is wrong with my service. Your technical support people put me on hold so long that my battery in my phone dies while on hold. If I had a choice in the matter, I would have broken up with you months ago.
What better excuse to link to my set of pictures from my recent vacation in Mexico than to show everyone the new Flickr slideshow interface. Most of the pictures were taken with my new Canon 5D rig.
I like the new interface quite a bit, and I think that it makes my shots look even better than they really are. Well done, again, Flickr.
I have Joost invites. Leave me your name and email in the comments and I will send you one. After I have sent it, I will delete the comment, so your email will not remain out on the web. Cool.
Today started like a normal Tuesday. I went to the office, we deployed the new Super Deluxe patch, and then I headed down to CNN Center for my normal slate of meetings. In between meetings, I usually find an empty conference room to squat in and do my work. Today, however, all the rooms were full, so I went to the Omni Hotel, which is connected to CNN, to use their free WiFi network. I was sitting there, at the top of the escalators, when a single gun shot rang out. This was followed by a pause, and then three or four more gun shots. All I remember is picking up my things and running. Somehow I ended up behind the security door at the suite of offices behind the front desk, where I waited with hotel employees and some other civilians until the situation was safe. Scary stuff to be sure.
You should go watch the video for this fantastic song, Cops on Bikes. There are also wallpapers and AIM buddy icons. Cops on Bikes is gonna be huge, I just know it.
I’ve been using SmartSVN, but it just doesn’t feel like a Mac app. Anyone have a first class Mac OS X Subversion Client that they can recommend? Has no one written the equivalent of Transmit for the SVN protocol yet?
It's been four years since the last time I went to SXSW. Thinking over the last seven years, since the 2000 conference where so many of those of us in the blog world met for the first time, and how valuable the two that I've attended have been to me, it's amazing that I haven't attended more. This year, with my newest labor of love just out the door, it seems like the perfect time for me to go again, so I am. I'm hoping to renew some acquaintances from year's past, and meet lots of new people.
I was quite please to find that SXSWBaby exists as strong as it ever was. It's a great resource in the sea of information.
If you are going, and want to meet up, or have a tip on a hot party, feel free to drop me a line.
Well, we've got a press release out today. I'm generally not a fan of press releases, but there are two things in this one that are pretty cool. First, Super Deluxe hit a million unique users. With no press push, no really heavy corporate promotion or anything, we hit a pretty reasonable sized user number. Second, there are a bunch of new names in the press release that we hadn't announced yet. Probably the biggest are David Cross, Wayne Brady, Horatio Sanz and Dave Attell. I'm really looking forward to seeing these guys out on the site, and I am hoping that they interact with the community and other artists the way some of the existing artists are interacting. Cool stuff, to be sure.
I spent a good part of my three day weekend tearing my office apart and reassembling it the right way. On the way, I installed two new hard drives in my Mac Pro, which is super easy to do. I also finally installed BootCamp on that machine, which is what one of the new hard drives is dedicated to, and XP on top of that. I plan on upgrading that to Windows Vista this week. I still have a lot to do, but I am now wishing that I had taken a before picture, because the after picture will be pretty cool. I reran all the cables the right way, put down carpet, put all my devices on a shelf in a unit that now houses the towers and printer as well, set up a new RAID backup system, and reworked the home entertainment part of the office. It feels good to be productive.
Of course, after putting all that effort in over the weekend, I find this awesome Make Magazine post today. It's a really cool idea to declutter your office.
So, at the end of 2005, Turner asked some of us to sit in a conference room. At first, I was like, "That sounds boring." After a while though, I realized that it would be a good way to get out of work on PGA.com. That part was pretty awesome because I had gotten kind of bored working to make sure leaderboards were updated all the time. Then they started asking us to come with ideas for "broadband" projects. So I went to Wikipedia and looked up broadband. Then I made some stuff up. In the end, we came with an idea for a comedy broadband Web site. It was a pretty good idea, or so I thought. Then they made me go back to work on the golf Web site. Then a month went by, and they asked us to start "fleshing out" the idea. I am pretty fleshy, so I was good at that part.
After this, it was a crazy wild ride. I have always wanted to say that something was a crazy wild ride, so this worked out perfectly for me. We did some stuff, and then we did some more stuff. Finally, they decided that this idea was good enough to actually build. This made me nervous, because it entailed me actually doing work. It was a pretty big project, and they weren't going to give us much time to get it done. I had one employee, and no code written. Over the next four months, I hired a full development team, and worked with three other development teams, and our gifted presentation team to build the site from scratch.
In all seriousness, I am very proud of what our team accomplished, and this project was a time of massive personal growth for me. There's a lot more we want to do, and we've already started working to improve and enhance what is already out there. I will definitely write more posts about the many lessons I learned. In closing, check out Little Michael Jackson.
I reworked a nice Wordpress template for my current ancient blogger infrastructure. I think you will agree that this is much nicer than the previous dated Kubrick layout. Hopefully, I will get to making a layout of my own soon, but I was so tired of looking at the old one that I wasn’t posting, and that sort of defeats the purpose of the site altogether.
