Approximate progression of conversation which started at Cam’s birthday at Golden Gate park and continued through until early evening at Glenda’s:

Glenda: We should take Cam and Buzz’s visiting brother, Bobby to the Yoda Fountain!

Buzz: Ok, but I want to take Bobby to this pizza place for dinner first so we’ll meet later

Glenda: Dude, so we’re going to the Yoda Fountain at night?

Me: We should do it with T-shirt Ninja masks on!

Buzz: We should bring the keg!

And so … that’s how this video and the most amazing flickr photos set ever came to be.

First, what I looked for:
- something that could look good with any blog I design
- something preferrably free or very cheap
- something that lets me store full rez photos and others to download them
- sometihng that lets people order prints
- tools that help me colour correct, crop and maybe red eye touchup
- easy uploading tool
- easy organization of photos
- easy sharing without viewers needing to get accounts
- blog integration (ideally, near one click post to blog)

###Ofoto
Pros:
- upload tool lets me crop to typical photo ratios or custom ratios and save changes
- free
- can order prints
- don’t need account to view

Cons:
- people can’t view or download high rez pictures
- stupid photo index always pops up new window
- ugly
- no blog integration

###Picasa
Pros:
- “Hello!” integration to Blogger
- Great viewing client
- lots of basic correction tools built in
- can order prints (integration with an online source)
- has trouble refreshing directories sometimes to see new photos added

Cons:
- no online photo album
- only integrates to Blogger
- corrections cannot be permanently applied to photos so they get lose when you upload them

###Imagestation
Pros:
- No disk space limit, full rez downloads
- Reasonably usable site
- Only online cropping/correction tools which are slow
- Can order prints and other photo merchandise like mugs

Cons:
- Slow uploader
- Slow site. Really, painfully, slow. Seeing a theme here?
- Now costs 9.99/mo for ability to share full rez pictures with friends

###Flickr
Pros:
- don’t need account to view
- can set photos to only show friends or family
- slick interface
- tagging system to organize photos
- high rez photos for download
- ability to post to blog
- no limit on disk storage
- free for 10MB of image uploads per month

Cons:
- can’t post to blog categories
- uploader crashes sometimes and has no editing capabilities other than rotate
- if you want print rez pics, you’ll need to go pro ($40/year) for 1GB upload per month (which I couldn’t even exceed when I uploaded my last 3 years of photos)
- no print ordering

I considered using Gallery but its default look and feel is ugly and just wasn’t something I’d want. I probably didn’t have the time to spare to make it into what I did want either. So far, none of the applications do the basic photo editing right. Picasa is damn close – if I could just save the damn changes. I’m finally switching off of Imagestation now because I don’t like that people have a barrier to seeing the photos and am in the process of moving our photos to Flickr. You can see our full set of albums and photos here.

Chinese New Year Fireworks, originally uploaded by kurioso.

A view of the higher fireworks was visible from our balcony. Despite the imagery, it was only a fraction of the show that could be seen from the harbour, with four boats firing simultaneously.

(Testing flickr blogging photo functionality).

### [Trillian Pro 2.0/3.0] [1] – Instant Messsenger ($25/yr for pro)
- aggregates all of MSN, Y!, AIM and ICQ
- lets me treat Joe on MSN and Joe on AIM as the same person through “meta-contacts”
- lets me treat Joe ICQ@Work and JoeICQ@Home as the same person
- puts all of “Joe”‘s history in one place (3.0)
- has nifty plugins for weather, time, spellchecking and even translations on the fly
- Apple’s Rendezvous support (3.0)
- can organize people into groups and more importantly, sub-groups
- type ahead search to find a contact out of my 417 (3.0)
- voice/video chat for the clients that support it
- tabbed chat so all your windows are contained

### [Skype] [2] – internet phone (mostly free)
- free calls to other skype users anywhere in the world
- means i can call anywhere I find a hotspot for free
- can call real phone numbers for a small price per minute
- seamless duplex and no noticeable lag

### [Moodlogic] [3] – music manager (mostly free)
- identifies music in your library just by looking at the signal instead of the ID3 tags
- pulls in data about the song’s tempo, mood, etc
- lets you create playlists just by saying “songs that feel like this song”
- really cool profiling engine

### [SpamBayes] [4] – OutLook spam detection (free)
- no false positives
- has a spam suspects folder for unsure items
- kills 150 spams a day for me
- slow =(

### [Mozilla FireFox 1.0] [5] – web browser (free)
- tabbed browsing
- effective popup blocking
- built-in stylesheet switcher
- effective [toolbars for web development] [7]
- [googlebar] [6]
- [sage RSS reader] [8]
- [colorzilla] [9]
- [tab browser extensions] [14]

### [Picasa] [10] – picture manager (free)
- iPhotos but done better
- reasonable photo editing tools built in but could be slightly better

### [Movable Type 3.11] [11] – blog software (sort of free)
- free for single author up to 3 blogs
- easy to customize template (ugly default templates, though)
- very flexible in setup
- new [blacklist] [12] is better than ever at anti-comment spam

### [AVG Anti-Virus] [13] (free)
- free anti-virus!
- regular updates, stable

[1]: http://www.trillian.cc “Trillian IM Client”
[2]: http://www.skype.com “Skype”
[3]: http://www.moodlogic.net “MoodLogic”
[5]: http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/ “Get FireFox!”
[4]: http://spambayes.sourceforge.net/ “SpamBayes: Bayesian anti-spam”
[9]: http://www.iosart.com/firefox/colorzilla/ “ColorZilla”
[10]: http://www.picasa.com “Picasa”
[6]: http://googlebar.mozdev.org/ “GoogleBar”
[7]: http://www.chrispederick.com/work/firefox/webdeveloper/ “Web Developer Toolbar”
[8]: http://sage.mozdev.org/ “Sage RSS Reader”
[14]: http://googlebar.mozdev.org/ “TabBrowser Extensions”
[13]: http://www.grisoft.com/us/us_index.php “AVG Anti-virus”
[12]: http://www.jayallen.org/comment_spam/ “MT-Blacklist Clearinghouse”
[11]: http://www.movabletype.org “Movable Type”

Basically, I spent the last week(end) getting almost no sleep putting together a 110 page “portfolio” that showcased papers and such that I’d written that prove how much and what I’d learnt from my MSc since starting in September. Luckily, I was able to leverage (can you tell I was in industry) my OK/Cancel articles but that there was still a ton of additional writing.

In two weeks, I write a couple of 3 hour exams and then it’s thesis time! Hopefully, it’ll also be blog redesign time. High time I did since Blogger’s redesign, coupled with the awesome Doug Bowman’s new templates (and some by Vancouver’s, Dave Shea) raise the bar of all blogs dramatically. Damn you guys. I’m a designer and now mine looks like crap compared to every 10 yr old starting a new blog!

Last time, I was basically a recruiter, standing at a booth and talking two days straight, occasionally seeing some other booths but never making it to any speakers. I briefly met Jakob Nielsen then but I doubt he remembered me back then. Now, he probably just remembers that punk that coined the name Nielly. Sadly, he wasn’t there to receive his trading card. I did meet many other authors who’s work I’d read and what one can only call industry luminaries.

Tom and I got to talk to a lot of people ranging from student volunteers to creators of staple methodologies. As Press, we were also able to interview some in more depth and will post those on OK/C. Also, Lucille, Tom’’s g/f, made us some OK/C T-shirts to wear and stickers to give out. Awesome stuff. We’’re almost out of trading cards, too so we’’ll have to make a second set sometime.

Kathryn already posted about the first part of our trip and will continue to do so. We went to Budapest prior to Vienna and it was spectacular. A friend I met at SxSW, Jay, invited us to stay with him and was an excellent host. He was (and is) busy writing a book on Movable Type 3.0 programming which I’ll likely buy but still managed to give great advice on places to go and even picked us up from the train station. Anywho, I’ll let Kat talk more about it. I think we also took some of our best pictures this trip but then I’’m giddy over discovering the super macro mode on my camera. I honestly believe taking good digital photography requires you to know the nuances of your camera, especially compacts.

A lot of people have been posting reviews of GMail but that’s not going to stop me from doing the same. Stay tuned on OK/Cancel, I’ll probably end up posting it there if Tom doesn’t beat me to it (I need to do it anyways as a piece for a paper I have to hand in).

My userid is kevnull. Converse with my GMail self as it is oh so lonely and empty at the moment …

Worth1000.com has photography contests that run regularly. You enter your photo for free (or pay like $0.50 if you want to try for the jackpot) and people will vote on it.

Anywho, I think it’s pretty cool because now I have some focus for my photo taking to practise. Both Kat and I have signed up and will be entering stuff periodically. My username is kevinc and Kat’s is kittikat.

Let me know if you start putting entries in or even joining just to vote.

They also have contests related to Photoshop (where they started out), Multimedia (incl Illustration), and Text. Convenient, since all of those are areas I want to improve myself in.

Before I go on, for all of you on Blogger who haven’t moved because you don’t want to lose your comments, somebody’s figured out how to import everything. I haven’t read in detail but the person also mentions why the move from Blogger/Comments was made. I know Blogger Pro recently got rolled into Blogger so it’s definitely less compelling but after seeing all that’s possible in MT, I’m pretty sold that I made the right decision. I also just noticed that MT came out with TextPad which is their answer to BlogSpot I guess. So users can run MT without going through installation pains but it’s not free (it’s also not adware). There’s a 30 day trial though.

While researching, I discovered so many plugins and modifications that I had to start creating a wishlist for things I will be doing to the Blog. Probably well before I ever get to a redesign unfortunately. I’ve linked the relevant tutorials as well:

• make links section a server side included blog of its own
• modify photos section to put links into body instead of title
• add comments leaderboard [1]
• add comments excerpt [1]
• add automated backups [1] [2]
• add winamp playlist [1]
• include category icon to show in search page [1]
• combine bloglet with notification [1]
• advanced search by category and fields see [1]
• remove redundant comments [1]
• add mt-medic for more powerful control [1]
• add a “mail this entry” link [1] [2]
• obfuscate commentor e-mails to prevent spambot harvesting [1] [2] [3]
• add voting poll [1]
• inline comments [1]
• mt based guestbook [1]
• fix “remember me” problem [1]
• hot topics (most comments) [1]
• comment permalink [1]
• merge trackback and comments [1]
• subscribe to a thread [1]
• add notification when someone adds name to maillist [1]
• blogtimes function [1]

In addition, I’m looking into certain functions that are more important for OK/C than for this blog but may be incorporated into both:

• ok/c author icons [1]
• weekly archive dropdown [1] [2]
• meaningful archive naming [1] [2]
• ok/c login page [1]
• changing the weekly cycle [1]

Slightly related note, whilst browsing all of these sites, it’s interesting to see that almost all of them are at least peripherally interested in interaction and information design, linking to sites like k10k, boxes and arrows, core77, kottke, etc.

Finally, a quick nod to Joshua for linking to my comic already! Josh is studying with me at UCLIC.