We are back in Milwaukee and onto the grind. We came back to snow and the cold. While it is warmer now than when we originally left, it still feels very cold having been on the beach for a week. I can feel your sympathy.
I have two posts for the end of the trip that I’ll back post as I get a chance to finish them and plan on annotating the others with some cross links and such. I have over 1700 photos to go through and 3GB of video as well. Between four cameras I had an interesting time keeping track of everything. I just spent a solid hour or so weeding through some errant duplicates and doing a little color enhancement. I’ve got to get them cleaned up and posted on Flickr as well*. Unfortunately, I had a heavy deadline waiting for me when I got back so I don’t know when I’ll be able to finish all of that.
In the mean time, expect a little of the usual darkness.
*On that note, I almost didn’t pay for a Flickr Pro account for worries of Microsoft’s intended hostile takeover of Yahoo!. I did break down and get it with the hope that it would take at least a year for the deal to pass through the FTC and DoJ. Google’s DoubleClick deal took them nine month for the US and the EU is still evaluating it. At this point, Picasa Web is just not as strong and lacks some features that I like, though Picasa’s lack of Flash makes it much more iPhone compatible. We’ll just have to wait and see.
I was just playing around with Picasa the other day (for the first time). If by not as strong, you mean (in part) slower page loads – I’ll agree whole-heartedly. So far I’m not sure I like the interface as much either… plus there’s a few things I use that are integrated with Flickr quite nicely (like my blogging tool: MarsEdit for one).
By the way… 1700 pics! I was looking at some of them the other day (pretty cool by the way). How long did it take to upload? I get impatient waiting on half a dozen. 1700 sounds like an overnighter.
Marsedit was originally developed by Brett Simmons, the maker NetNewsWire (My RSS reader of choice on the Mac). When NNW was purchased, Brett farmed development to Gus Mueller, developer of the equally awesome VoodooPad which is a nice little personal wiki text editor. I briefly talk about those and other of my favorite Mac apps here.
While I do most of my blog compositions in a regular text editor and then paste them into the back end webpage, I have played around with a few blogging tools like MarsEdit. One of the other interesting ones is Flock, a build of firefox with social media in mind. Like MarsEdit, it has blogging, flickr, youtube and other features built in. I haven’t used it in a while, but it was cool at the time.
As far as uploading the pics, it took about two hours on my four meg up connection at the office. While my downloads are faster at home, the balanced connection at the office is so much better for uploads.
That flickr set accounts for the combined photos of four different cameras, ranging from 3.2 to 8.1 megapixels, so file sizes were very erratic throughout the upload.