JackTales

My Flickr account has officially passed a half million views! Of course, not because of the Bettie Page collection. Yeah, right… Anyway, 500,000+ views! Kewl, huh?

Here’s an update to my top 10 Flickr photos. I took the Bettie Page collection out as they glutted my top 10. I have no idea why a picture of my elementary school is so popular. If you can’t see a photo, you may need to log into Flickr, go to http://www.flickr.com/account/prefs/safesearch/?from=privacy, and turn your SafeSearch off. The first of these pictures has been flagged as Restricted.

1. Up the skirt photo
2. Gas prices
3. Car crash
4. Hurricane
5. Frank and his girlfriend
6. Leather Wolf Mask
7. 3 Stooges
8. Tornado
9. 1969-1970 Holland Elementary
10. Brass Street Sweeper

Photos Sold

Kewl. I was contacted by a magazine for permission to publish some of my Flickr photos. I said sure, provided a little information about each photo and kind of forgot about it.

Today they contacted me to tell me they’d be sending a check for $500 for 4 of the photos they are going to publish.

Fortune smiles upon the dysfunctionals. I’m a happy guy. And my Flickr pics are up to 250,000 hits, by the way.

I can use the good news. This week has been a horrible one at work. We had the holiday, which means a ton of mail waiting for us on the day after the holiday. We ended up on a national list of screwups. And I ended up in the middle of a procedural error on the part of another department.

$500. $500. That’s going to be my mantra today.

I decided I liked the old layout better for now. I can always change back, but the new one was very serious looking, and I don’t have anything serious to say.

I have this stupid vent blowing straight down on my head and hands, and I’m really cold. I’m going to go outside and have a smoke until carriers start coming back.

Got a new cellphone with a camera, so I’m going to try uploading some pics from it to my flickr account. For a cellphone, the pics aren’t bad; at least, no worse than expected. It’s a Samsung PL-M520, or something like that. Too many bells and whistles though. I need that Jitterbug thing that just makes calls. Good lord, I’ve become a Luddite.

Ooh, while I have you on the line, so to speak…anyway, check out Gravatar. A gravatar is a “globally recognized avatar.” Kind of a portable avatar. If you make one, in general, your avatar will show in the comments of most blogs when you post. You can find out more on the website.  Here’s mine:

Not that much going on lately that I’ve felt the need to post. I’m kind of that way. I’m not motivated to comment on the news, tech issues, whatever.

So here’s what’s been going on. In late November, I uploaded my entire Bettie Page collection to Flickr. That’s 6,000+ photos and artwork.

Now Flickr has two ways to upload pics. You can batch upload using the website, or there’s a Windows app that allows batch uploading.

Each has flaws. If you upload using the website, everything is available to everyone the moment you upload it, before you’ve had a chance to set title, description, category, tags…or worse yet, safety level. Safety level is a means of self-moderation. You can flag photos safe, moderate, or restricted. So, say, a nude can be flagged as unacceptable if it’s set as safe instead of moderate or restricted, and another member complains about it.

Simply put: Using the web uploader, you can get dinged for a photo before you’ve even had a chance to take control of it.

The Windows based uploader allows you to control the safety level of pics before you upload them, but it can’t handle a large amount of pics at a single upload, it balks at certain file types and resolutions, and has been known just to choke off and die, leaving you with no idea of what you finished uploading, and what didn’t make it, giving you the possibility of uploading duplicates or just abandoning the upload as a whole.

Simply put: The Window app sucks.

I uploaded Bettie pics using the web uploader and got dinged before I could go in and set the safety levels, and had my whole account restricted. I had to do a lot of begging, and deleted my entire 6,000+ photos before I could have my account restored.

As a new feature, they’ve found a way to temporarily set your account default safety levels until you’ve completed an upload, then you can set individual photo safety levels, and unrestrict your entire account.

In the meantime, I’ve slowly slugged my way through about all my Bettie collection, reclassifying her, with the exception of about 200 photos I’m just too burnt out to finish classifying at this time. I’ll try the massive upload another month.

Oh, back to the safety levels on Flickr. The staff went through and manually changed some individual levels on some photos non-Bettie they thought were a little too risque. You know who you are, and you’re very popular. Ahem.

On another topic, I go to get my thyroid checked out Monday. There’s probably nothing wrong, I’m just getting older maybe, but I’ve been having a lot of symptoms common to hypothyroidism. And weird dizzy spells too.

My car broke down last month. $2500 in repairs. More than the car is worth, but I love my Caddy. Still a few bugs, but she’s running nice again. Got her throaty purr back.

Lessee…got a company coming up to jack up the house, as it’s settled 3 inches over thirty years. Then again, we don’t know how much settling may have occurred during the Nisqually earthquake, so we’re shoring up the house.

Also have a landscaping company coming out to completely trash out our yard. Die blackberries, die, die, die. I’m going to have the damn yard Astroturfed. Or bricked under. Blackberries themselves are yummy, but only for a few months each year. The rest of the year you’re plagued by the nastiest-looking creeping vines, with thorns capable of piercing shark gloves.

The only manual way to deal with them, short of dragging the damn things out with heavy machinery like we’re going to do, is to get a herd of goats to mow the stuff down. Seriously. A herd of goats. Really good business to get into around here. So much so, that there’s a shortage of goat herds. Leaving only the heavy equipment. That’s okay, I’ll get a great deal of satisfaction watching the stuff get chewed up and swallowed by some machine. In the meantime, I’d still be suspicious of some guy living in Ohio with nervous-looking goats. Ohio, where men are men, and the women are goats. Go Purdue.

Hmm…time for more medications. My train of thought is starting to derail. Nervous goats, risque photos and throaty purrs. And Ohio.