BrockLi Soup

I’m in Buffalo for the weekend to visit the family and get some time on the bike so I’m ready for the road test. This weekend, I’ve noticed the difference between RIT and the area I live in just by watching traffic. You notice a marked decrease in BMW’s and a lot more pickup trucks. The weather’s been nice, so there have been a lot of bikers out - of the 40 or 50 bikes I’ve seen in the past two days, only four of them were crotch rockets.

During one of these trips home, I want to scan more family photos. I posted a bunch of them a little while ago, but there are a lot more. I grabbed six or seven rolls worth when I was home a few months ago. They’re the ones I took in middle and high school, but I keep forgetting to look through them and stop into the library to scan the good ones. Maybe I’ll do that this week. I scanned about 20 more from two rolls my Mom took recently, so I’ll post those when I’m back at RIT.

I haven’t been to The Little since December, so I’m hoping to go tomorrow and catch a movie or two. My membership ends this month, so I’ve only got a few more Sundays to go for free.

I used to upload all my photos to a gallery on my CSH site, then zip them up and put them in an archive folder on my machine. Since Gallery ran as nobody and everyone used it, the quota for nobody filled up and we couldn’t upload any more pictures (from what I’ve heard, it’s since been fixed). Around the same time, I broke my install and just gave up on it. This left me half of my photos in zip files and the rest half-organized on my drive. I began using Picasa a couple months ago, but it’s not capable of extracting images from zip files, so they were all useless to me that way.

Tonight, I began the process of unzipping and filing away all my old pictures so I could view them with Picasa and maybe upload some to Flickr. I found a few from the apartment that I thought warranted sharing. The one above is my desk right after I moved in - I added some notes, go take a look at the page. I also came across the old Kill List, so I figured I should post the current one for comparison’s sake.

I love Flickr.

I LOVE Flickr.

However, I hate (with the passion of a thousand burning suns) the fact that it wasn’t made more clear to me that my limit was 100 photos. I thought I had 100 MB upload per month (or something like that) and I just kept uploading all willy nilly. I looked at my account today and saw that I had uploaded 100 photos. That’s odd, I thought. I could swear I had 100 photos last week. Sure enough, the pictures from the Dropkick pre-gaming were gone. They simply fell off the back of my account without warning.

However! Upon logging in after treating myself to a Pro account (my third birthday present to myself this year), I found all of my pre-gaming photos there, safe and sound. Flicks saved the photos and even the set (free accounts are limited to three sets). I can’t even express how happy I was to find they were still there, and now I’ve got unlimited space and can upload 1 GB a month.

If you don’t have a Flickr account yet, you should get one. I’d suggest buying a Pro account to support the developers, but Yahoo! just bought them out, so they can’t be too strapped for cash. I’m hoping they don’t go and start giving Pro accounts away for free, because then I’d feel like an ass.

Looking at pictures is like eating chocolate cake. You see, chocolate cake is great every now and then, but if you have it every day, you won’t appreciate it any more.

When I went home this past weekend, I grabbed a copy of those photos I scanned over Christmas break. Looking through them again was a lot of fun. I had seen a few before, when I was younger, but most of them were all new to me when I scanned them a few months ago. Going through them again today and deciding which ones to post made me all nostalgic. Photos that we see every day quickly lose their meaning. My mom has some pictures of my brothers and I around the house, and I barely even notice them any more. But looking through pictures every once in a great while makes it that much more special.

At any rate, they’re up on Flickr. Enjoy.

About a year ago, my parents’ printer died. They did some looking around and settled on a cheap HP to replace it. It’s one of those scanner/copier/printer combo deals, so they figured it was worth the extra $20 because it would come in handy.

When I was home over Christmas break, I dug out a shoe box full of pictures from the closet at the end of the hall. There are probably 3 or 4 shoe boxes and a couple albums full of photos in there, and I have no idea when they were pulled out last. My brother and I went through a bunch of them one time when we were kids, but I haven’t seen any of them since. With my plans to start digitizing my life in a Wiki, I figured it would be good to have a photographic history too.

I picked one of the small shoe boxes to start with and scanned some 75 or 100 pictures. They ranged from 1980-ish till about 1991 and had no real order to them. It was tough to tell when a lot of them were taken, but some had a date stamped in the bottom corner or on the back, and my mom had written a small note on the back of a few. For the most part though, it was a shot in the dark, or (if I was lucky), deductive reasoning: dad’s wearing that same shirt in both of these pictures and they’re both from a Christmas, so I can assume they’re both from 1989. Even so, they were all mixed in together so the date on most of them is a mystery.

I would post a few pictures of Baby Brock, but the CD I burned them to was somehow corrupted. I’m hoping no one deleted the folder I left on my parents’ computer, because I’ll copy them when I’m home this weekend.

Anyway, my point in telling that story was that our kids won’t have to go through the same crap. Digital cameras can be had for less than $100 these days, and almost everyone has one. A lot of people have them on their person most of the time and snap pictures of everything. You never have to buy film or pay for photo development; once you’ve got the camera and (if you want) a larger memory card, you can just keep taking pictures for free.

So we do. A lot.

Most people I know have some kind of organization technique for their pictures. I create new folders for each event and add the date to the end of the name, for reference. From there, I view and rename them in Picasa2, which I highly recommend. A lot of people (myself included) use Flickr, providing an enormous photographic resource, due in a large part to tagging. Consider the sxsw2005 tag: there are, at this writing, almost 800 photos from SXSW. Almost 3000 are tagged simply “sxsw” and presumably cover this and past conferences. I don’t need to know anyone who went to the conference to see what happened and who was there - dozens of people are making that information available to me, and a lot of them provide detailed information on every shot.

Due to the prevalence of digital cameras and the popularity of Flickr (and services like it), our generation will be better documented than any before us. My kids will be able to look through old pictures and know at a glance when and where it was taken and who the other people in the photo are. My parents can’t even give me a definite year for a lot of their pictures.

Granted, this hinges on the continued availability of Flickr and my own hard drive and CD backups, but, barring disaster, we will leave behind far more visual artifacts than our predecessors.