(photo courtesy of frankmichelivt)

So for Christmas, I bought my buddy Dave a “MAXIMUS 79 PASSKEY INCL. FLASH CABLE AND FFC CONNECTOR” for his “currently not flashable without a pass-key” Xbox 360 with the Hitachi 0079FL drive. I’m going to hook it up and flash it for him when it comes.

I’m excited to see how this is going to work when it comes.

So I migrated all of my photos to Flickr in October, and it’s been a great improvement for my needs.

I recently added a listing of 10 random images from my Flickr photos to my site’s sidebar, which is amazing that they let you do that, and incredibly fast — as is all of Flickr. It looks to be not perfect (that is, not perfectly random), but the fact that it’s so fast makes up for that. I remember it being a hassle and a hack to get Gallery2 to show a single random image outside of the application in a decent amount of time, much less a series of them.

Flickr recently released Flickr Uploadr 3.0 (pic of it is above), which is an amazing piece of software. Every problem that I had in the 2.x series is gone, namely

1. It maximized your upload speed — so unless there’s another layer at the system or router level to limit your upload speed, some connections will have the download speed throttled as a result. The new version doesn’t ask you your max upload speed, it must just do automatic limiting to ~85-90%.
2. It wouldn’t let you set item specific tags, titles, etc. The way they do it now is nothing short of brilliant.
3. You couldn’t do batch jobs, i.e. start one job and work on another in the meantime. My upload speed is less than phenomenal, and the fact that the images are 3-8MB each doesn’t help. On the other hand, since you can now set element specific attributes, there’s not really too much of a need for batch jobs.

I really like the social part of it, and the tagging. I’m intrigued by what they call interestingness, and am determined to someday take an ‘interesting’ photo.

Overall, I only have a few small regrets from transferring all of my photos to Flickr. If you take photos at all, I recommend it.

nt

This holiday season, I’m strongly considering buying an OLPC — aka the $100 laptop that costs $399. I’m still on the fence about it. The first batch are just now being delivered, so if I purchased now, I’d get it “early 2008.”

Here are some pics of the OLPC on Flickr.

My wife Kessa had a near-life experience tonight, she got in a 3 person rear-end-a-thon on I5 in Portland, and as a result her 1992 Saturn is totaled.

Luckily nobody was harmed. Time to look for a new car! Hawt pics any day now

Edit: Hawt pics