sparkrobot

Ta-Dum-Tizz. Thanks, I’ll be here all week.

A photo I took of my Konica Auto S2 on my dining room table is featured on Camerapedia.org. Now it’s famous. Or something.

Flickr added web statistics to their photo sharing web application starting on December 13. The feature is simple, clean and the presentation is easy to understand. This comes as no surprise to me from the Flickr team. I’m finding this a welcome addition, as I would likely never had any clue my photo of the Konica was being used on Camerapedia.

Merlin’s list of Fives. How is it even possible that I’ve been missing this for so long? To get you started:

• Five musical embellishments that should be used in moderation
• Five things, besides “your ride,” that you might wish to “pimp”
• Five songs I’d enjoy hearing Tom Waits cover
• Five nicknames I would find unbearable

Now, on to 5ives.

ABCNews.com redesigned their site. It’s terrible. Looks like they needed room for bigger ads and that drove the design decisions. Somebody also got a little carried away with the javascript animation too. Put all of this aside for a minute though and take a look at this screen capture from this morning. Four years to the day after the Mission Accomplished fiasco, “Bush Prepares to Veto the Iraq Bill”. Take a look at the implied trajectory of the soldier’s weapon in this collage. Looks like the photo editor is asleep at the wheel and some Photoshop, uh, wizard dropped a bomb of his own.

Found quite a nice collection of Swiss poster designs on the Flickr today: Swiss Graphic Design History – a photoset on Flickr

I’m sorry Amazon, it’s over. It’s not me, it’s you. You don’t know me at all and you just don’t get me. An excerpt from a morning email:

Dear Amazon.com Customer,
We’ve noticed that customers who have expressed interest in Back in the USA by MC5 have also ordered From Conception: Live 1981 by Dokken. For this reason, you might like to know that Dokken’s From Conception: Live 1981 is now available. You can order your copy for just $14.99 ($3.99 off the list price) by following the link below.

Best of luck to you.

Wow. Game on.

Apple Unveils Higher Quality DRM-Free Music on the iTunes Store

I ran across this sane, rational post on the Flickr/Yahoo! merge “controversy”. These people are idiots. Fine, go. Get your money back fools. Better yet, build a better mouse trap if you think you can. It took me two minutes to switch over to a still-active Yahoo account that I haven’t used in 5 years. Was it annoying? A little. Do I want that two minutes back? Absolutely not. Let’s eat bigger fried fish.

I liken the whole thing to this sketch from 1975’s Monty Python and The Holy Grail.

The Witch: I’m not a witch I’m not a witch!
Sir Bedevere: But you are dressed as one
The Witch: *They* dressed me up like this!
Crowd: We didn’t! We didn’t…
The Witch: And this isn’t my nose. It’s a false one.
Sir Bedevere: [lifts up her false nose] Well?
Peasant 1: Well, we did do the nose.
Sir Bedevere: The nose?
Peasant 1: And the hat, but she is a witch!
Crowd: Yeah! Burn her! Burn her!
Sir Bedevere: Did you dress her up like this?
Peasant 1: No!
Peasant 3, Peasant 2: No!
Peasant 3: No!
Peasant 1: No!
Peasant 3, Peasant 2: No!
Peasant 1: Yes!
Peasant 2: Yes!
Peasant 1: Yeah a bit.
Peasant 3: A bit!
Peasant 1, Peasant 2: A bit!
Peasant 2: a bit
Peasant 1: But she has got a wart!
Random Person in the crowd: *cough* *cough*

I still heart you Flickr. We can still make out and such. If I decide we should break up later because of your big brother, you can keep my $24.

I helped some friends of mine put together a simple website for their newly-opened, retro-themed Martini bar in Port Orchard. Located at 110 Harrison in Port Orchard, the One Ten Lounge opened earlier this year to serve specialty cocktails in a comfortable, laid-back atmosphere. I visited the place a while back on a Friday evening and a diverse crowd packed the place. Dionne created a logo and some printed materials for the lounge, and this was set as the aesthetic used to design and build the website. If find yourself out in Port Orchard and looking for a place to relax, check it out. Link to http://www.onetenlounge.com/

Nerdy stuff: WordPress was used as the cms for the site, Justin Simoni’s excellent Dada mail for the newsletter and Todd Dominey’s SlidshowPro and SlideshowPro Director for the photo galleries. All open source software that makes publishing websites so much easier than it was even just a few years ago.

For about the last year and a half or so, I’ve been using Google’s Gmail to collect and manage all my email online. I made the jump when I added a larger, faster hard drive to my Powerbook. Rather than continue using Apple Mail and downloading via pop3, I decided to move everything online and manage my email with the web interface and make multiple accounts easier to manage online.

I first noticed earlier this week a welcomed design tweak to Gmail. Previously, if i wanted to delete everything marked as spam, several steps were required to do so, and it was only possible to remove one “page” of spam at a time. Not so hot if you get hundreds of spam items per day and the intention is to keep an email inbox lean.

The recent changes reduce the effort spent on this task. The new method entails a click on the “Delete all spam messages now (messages that have been in Spam more than 30 days will be automatically deleted)” at the top of the list which triggers a javascript alert that reads: “This action will affect all xx conversations in Spam. Are you sure you want to continue?” Here’s a shot of it:

Also added is an “Empty Trash now” control. What would ultimately be nicer here are to include the said controls available from the sidebar, á-la Yahoo’s approach. I’d like to be able to kill all the Spam with one click thereby reducing the time in a day that is spent concerning junk mail.

What’s the #1 feature I’d like to see added to Gmail? It’s a four letter word. IMAP. #2? Folders. I know Google is a search company, but sometimes you just want to put stuff where you want to put it.