Flickr-Yahoo Login: The Deadline Approaches

2007-01-31.

It came from Flickr this morning:

Dear Old Skool Account-Holding Flickr Member,

On March 15th we’ll be discontinuing the old email-based Flickr sign in system. From that point on, everyone will have to use a Yahoo! ID to sign in to Flickr.

So Flickr has gone ahead and made Yahoo logins mandatory effective March 15th, on which date users whose accounts predate the acquisition will be required to merge their logins with a Yahoo account. I am very unhappy with this, but lacking a quick and easy way to transfer my photos, metadata, and photolog links to PicasaWeb, I will simply have to suck up and hope Yahoo logins work better than they used to.

(I really hate the “Old Skool” label, by the way. It sounds infantile and patronizing, and as we can see from this login requirement, doesn’t really indicate that they hold their classic members in high regard. But then, maybe that’s the point: to annoy non-Yahoo users into submission with puerile condescension.)

Official Flickr forum thread is here, in which Ludicorp staff patiently answer many user concerns. It looks like my main problem of intermittent Yahoo login is solved with a separate Flickr cookie. Privacy and intellectual property ownership issues abound, of course, and many of the anti-Yahoo sentiment seems to stem from a fuzzy feeling of “badness” about Flickr being more and more absorbed into a Monolithic BigCorp™. That’s not something I’m too worried about, though you may want to review my Brief History of Yahoo Acquisitions for a possible preview of what may happen to Flickr in the next decade or so.

(I would be a lot happier about this if the people at Yahoo would let me have the “brownpau”, name, especially seeing that whoever took it before me hasn’t updated for almost a decade now.)

Arredondo in DC

2007-01-30.

I saw this pickup truck drive by my building today, flag-draped coffin in the rear, with a large US flag flying above it. He pulled up by the Hall of States, either to get a hotdog from the sidewalk cart or get interviewed by C-Span or Fox.

Turns out it’s Carlos Arredondo, the man who, distraught when informed by the Marines of his son Alexander’s death in Iraq, set himself on fire in the Marines’ van. Carlos survived, and is now an antiwar activist who reaches out to other families who have lost military children in the war. He spoke at the Saturday protest.

Here’s more on the memorial truck. It’s not Alexander’s actual casket in the back, but it’s surrounded by artifacts from his tour of duty. The boots, for example.

Caturday!

2007-01-27.

This is the Caturday Yawn Edition. The challenge is to look at these photos of the cat and not yawn. Ready? Go.

iPhone

2007-01-26.

Oh yeah, the iPhone. It sounded nice on introduction, didn’t it? Slick full screen OS X-based Apple GUI with unique multi-touch screen interface, iPod video, internet communications, bluetooth, wifi, camera — what’s not to love?

That wasn’t a rhetorical question. Here’s what’s not to love:

No tactile feedback. I can text with T9 off and my eyes closed on my Nokia 6600, because I can feel the keys and the borders between them. Can you type on that touchscreen keyboard without looking?
Insufficient memory? iPod video functionality, but with iPod nano-like storage? How big is your average iPod movie, and how many of those will fit in 4GB or 8GB? There’s no expansion slot, so no toting about extra content on SD cards.
Battery life? “Up to” 5 hours of talk time? “Up to” 16 hours of audio playback? How about if I listen to music and make calls in the same day? Plus, unlike other phones, the battery is not swappable. Combined with the tiny memory, I foresee this phone spending a whole lot of time in its dock.
Cingular lock-in. Why would I want to trade down to one of the worst mobile GSM providers in the country for two years, just for an iPhone?
No third-party applications. What? Is this an OS X phone, or a DynaTac? If this is going to serve as my mobile phone, music player, and handheld organizer, I expect it to be able to handle the five killer apps I need from such a device: Bejeweled, SFCave, Dope Wars, Space Trader, and iRogue. If I can’t install those on my iPhone, then no thank you.

In conclusion, I am not going to get an iPhone — at least, not the first Cingular-locked, no-third-party app iteration. For now, I’m very happy with my N6600, and my next phone will probably be a Treo 680.

Around the Capitol for State of the Union 2007

2007-01-24.

My normal policy is to turn off the TV and radio during State of the Union addresses, no matter who’s President, but there’s been talk of a State of the Union protest at the Capitol tonight, so I walked down there after dinner to see what I could see, not having been to one of these events before, and eager to photograph potential crazies.

At left, the scene at North Capitol Street and Louisiana Ave NW: a tough security perimeter all around the Capitol, with huge, bright floodlights atop various buildings shining on the Dome. I almost turned back right there, thinking the flares were to define an off-limits border for pedestrians as well as cars, but seeing a biker go nonchalantly go through them, I decided to keep going. A CHPD officer told me that as long as I approached from the far side of 1st St NW I was okay, so that’s where I went.

Over by the Grant Memorial, someone dressed up in a Devil costume with a Bush mask brandished a pitchfork about and pantomimed to a live audio feed of the SOTU address from behind an “IMPEACH BUSH FOR WAR CRIMES” banner table, while various protestors waved signs and jeered rebuttals at the mascot. It was a pretty thin crowd, probably not more than 25-30 of them. The NPS and CHPD security personnel I talked to, were pretty glad for that.

After the address was done, I braved the cold a bit longer to get some photos of the Washington Monument and the Capitol, lit up as they were for the evening:

Full SOTU 2007 photoset on Flickr, and more on DC Metroblogging.

Snow on Handrail and Tree

2007-01-23.

(Above, left) Archives/Navy Memorial Metro station, whose street-level escalators are still open to the elements. Falling snow was forming a slushy wet glacier which crept down the handrail and gathered in a pile at the bottom of the escalator. (Above, right) The next morning, a fast-thawing layer of snow on a tree near Dupont Circle.

Finally, Snow

2007-01-21.

Season’s first snowfall underway. The snow finally started as a shower of fine, tiny flakes just as we were leaving church, and a good dusting had stuck to unpaved surfaces by the time we were done with lunch at Bua. The flakes are much bigger now, and there’s at least a good quarter inch on the ledge. Here’s the view from my apartment, live, as the snow continues to fall. (I will convert this to a time lapse video tomorrow.)

Update: The time lapse video turned out pretty boring and uneventful, so I scrapped it. Instead, may I direct you to last year’s snow day time lapse, and offer this photo of Constitution Avenue and the National Gallery of Art getting snowed on:

The snow has stopped now, and turned into a light rain of ice pellets. This means our lovely layer of snow is growing an crunchy upper crust of slippery ice, like a cold creme brulée.

Shoppy, Potentially Snowy Weekend

2007-01-21.

It is a cold, blustery weekend, which Amy and I have so far filled up with registry shopping. We sauntered over to the new BB&B at Gallery Place/Chinatown to go scanner-happy on kitchen gadgets, paused for a Five Guys lunch, then Metro’d to the C&B at Clarendon for tableware, flatware, glassware, more kitchenware, bedding, and big huge giant towels so incredibly expansive that they need their own representation in Congress.

Today is church, and tonight is free music by the Baltimore Consort at the National Gallery and snow! Weather folk are predicting just an inch accumulating tonight, but after the paltry few flakes we’ve had this winter, even an inch is a lot. I’ve posted more on tonight’s potential snow event at DC Metroblogging.

Caturday!

2007-01-20.

It’s been two weeks since we’ve had a Saturday with cat photos. I’m sorry. Here’s a whole bunch of Pandora pictures to make up for the gap:

Oh, Snap

2007-01-18.

Animated GIF of 3D-generated Captain America parodying a GIF of an old chocolate commercial with the words 'Oh Snap' superimposed onto the chocolate bar packaging. Something weird happened to me last month, a couple of weeks before Christmas: I lost any and all desire to consume ginger snaps. I was about halfway down a week-old container of Trader Joe’s Triple Ginger Snaps, and midway through one of them I looked at it and realized I couldn’t eat it anymore. (This may be similar to the very last and final time I had a McDonald’s Sausage Egg and Cheese Muffin, when I realized on biting into it that every McDondald’s breakfast sandwich I’d ever eaten tasted just like sand. Even the Maple McGriddle. Sweet maple sand.)

I thought maybe I’d been eating a lot of ginger snaps lately, so if I gave them a break I’d like them again after a few weeks. Today, more than a month later, I still can’t bring myself to look at ginger snaps. Oh, I’m fine with chocolate chip cookies (though not with oatmeal raisin, mostly due to the “raisin” part), but ginger snaps? Pass.

Now, Peppermint Bark, on the other hand, I have fallen in love with. Seriously. Especially the Williams-Sonoma variety. Through the holidays I kept telling everyone I know who hadn’t tried it yet, “You have to try it. It’s like eating Christmas.”

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