Week Three (Part 1)

A lot to do this week so let's get started!

My first task was to explore 'Flickr' and link to an image - so here's our hero courtesy of Flickr. Unfortunately photographs of old Schopenhauer are far more common than young Schopenhauer (who can be seen in the profile picture of this blog), probably because he found fame only in the winter of his life.

Frustratingly, at first, neither Flickr's 'blogging tool' nor Blogger's 'photo upload tool' would work on my library staff computer. In theory our library is embracing web technology for service delivery; in practice this fine ideal is hindered by the technical aspects of I.T. in a large organisation - firewalls, bandwidth, security, and the like. However I did succeed on a later attempt.

Clearly Flickr is an amazing resource. One could spend happy hours perusing the photographs of strangers. An uneasy thought struck me: what if someone posted a image of me without my permission? I am not photogenic. I loathe the pale and squinty creature who peers out of photographs purporting to be me. A quick search of my name showed nothing.

Both 'Picasa Web Albums' and 'Smugmug' are clones of Flickr but without as much content. On its homepage Smugmug touts quotes from various media such as 'Elegant!' and 'Best looking!'. Yet for all that I couldn't see how it was significantly different from the others. Picasa seemed much the same.

My next task is to explore some Flickr mashups.

The simple and effective 'Flickr Color Pickr' caught my eye: a nice application that satisfies both the merely curious and the design minded; the latter perhaps looking for a public domain image suitable for some project.

'Captioner', from http://www.bighugelabs.com/, lets the user add comicbook-style speech and thought bubbles to photographs. Here's one I made in which Schopenhauer speaks this week's piece of wisdom. Schopenhauer considered deep sleep to be like death; a sort of foretaste of non-existence, because when we sleep we lose all knowledge of our own consciousness. He wrote that every morning was like a little birth, every evening an old age, every sleep a little death; and thus sleep itself may be thought of as...

Well that's the first half of week 3; there's still more to do in the second half, next post!