Category: General

I’ve been incommunicado for too many months. One reason: Beyond TV 4. Not an excuse, but an explanation. I’m back though. Welcome to 2006!

I agree with TechCrunch’s post about memeorandum (which I incidentally came across reading memeorandum). It’s a great site. A “newspaper for anyone interested in what’s happening right now” — couldn’t have put it better myself.

There’s a new version of Google’s Picasa photo management software, version 2, and I’m most excited about this feature:

External drives – Find photos on external drives using Picasa. Simply go Tools > Folder Manager to choose whether Picasa should scan a connected external drive to find pictures. When you unplug and reconnect, Picasa will find your pictures instantly (with no scanning), and will also preserve your labels

I’ve been needing this for a while since I’m constantly having to move files off my hard drive onto external storage.

I read ehomeupgrade’s post about qoop-flickr and it reminded that I wanted to post some brief feedback on qoop+flickr.

The ordering experience was OK, nothing stellar, but by far the biggest downer was the print quality of the photos in the book that I ordered. Pixely, dithered — how else can I describe them?

While Derek Powazek does point out the inferior print quality, I think he understates it.

Anyways, I’m surprised that flickr did a deal with qoop with the quality being what it is. You’d think print quality would be criteria numero uno for them!

UPDATE: Phil, President of QOOP, found my posting and has just responded in the comments. His attention is commendable and I look forward to seeing them improve the quality of the QOOP-Flickr service.

UPDATE 2: Phil just called me and after chatting with him, I have a high level of confidence that they’ll address these issues fairly soon. When I see the new results, I’ll definitely be posting my feedback then.

Searching for stock photography has always been a pain — visit corbis, then getty images, then veer and then… who knows what else. I’d like a single site to deliver a consolidated image search across all of these image databases.

And most stock photographs seem to be pretty well tagged, but how about letting people tag/rate photographs, collections and stock photo companies? This additional meta data could go a long way to making it easier for designers to find good stock photographs.

The site could make money through referrer fees (assuming that these sites have such a thing), though this sort of revenue model could create a conflict with the goal of providing high quality search results. Maybe the site could make money providing other services to a designer community that it would foster.

One of the other cool trends that I think will grow to dominate the stock photography business, or at least grow it to a new set of customers that don’t buy stock photography today is the trend towards amateurs and prosumers selling their work online. Why couldn’t some average photographer upload a bunch of his stuff to flickr and, in turn, have someone else pay him for those photographs? I’d buy those photographs — they’d be less expensive and there’d be a lot more to choose from.

IMG_7641
Originally uploaded by rakeshagrawal.

We’re off to Austin. Check out the house all boarded up!

I feel good tonight because I fixed a mechanical problem with Shonali’s Dell Latitude laptop. The hinge on Shonali’s laptop (between the screen and the base) has been extremely loose for, oh, about the last year or so. I spent about 30 minutes this evening, took the thing apart (thanks in part to the service manual on www.dell.com), found the loose screws in the hinge, fixed it and now the laptop feels like new.

I’m surprised at xeni and boing boing for taunting India’s offer to help the United States with handling the aftermath of Katrina in this post. The post is entitled, “Katrina: whew, here comes India to save us, at last!” Hey Xeni, boing boing, way to propagate American arrogance to all of your readers in and outside the United States!

I’ve been using Gmail now for a little bit and it works pretty well — I’m impressed with the Gmail interface. There are still some things I need to experiment with like attachments and keyboard shortcuts (are there any?) but right now, I’m not feeling much pain after using Gmail for a while. I wonder if there will be pain associated with not having my calendar or tasks in Gmail.

One thing that I wish worked better: I’ve setup my personal and work e-mail addresess to both forward to my gmail account and I’ve also verified both against my Gmail account so I can send e-mails from personal/work addresses from with gmail. But one problem I’ve encountered is that Gmail doesn’t make any inferences about which e-mail address to use when replying to a message — it simply uses whichever e-mail address you’ve marked as default. In my case, I have my personal address marked as the default so when replying to work e-mails, I have to CLICK on other choices (under the from address) and then I have to CLICK and CHOOSE my work e-mail address. Three extra clicks, in my opinion. Hey Gmail product people: why not do away with those extra clicks?