SmugMug vs. Flickr

I've never been a flickr fan simply because I've never liked the interface. However, I do understand the concept and think it's a great one.

After several power outages, my hard drive has been making some really bad noises. As I'm preparing for total melt down, I thought it would be nice to have somewhere to archive my photos. CD's go bad, and you can never fully trust your PC. The only solution for me was to find somewhere to stash them online.

One of those choices was flickr, and the other was SmugMug. I've whittled the list down to just these two services by reading many forums, and blogs. These two seem to be the leaders in photo sharing and storage.

While I've used both, my final decision was to go with SmugMug. I've decided to pay for the standard package which is ~$30 per year. With this you get unlimited uploads, and 4gb of download bandwidth. They seem to be very lenient with the 4gb ceiling by granting you the ability to ask for more when needed.

Along with being a good company with a great reputation, the offer an excellent product. SmugMug offers the user tons of image tweaking tools. Galleries are a snap to set up and are highly customizable. They also offer sub-galleries, a feature missing from flickr.

They already have a solid product, but allow you to customize it further with the wide range of apis available to web-geeks. Some have already developed handy tools to enhance SmugMug.

The only thing missing is the kind of community you can find over at flickr. "Interestingness" is defiantly something I will miss at SmugMug.

So with that said, hop on over and take a look at my boring vacation photos. I almost have them all online. Hopefully the last few will make it up before the "melt down".

P.S. If you want to sign up for SmugMug and save $5, use this code: dAoAc4XlBEnGQ

Sewage Plant to be Powered by Cooking Grease

I think bio-diesel is going to be one of the finalists in the battle of alternate energy. With that said, I find it cool to see things like this in the news.

Vacation Mosaic

I found this cool program that will allow you to create mosaics from your collection of images.

The one above is created from all my vacation pictures of which I don't have many. Obviously, if I had more pics, the quality would be a lot better. Click the image for a bigger version.

BTW: If you couldn't tell, this is a picture of the Golden Gate bridge. I took it from a catamaran, sailing in the bay.

When I was a kid we had these things called books.

It's huge for a library to drop all their printed materials, and opt for digital replacements. I guess it's natural progression, but wow that was quick!

I wonder if they will install a holographic librarian.

Web Developer Must Have

The link above is for the new IE developer toolbar. This is defiantly something you want to install if you develop user interfaces in html/JavaScript.

The ruler feature is something I've wanted for a long time now.

New Blog, New Outlook on Life

My last blog was just a spring board for me to get into the whole blogging scene. I didn’t think I was going to enjoy it, but it quickly became a small addiction for me. I loved the ability it gave me to vent some major frustrations. I quickly got carried away with what I was posting and realized I needed a fresh start. So this is it; my first “real” blog.

This blog will be a lot tamer as I find other ways to vent my frustrations. Ways that aren’t directly linked to my name and address.