A Collection of Daily Wisdom by Dennis Sylvester Hurd since September 2003.

The title here reminds me that my quick wit has always been obvious. Modesty is one of my many other great virtues. During class, my seventh grade English teacher was going into some detail about a family member who worked for the railroad. I interrupted the lesson to state that while his relative was minding trains, he was in the occupation of training minds.

Rather, I actually intended for the title to point out how I have been stuck discussing images of late. It is very true; therefore, I'll wrap up the discussion with one last bit of news. I have decided that this blog isn't enough to keep me busy. Now, you can check a daily photo at the other, oft-mentioned site. My first of the series appeared yesterday.

I promise there'll be no more talk of flickr from tomorrow ...

Labels: Flickr, train

CANADA DAY!

Labels: Canada, Canada Day

I only know about five other people who own a digital camera. My excitement over Flickr is infectious, but I don't want to keep bugging these folks. Some signed up yesterday, and a few have even uploaded a few photos. I want to jump and shout about Flickr somewhere though. It is so well-designed. I will mention four hints below:

First, use tags well. This is the newest style of organizing things for the hierarchically-challenged. Actually, computing has become so much less organized since DOS days when each and every subdirectory was loving created with the command 'md' and one moved around by 'cd\'ing all over the place. On flickr you won't be worrying about making folders as new photos will just appear in your stream. After you have more than a half dozen, it could be hard to find what you want. Therefore, plan and use your tags well. For example, from the 50 plus photos on the site today, you can view new westminster, burrowing owl, or 1970. It will even keep track of all the tags you've used.

Second, get all your digital-imaging friends involved in Flickr right away. This is because you will have instant access to their uploads whenever you sign on. Right on the first page you'll see photos from your contacts. You might want to allay any fears of those who think privacy is important. They can specify photo as visible to only those deemed as family or friends. Personally, some people go a little overboard about privacy, but then I'm a blogger who just loves to have people stop by and gawk.

Next, an absolutely amazing ability of Flickr is the use of groups. Each of one's individual photos may be offered as visible to a group. That means you search the thousands of topics started by others and contribute matching photos to them. For example, I shared many photos in an official Beautiful BC pool. Do you have a really off-beat topic? You can create your own group and hope others will stop and participate.

Lastly, there's more to each photo page than originally meets the eye. Explore the lower, right-hand side of the screen. For some photos that haven't been edited you may even see the option for more properties. You might even learn some information of which the photographer wasn't aware!

Labels: Flickr, software

I found myself constantly defaulting to a quick and dirty little graphics editor called MS Photo Editor that shipped with Office 95. Although I'm currently running Office 2003, I kept the program on my computer. For some reason, even my old MS Picture It! had become uncooperative after I installed more RAM.

Hell, I thought, images are important to me. So, I ran out and bought MS Digital Image Pro 10. I think a new version is imminent as they're offering a $60 mail-in rebate through BestBuy. The software surely makes photo manipulation easy. Give me a recent photograph, Don, and I can save you thousands on 'procedures'. The interactive demo started with a face photo and I learned to ...

• get rid of red eye
• remove wrinkles
• fix a double chin
• whiten yellowed teeth.

I wanted to give the friends above a gift. So I've decided on a virtual trip to Lake Louise, AB. Even though they haven't visted there yet, I can print up an entire set of vacation pictures for them.

Labels: Don, software, Tim

Okay, I'll admit that Flickr's fun. It's full of configurable options and basically feels cool. It makes one quickly feel like a part of a vast network of image makers and collectors. Click the screen image here to see 20 images in my recently uploaded Beautiful BC collection.

Yesterday, I got a package from my dad. I had asked him to mail old slides to me. My mom used to take Kodachrome shots when we were on trips. For example, I wondered if he'd be able to find anything from our 1965 trip in a Volkswagon bus from New Hamsphire to Alaska. I really only recall the stories told by others as it was the year I started first grade. In fact, I believe I was a few days late for the start of classes as that's the only time my dad was able to arrange vacation time. The postman's delivery arrived with slides as well as other junk. There were quite a few fading paper prints too. Now, I'll have things to scan and include here over the next little while.

Perhaps this is why Flickr is so intriguing to me at the moment. In theory, a child born today can have a digital record of everyday life. There could be a universal image repository with tags for searching. It could grow to contain an entire lifetime of images and be easily accessible from any computer. My recently-arrived box full of yellowing parchment and dyes seems like such an anachronism.

(I should give my father some credit, instead of cushioning things with environmentally-unfriendly Styrofoam popcorn, he sent the items sandwiched between rolls of toilet paper. That's an added bonus that will keep on giving!)

Labels: Alaska, Flickr, New Hampshire

If you happen to search for SkyTrain at this blog, you'll come up with a surprising number of matches. The word features prominently as the Columbia Station is accessible right from this building. I seldom drive to Vancouver as it's far easier and cheaper to travel the twelve miles in driverless cars on the generally-elevated track.

Labels: transit

No wonder why the world's been agog over Flickr. I've been slow to investigate the service. Although initally started by folks from here, it's now a part of the Yahoo empire. Thankfully though, the new management doesn't make one jump through hoops to participate.



Here's a sample picture uploaded to Flickr. The photo was taken in the wine tasting section of the Burrowing Owl Winery. Luckily, Jay and I had just watched the DVD of Sideways (2004), so we were in the right mood.

Labels: British Columbia, Flickr, food

I like the idea of net publishing through a web application. Although companies have been pushing the concept of 'thin clients' where applications run over a network for years, it's taken useful applications such as gmail to make me realize I don't have to have the code sitting on a hard disk near my fingertips.

Still, using www.blogger.com has become a royal hassle. It is nice in theory to be able to publish an entry from any computer on the Internet. In actuality over the past several months that's become harder and harder. Almost exactly a month ago, for some unknown reason, the site suddenly refused to publish to this domain. Now, I am finding that template information that has worked for several years, is showing incorrectly on screen.

Help is next to impossible to obtain from the folks at blogger.com. If I have to keep fussing with editing files and manually uploading them, I might as well move on to a dedicated, standalone blogging product.

Labels: Internet

Oh my. Finally.

News - Bell ExpressVU Launches Dual-Tuner HD PVR

Perhaps it's time to get serious about a widescreen TV. I should just wear a sign around my neck that says, "Will work for electronic gadgets."

Labels: PVR