Burnt toast, sheets and fucking foto services

[susandennis]

This morning I decided to have a couple of slices of toast.  I have two toaster ovens.  One I use mainly for broiling meat and toasting toast and the other I used for baking stuff.  This morning I put two slices of bread in the one I use for toasting and then came over to the computer to check on something and got distracted.  By the time I remembered the toast it was burnt.  So I tossed it and tried again (to the melodious screech of the smoke alarm).  This toaster oven is slow... so again to the computer. 

This time, when I remembered to check I found the toast flambeau!  Yep, flaming, fire.  YIKES! 

So... this toast is now a crusade for me.  I get two more pieces of bread and try the other toaster oven.  I've never used it for toast before.  It does a FINE job!  5 minutes  Perfect toast.   Note to self:  Don't forget to toss out the charcoal you left in the first toaster oven.

Somewhere last week I caught a lengthy online thread about sheets and duvet covers and who sleeps with what bed linen.  It was a variation on the toilet roll up or under controversy.  For years I have slept on a full sized bed with fitted bottom sheet and a twin sized top sheet and a duvet cover - full of duvet in the winter and empty like a light blanket in the Summer.  After reading the conversation I decided to try going comando - no top sheet.  I'm sold.  Way easier sleeping.  Way Way easier bed making.  Probably in the Summer, I'll add the top sheet back in but maybe not.  Stay tuned.

Buzznet is giving me fits.  I've had my account there for two years now.  It has the handiest feature - a snippet of code grabs the last four photos and puts them on my web page.  Plus, I just like the layout of their pages - the latest photo and then thumbs of the dozen ones before the latest.  Easy peasy but they are always having some kind of issues.  It's been a year since I've reliably been notified by email of any comments.  The site owner keeps telling me he's fixed this but it keeps not being fixed.  Then today I noticed that once again my syndication - the last four photos - is no longer working on my webpage.

So I decided it was time to switch.  I've always hated flickr.  I don't know why.  I hate it when a link sends me there.  I find their interface very confusing and I just don't like it.  Textamerica was once a fine alternative but they, apparently, no longer offer syndication.  So back to flickr.  I'm sure there is a way to email my photos to flickr and then grab the last four for my webpage but you know what, I've now killed an hour trying to figure out how. 

This is what I hate about flickr.  It is impossible to figure out how to work their site.  I know others have done it.  machupicchu loves the place and kyrielle seems very happy with it and both have, apparently, cracked their obfuscated system.  But I'll be darned if I can figure it out.  I did figure out how to email photos - the email address is very bizzar but it works.  But, I can not figure out how to generate the code which will pick up the last four photos and plop them on my website and refresh as I email new photos.  If anyone has a clue, I'd kill for a tip.  http://www.flickr.com/photos/susand/

I did take a walk today. It's been nearly a year since I've done one of my weekend walks and today was just a mini one.  I walked down to the aquarium and back - according to Google it's .8 miles.  It was perfect walking weather.  Cool and nice. 

Comments

[kyrielle]

See, my only web-page is my LJ, so my desire to pull my most recent four photos is nonexistent.

However, I assume the easiest way would be to snag them somehow from the RSS feed for your photostream (or the Atom feed, if you prefer)?

AHA! Found it. Just searched the "Get the most out of Flickr" link under "Support" at the bottom of the page and found this:

http://www.flickr.com/badge_new.gne

[susandennis]

You are THE BEST!!! I would have NEVER figured that out on my own. I saw about badges but couldn't figure out what they were talking about. Yahoooo!!!! Fixed. http://www.susandennis.com - heck, I might even move my buzznet stuff over. Thank you!!

[kyrielle]

Glad it worked! I like Flickr, but where they fall down is in explaining things - I guess I've learned to read Flickr-ese when I have to. For a long time they didn't even tell you in the FAQ that they had RSS and Atom feeds. I'm not sure they do now, for that matter. The links are there but, unless you read a whole page just to see if there's a feed, the FAQ didn't use to tell you. It may not yet.

[dragonvpm.livejournal.com]

LOL

Your adventures in toasting reminded me of a site I came across a while ago:


Strawberry Pop-Tart Blow-Torches (http://www.pmichaud.com/toast/toast.html)

Although you get bonus points for managing to do it indoors w/o destroying your toaster ;)

This is pretty much a moot point now, but can't you do something similar to what you did with flickr using LJs photo stuff? I haven't poked around it too much, but it seems like something it should be able to do (then again I often think things should be able to do quite a bit more than they actually do ;). Anyways, I hope you enjoyed your toast :-p

[susandennis]

Oh yikes on the pop tarts!

And I don't know if you can do the photo thing with LJ's photo program BUT, the main purveyor of my photos is my Mom and I'd kind of like to keep her separated from LJ, if possible. It's my dual life :).

[dragonvpm.livejournal.com]

Heh, gotcha.

Actually how do you handle the dual life thing online? For a while now I've been at a bit of a loss as to how I could seperate my LJ life from my watered-down-appropriate-for-parents-and-other-random-people life. I don't really care if my LJ friends find their way to the rest of my life, but I'd rather that my parents etc... didn't make their way to my LJ.

Any thoughts or suggestions?

[susandennis]

It really helps if your parents are clueless like my family. I have a website that has a webcam and knitting updates and book updates and periodically, Mom likes to roam around there. That keeps her distracted. Last week, somehow, she found Live Journal and was on my userpage but couldn't figure out how to get past there - fortunately. I'm sure that she has not totally forgotten about it or probably thinks she imagined it. But, it was a little freaky. (I routinely VPN to her machine to fix stuff - like close 47 bascillion IE windows and that's how I discovered it.)

If you google "Susan Dennis" with the quotes, my LJ is about the third hit down so I'm not really hiding. I just have a lot of clueless friends and family :) and I'm just not inclined to help 'em find out.

To the best of my knowledge I have only ever had one friend stumble on my LJ. Even he got a nudge. I refereced a political blog he writes and some of my LJ friends went to see it. I'm guessing he tracked back from the stats. He needs few clues anyway.

I do lock down some entries to friends only. Mainly these relate to work stuff. It's not a perfect system and I have been lucky so far.

[vasilatos]

It's a little sneaky of me to bury this over here, but it's on topic.

My family is pretty stodgy, and I suspect they are nearly all reading my LJ entries but are carefully not mentioning it. They are pretty savvy about tech stuff, so I try to keep it clean or lock it up. Fortunately, I'm out to everyone, so that's not a concern, and we all get along, so that's not a worry. I think it's kind of funny when I find out about people who don't have LJ accounts reading my stuff. Except when they start sending me email about it. That's just annoying.

[susandennis]

I think it's hilarious that you buried it here. It's perfectly fine by me and I think quite creative!

Excellent point about people being cagey... reading and not fessing up to reading... but, I think the only one I know who is cagey enough to do that is me!

I also think that if someone not on LJ emailed me about something in my journal, I'm not sure how I would react... hmmmm

[vasilatos]

Sorry to keep intruding on your journal...

I am slightly plagued by People From My Past who have gone off and gotten married, moved to the suburbs, and had kids, only to find themselves angst-ridden and bored. For some reason they start thinking about *me* and chase me around on the internet, thinking I will renew them somehow. It's not *my* fault they screwed up.

[end of sneaky rant]

[geordie.livejournal.com]

In fairness to pop-tarts they do say to toast them on the lowest setting. But having said that, I have burned myself on a glazed one before. Melted sugar sure sticks to skin well.

[susandennis]

ouch!

[kyrielle]

LJ's "scrapbook" feature is handy for quick-posting things, but it's not really that great as a photo-sharing service. It's a little inconvenient and hard to do layout, and lacks a lot of spiffy features that Flickr already has. Also, it has a disk-size limit on total uploads (though you can buy more space, of course...). Flickr doesn't - only a limit on uploads per month. I actually considered scrapbook when I left Buzznet, but it just didn't do a whole bunch of things (ability to fave other people's photo-sets, ability to drop their new photos on my friends page without them having to make a separate blog entry, tags, favorites, etc., etc.) that I have come to want from a photo-sharing service.

[dragonvpm.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... interesting.

I've never really looked at photo-sharing services in much detail before. I only use LJ's scrapbook feature so that I can make photo posts from my cell phone.

Suddenly I'm rather curious to see what Flickr can do. Right now I still do the old fashioned thing of hosting photos on my own website and controlling access etc... from there, but some of those features you mentioned sound kind of cool.

Thanks for the info.

[susandennis]

I do the exact same thing. I have a lot of pictures on my own website - well, actually the hosting service. I use LJ photo thing to house mainly the eye candy I use in my entries.

Flickr is very robust and does a lot of nice things. It's just so damn confusing! Maybe too many options for me. Buzznet was very easy but I think they finally pushed me over the edge. But, as you can see, I did get Flickr working on http://www.susandennis.com. Send a pick from phone or other via email and presto/bamo... It's on my webpage. It's a great trick.

[estis.livejournal.com]

Not a big deal but the correct spelling is bizarre.

[susandennis]

Now that is very biz... strange. I thought it looked wrong but my client's spellchecker was ok with it. Thanks for letting me know that next time I should maybe trust me...

[geordie.livejournal.com]

One of my persistent disappointments in the US is the electrical stuff. In the UK mains is 240v +/-10% and 13A, so you can rely on about 3Kw, typical toasters are 1800W and electric kettles are 3Kw. In the US it's 110v 15A and 1650W, my electric kettle is 1500W and my toaster is 850W.

I guess there must be a better toaster than I have, maybe it's time to get a toaster oven? I have considered getting a UK kettle and wiring it to the dryer outlet. Who'd know?

[susandennis]

I haven't had a proper toaster in years. These two things I have are way more ovens than toasters. I don't use the big oven - well, I do but I only use it for storage. The two little ovens do everything I need much better. I usually replace them about every 3 or 4 years but these last two I got are really good ones and they might just last longer.

[letmesaythis.livejournal.com]

I haven't used a top sheet as part of my bedding since comforters became a hot item. I love the ease of making a bed without one and I've never missed it.

[susandennis]

Wonder why in the heck I never thought about it before?? It is easier to make the bed nicely and quickly but I also like the sleeping without getting all tangled in the sheet, too. Amazing. Ya gotta love the internet....

[machupicchu.livejournal.com]

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I'm simply not as computer-savvy as you are to even know how to do what you were attempting to do with Flickr -- nor do I have an external website on which I want refreshable links either. If I did, I might very well have been just as frustrated as you were (until, of course, someone pointed out a handy FAQ link).

What I love most about Flickr is how easy it is to organize photos, and how simple you can make navigating them on the Flickr site itself.

Take my own photo page (http://www.flickr.com/photos/26861346@N00/), for example: not only does it show the most recent ten photos I have uploaded (with pages to all the rest of my entire archive at the bottom), but it also shows the most recent ten galleries I have created, on a column to the left (again, with a link to the rest of them under that). That "organize" button is my best friend.

Okay, well, maybe second-best friend -- because I love their tagging system more than anything else on their site. That way I can bring up a group of all photos featuring a particular person or thing, or even multiple persons or things, and it makes me damn near obscenely excited to be able to use such a feature.

I also love my galleries (http://www.flickr.com/photos/26861346@N00/sets/) (or, in their terms, "sets") page -- a full list, with thumbnail links featuring a particular photo of my choice, of every set I've ever created. As I am now back to 1997 in my scanning, the sets on my page cover 1997 through now. I love, love, love it.

The only complaint I have, actually, is that on the "organize" page, when I want to make a new set for something I want moved to the bottom of my sets page, there does not appear to be any feature that allows for doing that quickly when I already have a ton of sets created. So, I have to click and drag about 15 times until I reach the end of the list. That's a little tedious and annoying.

But, a small price to pay for how much I otherwise love the site -- which, best of all, is by far the cheapest photo hosting service I have found on the Internet that does what I want it to do for me, plus much more.

I just realized I'm going on so much about this that I'm starting to sound like a Flickr infomercial. I guess I'll stop now.
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[waning-estrogen.livejournal.com]

I haven't taken to flickr, either, although plenty of people seem to love it. Last night I went over to my fallback-the-next-time-LJ-goes-down GreatestJournal and remembered that there is free photohosting there that I can use for posting anywhere. Then I noticed they have not only cellphone photohosting, but they will host videoblogs. Signed right up for that one. Now I just have to figure out how to use it.

I'm over here looking for the ToyBox gadget victory_rose cited.

[susandennis]

ljtoys - I think her concerns are interesting... I don't share them at all but think it's very interesting that she feels that way.

[waning-estrogen.livejournal.com]

found it! looks interesting, I've signed up, but the emails might get annoying. I'll probably use it for a little, but forget about it, like I do with most things lately. (a persistent problem when I stay up late and sign up for things that look interesting and in the morning wonder what the hell I was thinking)