I’ve never been completely happy with Flickr. I started using it several years ago because I got tired of maintaining Gallery on my servers when services such as flickr and smugmug existed. I originally chose flickr because it was free, but after i started scanning my family pictures I hit the upload limit fast and bought the pro account. Setup my sets and left it at that for a couple of years.

When I started dating Katherine and showing her some pictures she commented on how awful Flickrs navigation is. Flickr’s strength is when you are using its tagging features and searching for lots of pictures … especially if you want pictures from multiple people. I always browsed my pictures in iPhoto on my local machine, not on flickr. I used flickr to link to pictures and let other people browse them. But for people that are not used to tagging and searching tags, using Flickr really IS very cumbersome.

I recently became re-aware of SmugMug from Lifehacker. A friend of mine used it years ago, but i dismissed it because I was running Gallery on my servers. Then i ignored it because I was already using the free flickr and decided to just stick with it. Having some time to kill this week, i decided to give smugmug another serious look and signed up for their 14 day free trial and used Smugglr to automagically migrate my flickr data over to SmugMug. The import worked well, only 4 images failed to import properly. My only complaint about Smugglr is that it didn’t tell me which images didn’t import, so i need to figure that out by hand.

All in all I’m happy with SmugMug, and paid for the year subscription (50% off with the coupon code “flickr”). It allows much more customization and organization options than Flickr does: Categories, Sub Categories, Themes (global and individual galleries), etc …. I feel like I am in control of my pictures again instead of just having a stream of all my images and some “sets” which always felt like a hack to me. If i know what i’m looking for search the tags in flickr worked well, but sometimes you just want to browse your images. SmugMug excels at just browsing things, if you spend the time to setup categories and sub categories and organizing your galleries.

Here is my new Photo website, enjoy:

http://mbond.smugmug.org

I updated the navigation in the left hand bar as well. I won’t be getting rid of my flickr account but it does expire in January and I won’t be renewing the pro account. Pretty sure that means things will disappear after that.

Scheduled 10 hours in a Citabria with a CFI in August. FINALLY going to have a chance to get my tail dragger endorsement :).

Hoping that I have enough time left after doing the tail dragger stuff to do some spins. That would be most excellent.

Who’s the idiot that decided to disable php.ini’s SMTP variable on linux and assume that everyone can use sendmail off the local box? Apparently, its a windows only setting. So its not that PHP can’t support using an SMTP server, its that they specifically disable that feature on linux. Brilliant.

Enter smtp_mail.php a php class that works similar to mail() but honors what you have set in php.ini. Not a perfect solution, but better than nothing.

We just launched the redesigned website at WVU Libraries, check it out: http://www.libraries.wvu.edu

That site has taken a significant portion of my time for the past 3 or 4 months, looking forward to starting something new next week.

Back in October there was a slight problem with my shower. It developed a crack in the bottom that was shaped strikingly like my heel. That weekend I tore the shower and carpet out of my bathroom and installed a new shower. The shower, it turned out, was the easy part. Getting a new floor and shower doors proved to be the more difficult aspects of it all.

6 weeks later, my shower doors FINALLY arrive. I installed them Friday night (12/7/2007) and today took my first shower in my brand new shower stall.

Flickr Photo Set of the progress from start to finish

3.4 more to go to reach the 100 hour mark.

At 8am on July 25th, 2007 I arrived at the Morgantown airport. Preflighted the plane and flew down to Elkins airport.

10am, I had my oral exam. The examiner told me he would meet me out at the plane. I passed the oral.

11am, we were in the air. My practical test was going well so far.

11:50am, I walked back into the terminal. Fast test. Very fast. I was worried.

by 12:00 noon I had my temporary pilot certificate in my hand, and a huge smile on my face.

Been waiting to hold one of those in my hand for very nearly all my life. Gonna fly around for a couple months, practicing everything i’ve learned and making it perfect. Then I’ll begin my instrument training sometime this winter.

If you are in or around the Morgantown, WV area and have a plane or are looking for a co-owner in a plane contact me. I’m very interested in working with someone to fly their plane or own so that i can stop renting planes from flight schools.

Concerning Karate …

I’m testing for my brown belt this coming Saturday (April 14th). I’m in the best physical shape that I have been for years. I’m almost 20 pounds lighter than I was 3 months ago, my endurance/stamina is where it was when I was in high school. I have no doubt in my mind that I will still be standing at the end of the test (not something I can claim at the end of my green belt test).

That isn’t to say I’m not worried about the test. It’s one thing to make it through the ordeal, its another to pass it. I know all the material; drills, katas, judo, akido, etc …. I know I know it, but I’m not convinced my technique is good enough to earn a brown belt. I know there is a lot of room for improvement still, and this is blatantly obvious every time I watch the person leading class how much more I can improve.

To say I’m nervous about the test would be an understatement of epic proportions.

Concerning AOLIM …

I was creating new AOL Instant Messenger accounts for librarians yesterday (something I’ve been doing almost weekly for a while now) and noticed that you can now use your existing email address as a AOLIM user name. This is something i’ve been after for a very long time, and was my biggest reason for not using AIM.

I still prefer googletalk over AOLIM, but you can now get a hold of me with AOLIM using ‘mbond@the-forgotten.org‘

Concerning Web Development …

I learned about FireBug today … if you do web development, go get it now. Its crazy cool.

I’ve also been spending time working on a new web page for the Dojo, http://greatmartialartist.com/. As you can see I am not a graphic artist … but the web page is coming along nicely, with a lot of nice features for students when it is done.

Concerning Television …

TV sucks these days. There is hardly anything on to watch … but if you are going to watch TV try to do it in High Def, it really makes a difference.

The new Chiller channel on DirecTV is probably the best channel ever, even if it isn’t in HD.

I’ve been wanting to do more with my website, but lack the motivation to finish all my template software write now to make it possible to do it exactly as I would like. So … i decided to move back to wordpress.
A couple of changes have taken place as a result:

1. Left navigation now seperates Internal (Wordpress Pages) and External (Everything else) links
2. Random links on the top right are gone and replaced with the titles of the last 10 posts. Didn’t like the random links anyway
3. Internal Pages now work the way I originally envisioned them 2 years ago but never got around to doing till now

The changes to the home page, are relatively minor and will continue to get better as I hack on the WP code and refine my template.

The one major disadvantage to word press is that not everything works exactly as I’d like it too, which means hacking code, which means upgrading is more of a pain than it should be. Oh well. I’ve already made about 5 changes, I have another 6 to do before I’ll be happy with it. Other than that the rest will be adding content, particularly to the tech pages.

The blog part of the site will become second to the content on the other pages. Most of what I’ve written in blog posts previously will now be Site pages.

Enjoy.

Features I’d love to see on the iPod in the future.

1) Currently pressing the button during a song play back cycles through ratings, length and another length view. To me this is a waste.

Pushing the button should bring up a user definable menu. Here is what i would put on it:

• View Album : Takes you to the track listing for the album that the current song is from
• View Artist : Same thing, but to the artist listing
• Shuffle Toggle : turn shuffle for the play list on and off
• Share Song : See below

2) Volume normalization. Keep the volume the same for all the music automatically. Neuros did this wonderfully. You can do it manually in iTunes, but that kinda sucks.

3) Social Listening. This is the one and only feature of the Zune that I like. It would be great if you could share the current song with someone else. They get to listen to it a couple times then it locks up and they have to buy it from iTMS or whatever.