It's a tall order but we're taller

At first I was indifferent-to-mildly-excited about video to Flickr. I watched one on one of my contacts' pages as soon as it was announced (said contact was a beta tester, so had a vid available as soon as it went live). It was a good video, so that helped, and I actually like change, unlike many of the people reacting badly to the addition of video. But the more I see how it's implemented on my little page on Flickr, the more I really kinda wish they hadn't done it.

It seems like a little nitpick, but I hate how now my Flickr page is titled "Flickr: Photos & Video from Lalitree", even though I have no videos uploaded. No big deal, but I'd guess that as they tweak the interface further, more menus and navigation options will have to be changed to de-emphasize photos and avoid confusion. Someone unfamiliar with Flickr coming to my photostream for the first time will have a much different impression now of what my page is all about, even if I have no videos at all.

Which is what really bugs me about this whole thing: Flickr used to do one thing and do it well. Now that's no longer the case, and that really dilutes the impact of a nice Flickr page as any kind of informal portfolio (or even a back-end for a portfolio, as I use it). Not that it ever was a great place to host a portfolio, nor was it ever intended to be, but I personally preferred it when Flickr's identity was simply a great place to share photos.

Maybe they'll further adjust things to ease the awkwardness somewhat--having a separate tab for video, rather than mixing them in with the photos, for example, might help quite a bit. Though staff's responses to the suggestions and complaints so far has been to dig in their heels somewhat, at least as far as the interface goes. 

I know some people's reactions to this have been a bit over-the-top, but consider that everyone uses Flickr differently. I'd imagine those who just use it as a place to share fun stuff with their friends would embrace video enthusiatically. After all, most people's cameras take both photo AND videos, so maybe it seems natural to have them shared from one site? But those who use Flickr as more of a place to showcase photography might understandably dislike the loss of a photo-focussed site with great social aspects. As I'm somewhere in between those two camps, I'm sort of cautiously pessimistic at this point.

Supposed to be a frost tonight. This is all kinds of bogus -- I had to do a bunch of plant-shuffling and -covering in the hopes that my tender ones don't get hurt. It's cold in the house too, but I'm not turning on the heat. This is the South and it's not even November yet! Though I do have the little space heater going. I'm on my second cup of hot tea, resisting the urge to eat this entire bag of Choco Spekulatius cookies. Resistance...fading...

I don't suppose anyone here knows what to do about an Safari rendering problem causing images or text to load, but not be visible until highlighted with the mouse (after which they stay visible)? I'm using a javascript Effect.Appear function, and Camino and Firefox render it just fine. Google is failing me, or I am not searching on the right keywords. Heaps of thanks to anyone with an idea of what's wrong and/or how I can fix it.

I've heard this song (http://myspace.com/theexmembers -- click on the second song, "Big Black Goodbye") by Durham band the Ex-Members a couple times on local radio, and have found myself really digging it. Have a listen if you're still looking for your summer jam. (When we first moved to North Carolina, we bought our dining room table and chairs from this funky furniture store called Ecko, and the woman who is now the lead singer of this band was the person who sold them to us. I remember her telling us she was a musician, but I never really got around to hearing her band at the time (Gerty). She doesn't sell furniture anymore, she's now a chef of some sort. True story.)

...has not left my head today. What is that percussion in the chorus? It's so rad.

If anyone has recommendations for good, reliable, VPS hosting for under ~$75/mo., please do let me know asap. And I thank you.

and I am eating strawberries from the garden dipped in the chocolate fudgy frosting that John made to put on the chocolate cake that he also made, all from scratch! And OMG, it's all delicious. He also gave me Bust-A-Move Bash, which I played much of the evening, plus a neat-o wok topper for our grill, some nice beach clothes, and some fancy chocolate bars. My work friends made me cupcakes and took me out to lunch. Win!

I am late to the party #238347: remixes are cool.

Busy & great weekend. Friday and Saturday, movies at the Full Frame documentary film festival. Amazing to be among such a mad scene of people, all here to see documentaries. We didn't even get to see some of the ones we wanted to see (like Helvetica) because the theatres--including one that seats almost 1,000--were sold out. Saturday night, the Junior Boys (outstanding); last night, TV On The Radio (photos tk, but the usually-great lighting at the Cats Cradle was not so good last night, so I don't think I got many keepers).

At work now, sitting in silence because I forgot my iPod. Rats!

Too much standing, too much talking, so much fun. It was a beautiful night--warm, with a full moon that rose huge and orange over downtown Durham. I intended to go home after SW, since I had to get up for work today, but ended up staying the whole time. I got home at 2am and stayed up even later to import my shiny new expanded Palo Santo CD and my replacement copy of Thor's excellent Fields of Innards, to get them onto my iPod for potential listening at work today. Somehow I then woke up, wide awake, at 6:30 this morning, before the alarm even went off. I got up, made coffee, and imported my photos. I'll do some more uploading after work today, but for now please enjoy these two.

• The Hurricanes are rapidly approaching watching-the-playoffs-at-home status.
• Oprah chose Cormac McCarthy's dark, apocalyptic and excellent The Road for her next Book Club selection.
• Dreamhost had some apocalyptic crash in their entire network and all my websites are were down. Hey wow they fixed it.
• I'm growing wheatgrass in a pot by the kitchen sink and it's beautiful.
• Soon I will juice that wheatgrass and it will be tasty.

Dreamhost = Nightmarehost for the past week. For the past four business days straight, all the sites I have w/ them have been down during the day. I don't know what to do except send another support ticket into the ether, and then wait hours and hours and not get a response. I'd consider switching, but moving the forum database was a horrible experience the last time I switched hosts, and the db is considerably larger now. This has to get better NOW though, or drastic measures will have to be taken. I think something is going on with them and they're not being forthcoming. If you want to see what a bunch of dissatisfied customers looks like, read the comments on their status blog.

Gmail is also down for me for the past two hours. Internet, why have you forsaken me?

Redesign of the official Mountain Goats website is up, complete with forums, more sections, and better contact info.

After many many discarded design ideas, I went with a sort of inversion: put the banner-like image at the bottom, rather than at the top. I like how it came out. I think I avoided making any of the five mistakes, though I realize that it is missing tracklistings. Those will come, but it'll be a bit of a project, since there are quite a few tracks to list.

ESSENTIAL
http://youtube.com/watch?v=TZ860P4iTaM

I also cuddled the wombat. And some cute Tasmanian devil stuffed animals too.

Australia photos up now, in case you haven't already seem 'em, which you probably have. In Australia they have excellent Asian food. Also in Australia they ask you "How are you going?" instead of "How are you doing?", and I just can't get used to it.

"A hot shower, a big hug, some diet coke."
--from a thread on the LPTJ forums entitled 'What are you craving right now?'

Leslie posted on our little forums occasionally, this quote was from about a month ago. She last posted on Thursday, December 7th, sharing her recipes for holiday bread. This morning I came in to work to and checked my email and blog feeds and was startled to read this post saying that she had passed away. I couldn't believe it, and hoped, like kfan did in the post, that it was just a misunderstanding and that she was fine. Then it was on LJ and more people who knew her well confirmed it, and I knew it was true.

I think I first knew her from comments on Merlin's LJ. Later she put me on her friends list and I put her on mine, and we became casual internet friends. She'd often comment on my entries, especially when she had some advice to offer or wisdom to share. When I whined about doing taxes & how complicated ours were, she emailed me with tips about "rockstar bookkeeping". When I had job angst, she was there with advice. When I posted something about buying art, she emailed me with tons of great info about art collecting. When I posted photos, she was encouraging and said nice things about them. When I wanted a Neighborhoodie, she suggested the perfect phrase to put on it.

And that's just a sampling. She was so wise and smart, but not pretentious or self-interested. She was just generous with her knowledge and wanted to help people who might benefit from it. She wanted to help people with their problems, or make their decisions easier or wiser, and generally use her powers to help out in some way. I never got to meet her in person--she was in NYC one time when I was, but we weren't quite able to get together. My thoughts go out to her family and all her friends. She touched a lot of people's lives. We're all going to miss her.

Staying in tonight. That cold front finally made it here and now there's a chill in the air; not freezing or anything but a bit of a downer after yesterday's 74 degree balmy loveliness. Leaving some friends' house last night it already seemed cold, and even though it was only 50 or so, my teeth were chattering in a really annoying way before the car heater really kicked in.

We'd spent the evening playing Wii games. It was my first chance to get to see the new system, since we were out of town on launch day; last week when stores had more, we were just a little too late to grab one. JD went over to play with it when my mom was in town last week, but I didn't get my chance until now. Of course, it was a good time--Wii Sports is fun and right-shoulder-destroying, especially pitching in baseball and serving in tennis. Monkey Ball mini-games were sometimes fun (hovercraft, racing) and sometimes just ridiculous and simple (rocket landing, beat the thief, and sadly, the new Monkey Target, which isn't simple but rather ridiculously difficult).

I've heard that stores might be releasing more tomorrow morning, so I am going to try to get up and see if I can get in line for one. I'm not doing anything insane though, like some people online who say they're getting there at 4am. Shame about that cold front, it'll probably be in the mid-30s out there.

UPDATE: it wasn't that cold at all, really: 45 degrees at 9:00 when I got there, an hour before opening. There were more people in line than I expected. I was probably 35th in line, and word was that they only had 22 systems. We waited for about 20 minutes, then an employee came out and handed out tickets. He ran out of tickets about ten people in front of me. Oh well! Next week.

All you really need to know about me lately: A Trader Joe's opened in our area yesterday, and today we went and bought five bags of groceries. YES YES Y'ALL

If anyone is doing NaNoWriMo and still hasn't decided on a plot, I thought up one for you while unloading the dishwasher just an hour or so ago. Check this out: the popcorn bandit. S/he breaks into houses, pops a bag of microwave popcorn and leaves, leaving the rest of the house untouched but with a distinct and tenacious smell of fake butter in the air. At first the neighborhood is just puzzled but then starts to get freaked out. Meanwhile the popcorn bandit does it at first just for fun but then starts to get addicted to the thrill. The details & interstitials basically write themselves; bingo, you're done.

Drinking port on the last nice day of the season (at least for awhile). I finished my video game (Okami, for those who missed the last entry's ravings). I think this game was perfect for me because none of the tasks were too repetitive & the fights weren't too hard (and extra health was as easy to procure). Only gripes were some poor decisions made by the writers to toss in some annoying content/dialogue about boobies, provided by the 'guide' character. Didn't add anything to the game and was rather out of place, frankly.

In other news, I think I have begun liking the Thermals.