I’ve had some kind of web presence since 1996. (That doesn’t make me one of the old-timers; I came late to the party, compared to some.) I’ve been posting pictures online for most of that time.

Over the years, I’ve tried various approaches to online photo albums:

• Hand-coded HTML. This proved remarkably tedious.
• Gallery 2, which was too big & slow for the Pair servers. The memory-hog killer kept knifing it.
• Gallery 1.5, which worked, but was ugly. (Maybe the blame for that lies with me, not with Gallery.)
• Flickr, which is adequate. (I’m still using it, but mostly from lack of a suitable alternative.)
• SmugMug, which I didn’t like (and about which the loyal readership complained vehemently).

For now, the photostream – 1,718 photos, 13 videos – resides on Flickr.

But the statistics I get from Flickr – view counts, referrers, etc. – make me wonder whether my Flickr account is worth the effort & expense of keeping it. As near as I can tell, the visitors to my Flickr photostream are all coming from: 1) various image-search sites (Google, Yahoo); and 2) Facebook, whenever Jennifer posts a link to one of my pictures. (Now that the AirPort disk-sharing problem has been fixed, and Jennifer has access to all [recent] pictures, I imagine links from Facebook will be less frequent.)

Sometime when I wasn’t paying attention, the role of ‘poster of family photos’ shifted from me to Jennifer. That’s ok – she’s far more social than I am – but it leaves my Flickr account with no obvious reason for existing.

Some things I’ve learned recently, that are worth writing down somewhere so I don’t forget them:

1. The AirPort Extreme’s USB port isn’t quite right: it’s underpowered, or something. (The explanation I’ve heard is that it was designed for printers; disks were an afterthought.) Some USB disks will work with it, others won’t. The 1TB something-or-other (LaCie?) plugged into my AirPort is – alas – in the latter category. The fix: plug a powered USB hub into the AirPort, then plug the disk into that. It’s a regrettable proliferation of wires, but it works.
2. Synchronizing the iPhone with the MacBook is no longer such a good idea. For one thing, it causes iPhoto to download a second set of pictures (the first set being the photostream thingy that showed up with iOS 5 / iCloud / etc.). I need to save the cable for recharging, and synchronize the iPhone & MacBook with iCloud, not with each other. (Funny thing about iCloud – it’s useful. One could argue that Microsoft had the same idea, years earlier – but all the ‘softies managed to produce was the clunky, bizarre & generally useless Windows Live Mesh.)
3. Buying the iPod Classic last August was a mistake. The ability to carry my entire music library around with me doesn’t matter as much as it used to – with iTunes in the Cloud (or whatever they call it) and a wifi-enabled device (iPhone, iPad, etc.), I can download & play the tracks I want, whenever I want to hear them. Music used to be CDs; it was hard to carry around very many of them at one time. Then, music was bits on a disk; and the problem was finding a disk big enough to carry all the bits. Now, music is the right to play bits that live off on the internet somewhere; which solves the storage problem very neatly. (There’s a risk to it – by storing your music on somebody else’s servers, under somebody else’s control, it’s that much less your music. Instead of something you own, it’s a service you’re paying for, that could – in theory – be withdrawn at any time.)

I have various ways to post my ‘content’ (as the marketroids would say):

• Flickr [since November, 2006];
• Twitter [since June, 2007];
• Facebook [since July, 2007]; and
• WordPress [since August, 2009].

I have quite a bit of content spread over these four sites – except for Facebook, which I use mostly to read things posted by other people. I seldom if ever post there.

They’re old & familiar companions, and I’m getting a trifle bored with them all. I need to find replacements.

Yesterday morning, riding the 7E bus through a part of town to which police are occasionally summoned to investigate shots fired, I saw:

A school bus, lights on & engine running, parked in a driveway;

The screen door of the adjacent house, held open by a stern-faced, large-bellied, inexplicably shirtless middle-aged man;

Standing motionless on the front porch, a small child, wearing a dark blue hooded winter coat, staring up at the man.

The bus moved on, and the tableau receded.

Sam’s Cub Scout pack visited the Neil St. Post Office this morning; I decided to tag along.

(Jake would have preferred to stay home & play Half-Life 2. He’s pretty much old enough to be home alone – for a little while – but apparently the quiet & empty house creeps him out. So if the rest of us are going somewhere, Jake comes along.)

Watching a half-dozen first-graders following the tour guide was rather entertaining: pack is certainly an apt description. They were very attentive and well-behaved, marching along in what was supposed to be – and occasionally was – a line. I think we all learned a little about how the Post Office works.

Behind the counter is a single large room (there are a few offices along the north wall). It’s full of route stations, each comprised of three shelves of cubbyholes. The mail – what couldn’t be sorted by machine – is manually distributed into the cubbyholes.

I should have taken pictures. Oops.

I was expecting more automation, rather than a bunch of people pushing baskets around & manually sorting mail. I assume all the machinery is at the Mattis Ave. Post Office, which is much larger and newer.

Either way, there’s something very last-century about trucking pieces of paper across the country. I’m surprised that so many people are still doing it.

WordPress tells me I haven’t posted anything here since the 15th. The last time I neglected the daybook for so long, I ‘d been hospitalized.

Nothing like that is going on this time. (Thanks for asking!) Mostly, it’s just laziness.

That, and a tendency to post my blather elsewhere. These days, I have quite a few elsewheres to receive my blather: some public, some not.

I noticed a while ago that the iTunes store claimed to have four albums purchased (by me) but not yet downloaded; this puzzled me a bit, because iTunes also told me all four albums were in my music library, with nonzero play counts.

Maybe they’re upgrades, I thought. Amazon has done that, once or twice: spontaneously offered to download to my Kindle an updated copy of some book I’d bought months previous. I thought about downloading them, but dithered. I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the current files; why ask for trouble by updating?

(Unnecessary ‘upgrades’ cause endless problems on Windows. I’ve learned to be a little cautious.)

This evening, I decided to download the new files. The results were…disappointing. The ‘new’ files were all 128kbps & DRM’d. The old files are 256kbps, no DRM. At least iTunes kept both, so I can delete the one & do my best to forget they ever existed.

(I suspect this is some kind of licensing squabble between Apple and the record labels: I bought the tracks during the brief-but-happy time when they were available in iTunes+ format – 256kbps, no DRM – then Apple was forced to revert them to their pre-iTunes+ state. Silly record labels, screwing your customers is not a sustainable business model….)