Category: Musings

How not to do business: dotPhoto

Just found out that apparently all my albums have been deleted from the dotPhoto server. Sorry if anyone was trying to find my older photos from there.

Looking at the dotPhoto FAQ I see there is now a policy on free accounts that if you do not log in every 90 days you just delete the albums so I assume that is what happened. So those months when you happen to be busy and don’t log in – bam. There everything goes. Bye bye.

Wow.

That’s really bad from a customer perspective. One day all your albums are there – the next, gone. Flickr have a much more sensible system of limiting how many photos can be uploaded if you have a free account. Perhaps dotPhoto might want to consider doing that rather that just destroying albums/work and preventing people from ever coming to your site again. Storage and bandwidth costs are cheap compared to customer aquisition. Just a thought.

In the meantime my recommendation is not to use dotPhoto – flickr is much better in every respect (and fingers crossed will stay that way). I’ll try and re-load all my old albums up there over the next few months…

The Decisionator

Thanks to metafilter for this crazy remix of a Presidential Beatles song.

Is Ecko Still Free?

Marc Ecko has a great fake video of him sneaking into Andrews Airforce Base and spraying the words ‘Still Free’ on the plane. If it hasn’t been taken down yet, you can see all about it here.

Personally, although I applaud Ecko for his stance on free speech I still can’t help thinking that Banksy would have done something more interesting… like actually doing it!

Vinnifer

Is it just me, or does this trailer make you think the whole Jennifer Aniston & Vince Vaughn thing was just extended publicity?

And while we’re on the subject of trailers for celebrity couple movies check out drawing retraint which is pretty much the opposite end of the film spectrum.

And I will be your accident

Somehow I found out that TV on the Radio were playing their secret tour kick off gig at Union Pool last night. Having just missed out on tickets for their Bowery Ballroom ticket by a matter of minutes I over-cooked getting to this one a little bit, but I’m glad I did as they were amazing – rolling out their new songs to their home crowd and dropping some favourites as well. Thanks to Jess and Gerald for a) telling me about it and b) just being damn awesome.

My first batch of photos is up here – expect more soonish. Plus a word o’ advice for anyone trying to shoot at Union Pool: it’s dark and small, so don’t expect the usual bright stage lights to give you nice contrast shots.

Union Pool confirmed the secret gig on their mySpace about 10am on the day, which was interesting as up until that point they were just saying ‘special guests’ of Celebration, and Celebration were just saying ‘super secret guests.. hee ha hee’. So this was a good example of mySpace getting used to publicise fan only gigs. However at Union Pool I bumped into some folks I knew who were going to a secret Franz Ferdinand gig today purely because they had Franz Ferdinand as a mySpace friend, they got sent an announcement and were asked to put FF at the top of their mySpace friends, print out the page then take it along to Tower Records, where they were given a special yellow mySpace wristband that lets them in. Very interesting stuff indeed – mySpace is totally going down the music path, as well as the adolescent kids market. What’s fascinating to me is that mySpace didn’t set out that way, but they let people grow their pages organically, found that people were posting a lot of music, then responded to that by making it easier with music plugins. Definately something to bear in mind if you’re trying to grow any web community.

Totally ‘armless

Apparently postcards to England are now 75c and letters 84c, which means I have to get lots of 5c stamps to make all my 70c stamps useful. Not sure when this came in, but guess I know now. More importantly I’ve also learnt the following items cannot be sent by post to England:

• “Arms and parts of arms”
• “Seal skins except those from an accepted source.”
• “Goods made in foreign prisons, except those imported for a non-commercial purpose or of a kind not manufactured in the UK.”

There are some other exclusions, but these are the ones that will really impact my choice of Christmas gifts this year.

What a picture?

On the walk into work today there was yet another car crash on the McGuinness and Nassau intersection. This intersection constantly has flowers tied to the lamp post for people who have died there, but it certainly made a change to actually see the cars hit at full speed. My immediate reaction was to reach for my cellphone and dial 911, but having started to describe the situation I realised there was already a police motorbike right in the middle of the crashed cars and a policeman pulling people out as everyone stood around watching in vague shock.

As more police cars arrived I decided there was nothing much more for me to do, and there had been plenty of other witnesses nearer than me, so I walked on to the subway. Then I started thinking that maybe I should be taking some shots of this for sale to local newspapers, given that I always have a camera on me. Even if this wasn’t front page news some dramatic, in action shots of police working with the people in the cars would surely have some value? For some reason though I couldn’t do it. The thought that someone may be seriously hurt in there made me sad, not keen to make money on breaking news.

Having met someone who works as an on call photographer for local news, pager constantly bleeping as someone falls off a roof during a police chase at 1am, I know it takes a certain mentality to dive in there and snap away in the midst of all the people, and I just don’t have that and probably never will. My default reaction is to call the police rather than reach for my camera, or try to recall my first aid training (now woefully out of date). But then what is different when I take a picture of kids in poverty stricken countries? Generally we would give them treats such as pencils or food but it’s still not much to help the situation they live in.

So since I was back in England being a tourist I tried to get some classic tourist shots such as this. Expect more soon as I get round to filtering and uploading after tidying up my apartment and crap like that.

Back in the USS of A

After a whirlwind tour of Britland with Miette I’m back in Brooklyn on a bright, sunny, and slightly chilly morning. My bags are now unpacked. My washing is in a big pile. My fridge is bare. Lots to do. So hopefully if I work at getting smarter in a week then everything will be so much easierer. Er.

Being in London as a tourist, staying in a hotel rather than the usual generosity of friends with couches, was a strange experience for me. Trying to fit in just some of the usual things that go on in London made me realise why your average American tourist makes the mistake of trying to ‘do Europe in a week’. The list of places we wanted to go still far outweighs what we did see, but hopefully Miette got a sense of what London is like – from clubbing to history, from shopping to rain, from tube to London eye. Thanks to everyone who we managed to catch up with and sorry to everyone we didn’t, next time!

Depressing vistas

As of last October a pile of re-zoning was approved in Williamsburg and Greenpoint – which explains the ever growing towers sprouting up all over, especially around McCaren Park. Here are some highly boring illustrative images that, for some reason, I found to be the most depressing thing I’ve seen in a while. Maybe it will look just find once someone adds some nice graffiti (Ed. Matt has now written the word ‘graffiti’ out 200 times and will not get it wrong again).