I deployed a new intranet portal this morning. This was my first time taking a portal from concept to production and although I’m happy that it went successfully, deployments always leave me feeling somewhat anticlimatic once the site goes live. No time to rest on my laurels – there’s at least one more percolating as I type this and more to come over the next few months.
I went to the travel clinic today to update my immunizations and get prescriptions for Malarone and Cipro before I head off to India tomorrow evening. I had to get a typhoid and second dose of hepatitis B vaccines this time. Because I do energy healing (Reiki), I feel the effects of these vaccines on my body very quickly. Within a couple of minutes of the injection, I could feel my body begin to respond to the vaccines. I wouldn’t call it a reaction the way physicians have defined it, but I must have looked really “off” because the nurse asked me if I was OK.
After months of resisting, I started a Flickr account. You can see images from my Photostream further down the page. Frankly, I don’t get what’s so great about Flickr. Its interface is not intuitive at all and it takes a while to set up sets and organize photos.
I much prefer Photobucket, particularly since I can quickly share individual photos, videos or albums by copying and pasting the URLs, which are formatted for several different applications: email/IM, direct link, HTML code and IMG code. I don’t necessarily want to inundate everyone with my Photostream; I may just want to show them a couple of pictures or video from an album. Setting up albums is really easy too. Flickr has a slick interface and photos take on an almost luminous quality, but Photobucket’s is more user-friendly.
Now, what did impress me about Flickr is the EXIF data stats it captures from your photo files. It’s hard not to be awed by that much information, which may or may not ever be of any use to the average person shooting snapshots.
The taxonomist in me couldn’t help but get excited about the organization of so much information! Of course I was curious and checked out their advanced search functionality to see if it was possible to search on this wealth of metadata, but alas, those fields do not seem searchable, at least not without significant effort. (If someone has figured it out, I’m sure they will let me know. It’s a good challenge for my SLA colleagues.) Still, that was one of those serendipituous finds that will help me learn more about how my camera works and what conditions to replicate if I want a similar look for future photos.
Well, time to stop procrastinating and start packing. Thursday will not end for me until sometime after midnight on Saturday morning India Standard Time when I touch down in Hyderabad.
See you on the other side of the world!
