Here’s the GPS-track from last weekend’s Death Valley Trip, with altitude shown by color. I actually made it about 200 feet higher than shown in this track; I didn’t have the GPS with me whenI summited Bennett Peak Monday morning.

Flickr has recently added a few very desirable features that have been on the wishlist for some time. Photo printing was added as a feature just a couple of weeks ago. Prices are competitive, and you can pick up prints at your local Target store in just over an hour. They have also teamed with QOOP for printing more than just the normal 4×6” prints that’ll sit in that box on the shelf forever. QOOP will print posters and photo books, as well. At $15, the books are pretty nifty. I ordered one as a test and they’re not bad. The cover is nice and glossy; my only complaint is that the inside pages are not. They’re nice laser paper, and the printing is done with a nice color laser printer, it seems, so for the price its not bad.

Flickr also added replacement of photos. If you’re logged in to flickr, go to the photo page of the photo you want to replace. There is now a link at far bottom right you can click to replace the photo. I haven’t tried it yet, so I don’t know what happens after that, but it’s a step in the right direction. I have a number of photos that I uploaded before I knew of jhead, so they are missing exif info. Since flickr is good at showing all of the interesting exif data, I would like to replace some of those photos with versions that have exif. I’ll be sure to post any issues here.

And, if you have yet to jump on the flickr bandwagon, sign up today. If you have a Yahoo! login already (i.e. you have a Yahoo! email address or you have some variant of SBC DSL), signing up is as simple as entering your Yahoo ID on the signup page. Give it a shot, it’s free for a simple account.

Gallery 2.0 was released a few weeks ago, with promises of easy install and easy upgrading from old gallery versions. Since I’ve been using Gallery for a few years now, I went for the upgrade. I’ve been using flickr for my more important photos lately anyway, so I didn’t have much to lose. I installed last week, but as anyone stopping in on the local gallery may have noticed, not all of my photos made it through the update. I didn’t lose anything, but Gallery 2.0 just can’t seem to import some photos from old albums. As of yesterday, I’ve imported everthing that the auto-importer would let me, but I’ll have to go back in manually and figure out what all is missing. The problem lies in that the importer, being all automated, fails on a few specific images. In the process, it freezes, and there is no way to skip that image and go on with the import process for the rest of an album. So, the gallery is back up, but will be missing major parts of some of the albums until I can get this worked through. This all makes me wish Flickr would add a few of my most desired features—mainly a gallery-like interface with sorting so that my picts come up in the order I want them to—and I could just make the big move to all flickr.

Digital Globe has released more satellite images of the destruction in New Orleans and surrouding areas, including more up-to-date images than Google Maps, but be prepared if you’re on a slow connection, average image size is over 2MB. There is also a pretty comprehensive list at the NOLA-Intel Wiki Here

You’ve probably noticed by now the row of 4 pictures that jumps in before any text. This is my latest flickr photo feed. Revjim got me hooked on flickr once I found out that they accepted emailed photos. It is basically a combination of a (public or private) photo gallery and a weblog, with free accounts being limited to 20MB of uploaded pictures per month. If you don’t have a flickr account yet, get one today for free and start sharing your pictures quickly and easily online. Flickr also has groups and tags, which are tools for sharing and organizing your images. I started the San Gabriel Mountains group this weekend as a place for anyone to share images of outdoors activities or photography from the San Gabriels. Suprisingly, the group already has a second member after just a couple of days.

Now that you are all on the same level with respect to flickr, I’ll get down to the real meat of the issue. I have been using gallery for a couple of years to store and organize my pictures online. Uploading and sorting on gallery is easier than flickr for a large number of pictures, like the newly added Rome Uncut gallery, which has over 300 images from our Honeymoon. A number of these images have been ‘upgraded’ to the appropriate Photography gallery, I’ve just been too busy to highlight any of them here lately, which brings up my ultimate point.

While gallery is great for organizing and storing the large collection of images, flickr provides (through an rss feed grabbed with magpierss) an easy way to show recent images so they actually get out there. I’ve tried to work up gallery’s rss to get somewhat of the same functionality without too much success. On one hand, it would be great if flickr would feed me all of my moblogs through the feed, while not feeding non-moblog images. Then, assuming I could make gallery feed me only the recent photography shots, I could have a feed for each. So far I havent’ been able to make that happen. Ideas?

In the meantime, I’ll try to post some of my more recently added shots here, so that they don’t get buried away in the annals of the gallery and forgotten for good. Here are a couple to start with…

The plan for the moment is to move the blog over to Moveable Type sometime soon.  If you’d like to take a look at the site in that carnation, check http://justinm.com/mt/.  At some point in the near future everything will be over there.

It seems that the more consistant my life is, the less consistant my blogging is. The more I’m running around with too much to do or, on the other extreme, sitting around trying to come up with things to do, the more time I find to blog about that craziness. However, if I’m settled into a routine, getting enough sleep, and staying moderately busy but without haste, this blog tends to be one of the last things on my mind.

Part of the problem is that I don’t have unrestricted access to the internet at work, so for 10 hours of the day I don’t have the potential to blog. In the mornings, I’m pretty much out of it until I get to work, and by the time I get home I want to read the news and do something other than stare at a computer screen (unless it involves Battlefield Vietnam :).

So, does this mean my blog is gonna die and whither away like 80% of the blogs on the planet? By no means. I’ve got too much to rant about for that to happen, especially as we get closer and closer to November. Stay tuned (or at least flip the channel back once in awhile).

http://www.centennialofflight.gov/essay/Dictionary/kittinger/DI29.htm

The Life of Joseph Kittinger – I know, this probably should have gone in my links log, but I think this guy just did too much for his country to not get the front page every now and then. He holds the record for the world’s highest balloon jump, from 102,800 feet (almost 18.5 miles high), was awarded congressional medals and honors, served 3 tours in Vietnam, and broke the record for the longest balloon flight in 1983 by throwing everything in the balloon overboard—when he landed he was only in his skivvies. Now that’s service to the great U.S. of A.

I added a link log to the site as well, just to make life easier in posting interesting and or entertaining links I may find. If you’re into that kind of thing (farris), you can grab an RSS feed of that as well, thanks to the folks as Moveable Type.

http://justinm.com/links/

Following with my promise that if Mozilla Firebird could do all that Opera can, I would switch, today is the day. After not being able to sleep last night, I spent a couple of hours of the early morning playing with the extensions offered by various sources through Firebird’s Extensions Page.

So, to let you know what made me switch, here are the extensions that I am currently running: AdBlock (hides ads that you specify on certain pages, now I can surf CNN add-free); All-In-One Gestures (Opera-like mouse gestures); QuickNote (a little notepad that can be free-floating or on a tab); SmoothWheel (smooths wheel scrolling of pages so there aren’t any sudden jumps); and Tabbrowser Extensions (adds a lot of good stuff to the normal tabbing in Mozilla, like forcing new windows to open in tabs).

On top of all that, Firebird lets me arrange my toolbars as I like, placing the bookmarks to the right of the normal menus, and saving a line that is otherwise wasted. I think there is one other Opera feature tha I would like but can live without: ‘paste and go.’ This allows you to paste a URL into the address bar with paste and go so you don’t have to press enter after the paste. Same with the search box. This of course may be offered in some extension I just haven’t found yet, but we’ll see.