10 things you can do with 3gb of free space on wordpress.com

Not too long ago, the top dogs at wordpress.com announced that every blog hosted there now has three GB of free storage space. Wow, 3GB! That’s huge step up from the 50MB they were dishing out up to then. Before, if you wanted anything above that, you used to have to pay for a space upgrade.

I started to have visions of what I could do with all that space, but because what I saw was pretty fuzzy, I went on the wordpress forums and asked how much other bloggers were using. Turns out they weren’t using any. Raincoaster, practically a grandmother in bloggers’ years with a huge amount of material accumulated on her blog, is using 0% of her available space. So is everyone else who bothered to respond.

I learned that even if you were to post the Bible, the Koran, the Torah, War and Peace, the complete works of William Shakespeare as well as the entire catalogue of stupid things George W. Bush has uttered since he went dry, it would still register 0%. That’s because they don’t count text. Photos usually don’t take much space, so unless you’re uploading bloat-sized 39MB jpegs from the latest digital Hasselblad, you aren’t going to use up much either.

So I thought maybe you too are wondering what 3GB of free space is good for. Uploading video is the first thing that comes to mind, but then it’s no longer free. If you want to upload your own video and have it stored on your blog like a photo instead of linking to youlube like everyone else does, you have to pay the $15 minimum upgrade.

With the price of Sloppaccino Slattés in a paper cup approaching five dollars, 15 bucks might not sound like a lot of money, but since video is practically the only thing that 99% of us are ever going to fill up that vast amount of free space with, tying its most obvious use to a paid upgrade is not offering free space.

It’s as if you’re out shopping for a piece of land upon which to build your dream shack, and the agent steps out of the car, turns to a stretch of turf and with a sweep of the hand says: and it also comes with free use of the sky, all the way up to Uranus!

Looking at him like he’s a blithering idiot, you say: …but I don’t have a rocket ship.

Well, Home Depot’s gotta sale on stepladders! Fifteen bucks!

So if you’re like me and still wondering how to bulk up that 0% into a figure you can be proud of, yet remain true to your everything-on-the-net-is-free / dot-communist roots, here are a few suggestions.

1. Upload your entire photo collection and store it on your blog, thus freeing up hard-drive space on your own computer. Since you’ll have to upload them one-by-one, please allow yourself adequate time. Quit your job if you have to.
2. Beg, borrow or steal that Hasselblad and start uploading. At maximum resolution, your 3GB is good for about 75 shots.
3. Write all your posts out in longhand Dear-Diary style. Then scan and upload them to your blog. Make sure you don’t scale for size, because you’ve got so much to fill.
4. Once you’ve posted about 10 hand-written entries, hold a contest to see who can best figure out your personality through your handwriting.
5. Feel vaguely smug.
6. Add your name to the list of barking seals clapping their approval.
7. Start to wonder if this isn’t some way to make wordpress.com look good to investors, without a lot of outlay on their part.
8. Confirm this.
9. Go watch the fun as other kids point fingers and say: The Emperors have no clothes.
10. Forget you even have the free space. I have. It’s not hard to ignore what you’ll never use.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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Metaphorically speaking, memes are like, whatever

I have been a meme avoider the past few weeks, but can wriggle out no longer.

I know I’m not alone, because based on what I’ve been reading lately, a lot of people hate memes. Hate writing them. Hate receiving them. Hate reading them. One blogger has gone so far as to declare his site a meme-free zone. In his sidebar, he writes:

Many thanks to those of you thoughtful enough to tag Deutschland über Elvis with a meme. Owing to the large number of such requests, the tedium of the subject matter (usually personal details I am loathe to disclose) and the lack of sufficient online friends to forward, this blog will no longer respond to memes. Thank you for your understanding. Now fuck off.

But before the ever-so-diplomatic Mr. Headbang8, Esq. undertook such drastic measures, he did tag me with a meme. And since I understand the well-intentioned thoughts behind recognising the efforts of fellow bloggers, and in the spirit of camaraderie, I am now going to do an all-in-one cluster-fuck meme.

The first one is for headbang and Renal Failure, who both gave me the E for Excellence writing award.

Headbang has ordained that I come up with three of my own examples based on that most likely bogus viral list of boneheaded high school essay similes and metaphors.

Here goes.

She had such a bad cold, her nose was running like water from a tap that needs fixing but nobody ever bothers to get around to it, because plumbers are expensive, you know.

Her eyes were twinkling like Liberace’s diamond-encrusted jacket used to, except that Liberace was a man, and a total poof as well, so I doubt if that counts, considering that when her eyes were doing all that sparkling, she was looking into the eyes of her man-hunk of a lover, who did have his effeminate side, but he wasn’t a poof, at least not that anyone knew at the time, though you never know for sure.

He struggled to find the right words to say, kind of like when you are uselessly flipping through the pages looking up a word in the dictionary because you already know the meaning but not the word you want, so you don’t know where to look.

I would love to stop here, but the memes and awards have been piling up and it really is time to clear the desk.

Expatraveler and Mr. Peace have nominated me for a writing award. A Lion’s Roar writing award for powerful words. An award named for the cry of an animal who sleeps all day, wakes up in the late afternoon, spends most of the evening prowling around preying on the youngest and oldest among the weak and defenceless, eating all he can before leaving the shredded scraps to the hyenas.

Oy vey! This is something to be proud of?

My good people, as much as I appreciate your recognition, can we call it the Hyena Award instead? I feel more comfortable as a hyena. The strongest jaws in nature, to match my mouth and the trouble it’s gotten me into. Happy to be who I am, if not king of beasts. Often heard laughing, mostly at myself.

There, that’s better

Photo credit: our 2006 trip to South Africa

Az over at Casa az in Sevilla has given me a Champion Blogazine Editor award, which Archie started. To quote Archie, the award honours…

Those who create an online magazine full of interesting and differing articles. Some original work and some work found elsewhere and given a personal spin. Bloggers who give us, not just the minutia of their day but add other content to amuse and educate us. Who trawl the world of cyberspace to bring us the best available news and information.

I appreciate this one very much, az. Here I was worried that all I do is throw against the wall whatever crosses my mind or field of view, and hope some of it will stick. The experts say that’s a no-no. Apparently, the rule is, you have to have a theme. Like, a blog about Stuff White People Like.

Believe it or not, another blogger gave me that Lion’s Roar award too, but I can’t find the link to it anymore. Was I de-awarded? Did the link die? If you’ve given me an award, tagged me with a meme, thought you liked this blog and told me so, and I failed to acknowledge it, I humbly beg your forgiveness. I may do it again, however. In true Canadian fashion: sorry.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Every ecosystem has its predators and bottom-feeders

The comments on my last post about photos and copyright show that there is a lot of confusion about what images you can put in your blog and still sleep soundly at night.

After all, as I pointed out, there are predators and bottom-feeders out there with jaws poised like a spring-loaded trap, ready to sue your butt at the first sighting of your using any of their photos.  The link to the whole show - it’s the first item - is now in the right-hand sidebar of the show’s site.  It’s near the top under Video, which from my advanced language course I learned is German for video.

But even if you don’t speak German, take a look at the TV segment.  You’ll at least get a close-up view of who I’m talking about.  Have a barf bowl ready, just in case.

The show - and I - recommend using only your own stuff if you want to be 100% protected from these, errr… people.  But safe to some is boring.  What if you want to use somebody else’s work, and still be safe from a lawsuit?

Some hide behind the fair use fig leaf.  As pointed out by timethief - a tireless worker in the thankless and never-ending job of helping out wordpress.com users lost in their chaotic forums - as long as you’re not using it to make money you should be OK.

But where does occasionally using a photo or drawing for illustrative, critical or satirical purposes end, and systematically mining someone’s work for publication on your own blog begin?  Take a look at Comics I don’t Understand.  Actually, a lot of the comics on that site I do understand.  What I don’t get is how they can claim fair use.  His entire concept is based on the work of other people.  I asked him in the comments under a post with a full-colour Garfield cartoon what he does about copyright, but got no answer from the blog author.   Someone else in the comments said that since the site is for comment and criticism of copyrighted work, it’s OK to use it.

Buddy, I hope you have good insurance, because if I were the author of any one of those cartoons, I’d tell you to butt out after three posts of my stuff.  Sure, you might not be out to make a profit, but it’s like having a site entitled Photos I think are, like, bitchin’ and posting the collected works of Annie Leibovitz a little at a time. 

Headbang8 of Deutschland über Elvis says that if you’re a serious amateur blogger, get an el-cheapo subscription to clipart.com, where you can choose from more than nine million illustrations and model-released photos.    The catch with that site is, sure you can download as many gigs worth of images you like in one week for only 15 bucks, but if you don’t use them for the first time within the period of your subscription, you can’t use them unless you take out a new subscription.  To do so would be stockpiling, which is against their rules. 

Simon, a caricaturist based in London, is coming at it from the author’s side.  What to do about his stuff being grabbed and used on other sites?  Simon, if you want to make sure your art doesn’t get stolen, don’t post it on the Internet.  Like others pointed out in the comments, whatever you post is going to be scraped and used elsewhere whether you like it or not.  I’ve bitched and whined about this myself, and all I am is some duff blogger.  I’m slowly getting over myself though.

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Speaking of photos, and since recent events have put me in a giddy mood, I will now break two rules.  One: I am going to go completely off-topic within the same post, and two: post what we had for dinner last night.  Ta-da…..!

Sweetie, just take the picture.  My fingers are burning.

Photos and pizza guaranteed 100% home-made.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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How much is that doggie on the sofa?

I had great laughs this morning reading through B’s latest Eurotrippen post about the celebrity life of her dog, but it also got me thinking about a German TV show I saw on the weekend, which had an item about photos and copyright.

B’s photos are all her own, so she’s free and clear. But what if B didn’t have a dog? What if she had that twisted little idea in her head, but no dog to illustrate it? She could probably find a few pics of doggies dressed in leather and lace and weave a little story around them, right?

Sure, but she’d be putting herself in serious financial peril, not only for the obvious reason that a lot of photos out there have rights on them, but that there are websites out there dedicated to sucking you in to using their photographs on your blog and then turning right around and suing your sorry ass off.

The TV show profiles a couple who started up a little site dedicated to keeping birds as pets. They went a - googling for a few shots of common vegetables so they could brighten up a page on what to feed them. They clicked on one of the top results and found hundreds of photos on the Voldemort of recipe sites, the link to which I not only absolutely refuse to provide, I won’t even mention its name.

If you fail to look for the page that says they don’t give out the photos for free, and take one of their photos for use on your blog, the site tracks the photo’s new location and immediately fires off a bill to you for around €700 euro - or more than one thousand US dollars - per photo! Our pair of budgie boffins were asked to fork over €8600, and they are just one of hundreds the show says the site has already sued.

Since users are most likely to click on the top lines rather than wade through pages and pages of stuff, the shows says the site uses Google-bombing to game themselves into the top ranks of search results. And with more and more people getting into blogging for the first time without a clue as to its many pitfalls, their supply of fresh meat is almost endless.

The experts on the show say that if you don’t want to go to court and risk paying thousands more should you lose, there’s not much you can do besides negotiate the price down. After all, nearly a thousand euro for a fuzzy thumbnail jpeg is pretty outrageous.

So if you want to be like B, do what she does and use your own dog, your own camera, your own frilly clothes, your own electrician’s tape, and your own sofa. That way, the only mess you’ll have to clean up is a few hairs - provided it’s fully housebroken.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

PS: You can tape the show - schade, nur auf Deutsch - in repeat on Wednesday, February 20 around 2345, or Friday the 22nd at 0920 on HR (Hessischen Rundfunk) or simply watch it on the web via the link provided above when they get around to posting it.

PPS: Please see this excellent post on fair use from The Blog Herald, a blog on blogging.

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Cheaper by the dozen? Not in Germany.

Will someone please explain this to me?

I was out shopping this morning at the local supermarket. I had to buy whipping cream, so I went to the dairy case. I stooped down to pick up the only brand they had, and noticed the price was 65 cents for 200 ml. Since I had to buy a lot of cream, I wondered if I shouldn’t buy the larger, 500-ml carton next to it.

But, noticing its price of €1.79, I realised it was cheaper to buy five smaller cartons and pay €3.25 than to buy two large ones and pay €3.58.

What? I realise the price difference at around 10% is minimal, but shouldn’t there at least be a premium on smaller packaging? There’s more effort going in to make the cartons, fill, pack, warehouse and ship the contents, and at the end of the day, there’s more waste, more landfill, more energy consumed all around.

So just for laughs I asked the lady stocking the shelves why it was so.

“I don’t know,” she replied, giving me a strange look. “You’ll have to ask the buyer.”

“The buyer?”

“Yeah, the one who buys it for the store.”

“How can I get ahold of the buyer?” I asked.

“You can find the number on the internet,” she said, not trying very hard to hide her impatience with me.

Yeah right, lady. I can just imagine how that would go:

One ringy-dingy…. two ringy-dingy…..

“Hello? Is this Inedible Foods Corp? I have a question.”

“Yes, go ahead.”

“Well, I’d like to know why your cream costs more in big packages than it does in smaller ones.”

“For that you’ll have to talk to the buyer.”

(Insert pause for annoying 2-minutes Muzak.)

“Inedible Foods buyer, Helmut speaking.”

“Yes, I’d like to know why the large containers of cream cost more than the smaller ones do.”

“Well for that you’ll have to ask the warehouse guys, but they’re too busy, and anyway, they’d tell you to talk to the distributor, but they’re a private company, and anyway, if I gave you their number, they’d tell you to talk to the packager, who’d pass you to the wholesaler, and if you called them up, they’d say you’d have to ask the farmer, and if you talked to the farmer, he’d tell you to go ask some cow.”

“Yes, well I already did that back at the beginning, that’s why I’m here.”

© 2008 lettershometoyou

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Views of a London long weekend

Since the weekend was already a week ago, better wrap this London thing up with a few photos.

Our friend Douglas works hard for the money, and on a Friday night, he likes to nip around the corner to the local for a beer or two and have a bite to eat. We joined him. After dinner, the ladies bid so long, so the two of us ordered a couple more, then a couple more. Sometime toward the end of our evening we got talking to the people at the next table, who were laughing a lot and taking photos of each other One asked if we’d like to have our photo taken. Sure! Just don’t put it up on some website or some BLOG. So they took our picture. Then I asked if I could do the same.

I told them that I have a blog, and that I was going to publish it. They were OK with that, so I gave them this address. Hey guys, I hope the rest of the night was fun.

(Guaranteed not photoshopped.)

If you’ve got time in London to do some touring, but not much, at least check out the Tower of London. Sure it will cost you five times more than what Ryanair claims their tickets cost to get in, but once there, you could spend the whole day poking through crannies and getting lost in corners. We took the tour, offered free once you’re in. Hang around the entrance, and if you spy this guy, make sure you take a tour from him. Name’s Kevin, and he’s an absolute scream.

Douglas lives at the London studios where Alfred Hitchcock shot many of his earlier movies. It’s been recently converted to residential and offices, but the great director’s legacy lives on. This sculpture dominates the central courtyard. Not sure what the watch symbolises, but then again, I may just be exposing some cinematic / cultural illiteracy or complete laziness to go looking on Google for the umpteenth time today. Sometimes, I just like to keep a little mystery in life.

We dropped by St Pancras station, the new terminus for the Eurostar train via Channel Tunnel from Paris. It’s stunning, and even on a Saturday, swarming with people. I’d love to have seen it when it was dirty and gritty.

Canadian readers will get a kick out of this one. We all knew the guy was a crook, and now he’s finally in prison. But why did they waste all that time with a trial? He already came with a warning label, and you can find it within a shout of Buckingham Palace at the Canadian war memorial there, just inside Canada gate.

The Millenium Bridge is one of my favourite spots in London. I know, not very original, but there’s something about the way what looks from afar like an almost impossibly flimsy thread of steel has become such an important link between two of the most iconic sites in the whole city: St Paul’s on the one side, the rejuvenated Tate Modern on the other.

The Tate Modern’s turbine hall is stunning even when it’s empty. Right now it mostly is, save for a crack running the entire length of the floor. It apparently took weeks to install, and it’s interesting to look at up close, but I don’t know. It left me rather cold.

I’m putting in a shot of the same space a year ago. I tell you, whizzing down those slides was one hell of a lot more fun.

Our lives are intertwined with Hong Kong. It’s where I met my wife and where my daugher was born. It’s also where I met Douglas, who began as a colleague and remains a friend. We gravitated to Chinatown, not because we were hungry for barbecue duck or pork, but to re-live in some small way the atmosphere of what to us is so familiar. It also reminds me of Vancouver, because the sights and smells are to be found there too.

Actually, I lie. I would kill for a place in Hamburg to get decent barbecue pork. We bought a box of it and ate it like candy on the way home.

Saved the best for last. I don’t post photos of my wife or daughter, but the swirls of colour on this one somehow work. Happy accident.

© 2008 lettershometoyou
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Memories of Hong Kong on a trip to London

One of the things I used to love about living in Hong Kong took place only about 100 or so metres above it.

Back in the day, the city’s airport used to be a short taxi ride from downtown. The largest planes in the sky would fly west over the waters of Victoria Harbour, turn a half-circle to head east, then descend low through the teeming warren of streets of the Kowloon Peninsula, nearly scraping the six-storey buildings as they screamed past.

On the final approach, after the landing gear had been lowered, the plane would make a quick slicing arc to the right as it passed a beacon, before finally landing on a strip of landfill in the bay. Though there had been fatal accidents over the years, it was a tribute to piloting skills and maybe a bit of sheer dumb luck that in all the time Kai Tak airport was in operation, not one plane landed on top of all those people living just across the road from the start of the runway.

I was sitting in a window seat my first flight into Hong Kong in January, 1994. I’d been told about the landing, that I was in for something spectactular, but I never expected to see what I did. Through the evening darkness, I looked out the window at the buildings slipping past and suddenly in a flash appeared a figure seated at a kitchen table, the glowing blue light from a television set reflected off a pair of glasses like two flickering orbs. It was there and gone in an instant. By the time I tried to see something similar on the next apartment, we were past them and on the way down. I used to love that ride, and on every flight in hoped the winds were right so that would be the approach we’d take.

Why did I think of this on the way into London?

Because once past the motorway wasteland and into the outskirts, sitting on the bus from Stansted airport on the way to Golders Green tube stop I became fascinated with the scenes laid before my window as we drove by. I saw the silhouette of a man wearing a turban, a bedroom plastered with magazine posters, a dining room with an old-fashioned chandelier, a man getting up off the sofa, a shadow creep across a ceiling, curtains ranging from bedsheets to lace.

Whether it was some form of drive-by voyeurism or mere curiosity, I found myself compelled to keep looking, craning my neck to get the shortest of glimpses, somehow trying to peer beyond the mundane to discover something special, discern from that glimpse what sort of life they must live.

© 2008 lettershometoyou

Snowdrops and crocuses, heralds of spring

Sometimes you have to get out of town to see what lies ahead.

Snowdrops and crocuses,

Heralds of Spring

Snowdrops and crocuses,

The birds will sing

When all the world is bare,

Springing up here and there,

Blossoms of beauty rare,

Heralds of Spring.

It’ll still take about two or three weeks for them to appear in Hamburg, but in London they’re already out. These were spotted this past Saturday in the park alongside The Mall near Buckingham Palace, their quiet voices of light and colour reminding us that greenery will soon return to carpet the land. I was so thrilled to see them, I stood up, turned around and sang those lines out to my wife, my daughter, and my friend Douglas, whom we were visiting.

They always come back to me every Spring.

If the words sound a bit sing-songy and child-like, they should. In what I now recognise to be merely an early training exercise for that 1970s Village People hit YMCA, Mrs. Fairburn had her Grade One class (spot me if you can) stand by our desks and act out the words as we sang, drooping our arms and hunching forward for the snowdrops, standing on tip-toes and reaching up to the ceiling for the crocuses.

So unexpected to come across them midst the hurried, sometimes frantic bustle of London. But that’s what I like about visiting cities. Not so much the layers of history at the Tower of London, the grandeur of the Tower Bridge or the hulking immensity of the Tate Modern, but the little details you come across and only take notice of because you’re visiting.

© 2008 lettershometoyou