Andy's Blog

Apple takes a stand...

... by standing down.

Greenpeace Statement on Apple Leaving The Chamber of Commerce (via Studio Daily)

Well done Apple. Hopefully other companies will follow your lead on environmental policy.

A more modest approach...

I've got photo galleries spread all over the WWW. I have my photos at Webshots, Smugmug, DCM, Greeka and Flickr. Some are free and some are premium accounts, but I've decided to cut back. Most of my Flickr pics are replicated at Smugmug, however tonight I decided not to renew the Smugmug account saving me 39.95 USD (that's just over $57 Australian). 

To see my latest photos go to Flickr. 

UPDATED June 12,2009: 

I've decided to let Webshots go well. This is another premium account I can do without. I initially used it for the ProShots wallpaper, but lately even those pretty desktop pictures seem to be repeatedly recycled.

Caught speeding....

Last month I upgraded my ISP plan to ADSL2+. That's quite a speed jump (1.5mb/s to 24mb/s). The only problem was I still had to acquire a new modem because the old ADSL1 modem is only capable of 8mb/s. Any how, one month later and I eventually get around to installing the new super-dooper modem made by Billion (thanks Tony for the config help).

As you'd probably know, nobody gets the full maximum speed, in fact I've heard of people getting rather appalling speed. Lucky for me I only live about 1km from the exchange so overall I've been getting rather good speed test results.

Happy 25th birthday Macintosh...

In 1984 I wasn't very computer savvy. But I recall seeing the Macintosh tv commercial produced for the superbowl telecast (not shown in Australia but all the lifestyle tv shows love to preview them).

Fastforward to the early 90's when I meet my now best friend Tony (a Mac using computer geek from day one) who taught me all the basics of computers, particularly Macs. I've owned a few Macs since then (typing this post on a MacBook) and I'm more than pleased with the performance of all of them, with hardly any problems to deal with.

As for the Mac v PC debate... great design, unprecedented innovation and best of all, ease of use... there was no choice. The Macintosh today is still years ahead of any competition.

Happy birthday Mac.

Time wise...

I just created a timeline of my online posts with Dipity. So far I've included recent posts from Typepad, YouTube and Flickr.

It looks something like this...

UPDATE:
I've wasted time on this for two days now. The Dipity site held a lot of promise to begin with but with a lack of instant support or help for troubleshooting situations, even just general 'how-to' (it seems not very Mac friendly) it's left me frustrated and wanting to delete the account... if there was a way to do that!

A big thumbs down to Dipity.

Schmap Australia second edition photo inclusion...

Some weeks back I received a request (via my Flickr page) from Schmap for one of my photos to be short listed in their next edition. Of course, I agreed and this week came notification that my Hartz Mountains photo made the cut.

Of all the photos they could choose from, they picked this close up of a native plant to represent the Hartz Mountains.

Andrew,

I am delighted to let you know that your submitted photo has been selected for inclusion in the newly released second edition of our Schmap Australia Guide:

Hartz Mountains National Park
www.schmap.com/australia/water/p=185855/i=185855.jpg

Thanks so much for letting us include your photo - please enjoy the guide!

Best regards,

Emma Williams,
Managing Editor, Schmap Guides

Redesigning...

It's like bringing in the interior decorators with absolutely no idea of what you want.

My mind is at a complete blank when it comes to a makeover for my website. What can I throw out?, what should I keep?, and that's just the content. There's design and layout. I've got no ideas yet.

Adding to the dilemma is the recent announcement by Adobe that they are stopping development of GoLive, which I've used for years. I can tell there's going to be another Elements experience I had several months ago, when I upgraded to Leopard 10.5 and my old version 2 of PhotoShop Elements stopped working. It's only a matter of time before the same thing will happen to GoLive.

This week I've been searching out alternative software as a suitable replacement. I need something that's cheap (shareware), simple (WYSIWYG), not complicated (a no brainer) and can handle site management. I've tried out a few apps; Shutterbug and iWeb come close to what I'm after but I'm not completely satisfied yet.

Adobe have a US$199 upgrade offer to Dreamweaver. I've downloaded the free trial but not run it yet. I want to try the cheaper alternatives first.

Fleeing...

On Tony's recommendation, and seeing some of the pictures posted in parallel to Flickr and SmugMug by Leo Laporte during the Adobe Lightroom Adventure in Tasmania last week, I decided to give SmugMug a go, seeing they offer a 50% discount to switch.

... and I'm VERY impressed. Firstly, with the way SmugMug moved all 279 of my photos in just 12 minutes. It's done using a Firefox plug-in called Smugglr. There are also other upload apps and plug-ins. I really like the nice gallery themes. I picked out a sexy dark-grey gradient for my galleries, and they look a million bucks (for the half price cost of 20!). As you can see, I'm still to write a profile. I'll think of something nice to say about myself when the mood hits me.

The one thing lacking is the abundance of groups (on SmugMug they're called Communities). I had to create my own Tasmania community because none existed. It's not as well populated as Flickr, but I'm sure more people will join when the evil empire take over Yahoo (who own Flickr, if you didn't know).

I still have over 8 months left on my FLickr Pro account, so I'm going to dual post for a while.

Wow, that's a lotta links. Sorry about that.

Silly... but true!

Website update...

I've been busy working on my World Tour Of Greek Islands travel diary and photo galleries. This section of my web-site should be uploaded and viewable in a week or two. One of the photos is of these American tourists riding the donkeys up to the town of Fira, Santorini.

So how do I know they're 'American tourists'?

1. Only tourists ride the donkeys.
2. The spoke English with twangy American accents.
3. Or course they're American... they're fat.