Picnik vs Adobe Express

Yesterday’s big hubbaloo was the announcement of Adobe’s new web based, low cal version of Photoshop, Adobe Photoshop Express.
Of course, being the gurl I am, I set up an account, uploaded a few photos and gave it a whirl.
Yes, you can also connect to your existing, on-line photo streams (Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa), but I couldn’t get it to work with Picasa Web Albums. (maybe just a launch problem).

The good:

• the ability to see a whole bunch of versions of a particular change, i.e. black and white - you can vew a few flavours of black and white.
• the ability to control sharpness
• the nice touchup ability

The not as good:

• limited effects (Picnik has wicked effects)
• no border creation

I’m sticking with Picnik. Sure, Adobe’s thrown in space, but space is the last thing I need right now, what with photos scattered around the internets like breadcrumbs. Picnik is faster, and lets me do more with less.

Side note: I downloaded the Mac version of Photoshop last night. I’ve got 30 days to decide if it’s something I’m really going to pick up or not. I fell onto Joey Lawrence’s site. I might be convinced. His photography is stunning.

The Only Thing I'll Say About Bell's Traffic Shaping

The internets are abuzz.
Disgruntled consumer and wholesale customers alike are beating the drums of revolution.
Michael Geist has lively discussion.
Mark Goldberg has lively discussion.



Ahem.
Free markets dictate that if the service you are paying for is left wanting, you have the ability to take your dollars elsewhere. (once your contract is up, of course)
Free markets also dictate that a new provider will jump into the ring and take over where the incumbents have left off.
Folks who want unfettered internet access, lumping the good the bad and the ugly all-to-gether will likely be able to buy that type of service from specialized providers. There will likely soon be ISPs who are willing to take the risk, take the initiative and and jump into the swelling sea of net neutrality. But it's just not net neutrality, it's naked internet, if you will. Wild west internet. It's not a bad place, it's just a hard place to put any guarantees to. And I think that's where folks like Bell are trying to get to. More people want guaranteed internet than unfettered internet. To get to a place where you can have guarantees, you've got to be able to control some of the nuttiness that's going on inside your walls.

That being said - it's sort of odd that they are also throttling/shaping their wholesale service - but from what I'm reading, they are shaping the last mile, as opposed to the traffic heading out-to and back in from the internet. That's a bit of a dog's breakfast - traffic shaping at the DLS level. In theory, that's private network. Shared network, but private none-the-less. ISP resellers are going to have to figure out what they want to do to get out of that storm. They need to figure out their own guarantees and dedicated infrastructure from the BELL central offices back to their own networks. Maybe they have to shift away from buying shared network services, to buying dedicated network services. If the end user wants, nay, demands unfettered internet, I think there's got to be a premium for that as well.



Maybe Barrett Xplore has the right idea by building their own last mile?

I'm going to track down ISPs in Ontario who aren't affected by traffic shaping from their upstream providers, and list them here. :-)


Technorati Tags: Bell Canada, traffic shaping, throttling, Michael Geist, Mark Goldberg

Update on Friday, March 28, 2008 at 06:51AM by jules

Ok.

I can’t find a single ISP so far who isn’t impacted by throttling, either by their own hand or by someone else’s.

That being said - this issue has been pulled fully into the mainstream:

The Globe covers a Rogers Deliberate Pricing Change 

The Globe Covers the Bell Throttling Story 

Beating throttling with Vuze 

Comcast Changes it’s Strategy 

WiFi Photo Frame - The Future is Here

It's a brave new world, world.Imagine having a wifi enabled digital picture frame. Anything you shot, or had shared on the internet, or had stored on your hard drive could automatically be sent to the frame. Now imagine your grandmother having this frame on her desk in Florida. Imagine your parents with a frame in their kitchen. Sharing photos has never been easier. No more memory cards to load and replace. You could be anywhere, and could email new pictures to the frame with a few clicks of your camera-phone keypad. I just need one of these. In fact, I think I need 3-4 of these!

WiFi Photo Frame - WiFi Digital Picture Frames - WiFi Wireless Digital Photo Frame - eStarling

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Tags: wifidigital picture frame, eStarling

10 Days In - Life with Mac

If it wasn’t for work, and life bits like showering and eating and sleeping, chances are i would have spent the last 240 odd hours glued to my new mac. I’ve bonded, so to speak.

I’ve migrated all my good media, (and even some bad) I’ve found all the apps that I want to use. I’ve added windows for those apps that just don’t come in an apple flavour. I’ve logged dozens of hours sitting at my cozy chair working, playing and editing.

• it took 4 days to figure out that there really is a right mouse button.
• i still don’t have a mouse, and I think I’m ok with that. The touch pad is lovely.
• windows is slow regardless of what system it’s running on ;-)

Things I still don’t really understand:

• the brightness of the display tends to change randomly, regardless of whether I’m plugged into power, or using battery power
• the mac gets damned hot - as hot as my Dell laptop
• i miss not having a backspace key (maybe there’s something similar I haven’t found yet?)
• i miss not having home and end keys
• my airport wireless card sometimes flakes out and loses my internet connection. Not often, but enough to notice

Still. I’m in love.
P.S. Flock rocks on the Mac.

Are Real Estate Agents on the Brink of Extinction?

10 years ago you would have had to depend on a real estate agent. 5 years ago it was likely you still needed their services. Today, with the plethora of alternative options, you could reasonably buy and sell your house on your own, without ever setting foot in a real estate office.


I’ve never had any success with an agent helping me to find a place. And now, I’ve gotten pretty good at taking advantage of easy tools to let me sell houses on my own. The only person you can’t cut out of the real estate equation is the lawyer. :-)


MLS.ca does a decent job of showing houses on the market, but now there are a magnitude of similar sites - some better, some worse, but all getting into the on-line property game.

Facebook’s Neighbourhoods application has partnered with Point2Homes, showcasing houses that are for sale in your neighbourhood, and allows you to browse other neighbourhoods! Virtual tours, digital photography, ubiquitous internet access all mesh to reduce our dependency on agents. Who wants to spend an afternoon with a stranger, looking at houses that *they* think you will like? Aren’t you the best judge of that?


If you want to *sell* your house, there are still many options, and most of them are painless. Social networking sites like Facebook, eBay, Craigslist. You name it, you can sell it. People in the market for a new house have no problem being interested in cutting out the 5% of the sale price that has to be inflated to cover the cost of the agent.


Historically, the value that real estate agents brought to the table was one of audience. Agents controlled the audience of people looking to buy and looking to sell. There were no alternatives to easily discover houses for sale (unless you spent countless hours driving through the neighbourhoods you were interested in). There were no alternatives to advertise your home for sale either. Now both of those activities are easily subbed out to various different internet applications.

The value of the real estate agent today? Administrative paper-pushing. Agents know what paperwork needs to be filled out. I recently sold a condo on my own. A few google searches, and wham… I had all the paperwork I needed. The other value that an agent brings to the table: mediation. People are generally uncomfortable with negotiating the price of their home. It’s an emotional sale. But if you can wrap your head around dealing with a little personal discomfort to save $15,000 or more, it’s a worthwhile pain.


:-)


How are you going to buy or sell your next house?

Floobergeist Prom Paparazzi

At Floobergeist, we know your prom is a big deal. We also know your purse is small, too small for a camera. You want to be *in* the pictures, not taking them all night. You want someone to tell you when you need to add lipstick, or fix your fly. 

Hire Floobergeist Paparazzi to spend the evening with you, and then choose which photos you’d like turned into a hard-cover, professionally published, photograpy book.

The details:

• 75 page, hardcover book with dust jacket
• full colour and black and white photos
• you proof - we publish
• all photos also available to purchase on-line - soft copy or hardcopy - it’s your choice - it’s your prom
  

Contact Floobergeist Fotos for more information.

5 Things I Never Knew About Macs

1. They are damn smart when it comes to networks. I didn't even have to tell it about my home network. It found all my other computers and peripherals and wireless without me telling any secrets.
2. It *does* have a right mouse button...it just took me 3 days to figure out how to do it...
3. Installing applications is easy when you stop thinking about it.
4. I guess I don't need to defrag any more.
5. When you trip over the power plug, it doesn't send the mac crashing to the floor. The powerplug is just magnetic.

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Tags: Mac, Apple, 5 Things I Never Knew

No Buyer's Remorse - 15 Hours Post Apple Purchase

I thought that the cold, hard light of day would bring waves of buyer’s remorse, but so far I’m pretty optimistic with the Apple purchase yesterday. That being said, it took 3 hours of waffling, adding and removing different models from my Apple Cart….
But I finally decided, and clicked *Buy NOW*.

In a few days, a delivery will show up at my house.
A spiffy 2008 model 15” Apple MacBook Pro 2.5 Ghz Laptop. Upgraded HD and upgraded Video Card from the entry level 15” MacBook Pro.

Sweet Jesus, what have I done!?!??!!?
(deep breaths)
(it’s going to be OK, I can run windows on it still)

This morning, after shovelling a path for the smapp dog to try and reach the back yard (tunnel still in progress), the first thing I did was figure out the finances associated with Floobergeist Fotos. You see, I’ve got to try and justify the Apple purchase against a fledgeling new business venture. Once I do that, all is well in the world, and I can just sit back and be excited. I wonder if I should have done that step yesterday, before the clicking of the *BUY* button. I wonder if I would have still done it? Likely.

Without the new laptop, Floobergeist isn’t going to get very far. It’s been running on (and I’ve been working on) an OLD P4 desktop that was built in 2002. It’s got all of 256Mb of RAM and a whopping 60 GB hard drive.

:-)


Technorati Tags: Floobergeist, Apple MacBook Pro, utter fear

The New Age of Photo Albums

(cross posted from Floobergeist Fotos)
It’s a brave new world when it comes to turning your digital creativity into something that can be preserved and shared in an analog world.
Over the holidays, I created and published 2 hardcover photography books to give to different families as Christmas presents.

It was a labour of love.
After testing various different photo book publishing applications, I decided that Blurb was the solution that fit my requirements the best.

• needed to offer a configurable dust jacket
• needed to have reasonable software to download (I wanted something more than just drag and drop in a browser window
• needed to have LOTS of configuration choices in the format of the overall book, as well as individual pages
• needed to have a great price for 40+ pages

Blurb answered all those requirements, the main one being the dust jacket.  Blurb didn’t charge me extra for the dust jacket, unlike some of the alternative publishers.

It took me about 2 weeks to finalize the formatting and the pictures for each book.
Ordering was a SNAP.
Delivery was speedy.
Books were outstanding.
The printing and the photos were incredible.

Due to the subject matter (pictures of little kids and the wild internet don’t mix very well), I unfortunately can’t show you how the exact books turned out… but I will be creating new ones, and will provide you with the URL to them!

Taking the Mac Plunge

Ok Ok Ok.
I think I’m going to do it.
After 3 solid months of thinking about it, and comparing, and deciding what I want, and asking the Wiz a thousand times, I think I’m going to get a new MacBook Pro.
Gulp.
I thought I had it figured out last night, as Best Buy has the 2007 models on sale. But the biggest model only had a 160Gb hard drive. And of course, I want to run windows too, so I was worried that the drive space was going to be too small, and within a year, it’d be just like holding my breath to get into my old skinny jeans again.

The new models are available on the Apple site, but are in the magnitude of $500-$600 more expensive than the 2007 models. Even though they’ve got the expanded hard drive, it was a bitter pill to swallow.

And then it hit me. I’m an employee of a company who has some decent discounts arranged with a few of the coolest vendors. This morning I picked up a cheap version of Xp ($85 - if I’m going to do this right, a pirate copy of XP just doesn’t cut it any more) and committed myself to atleast buying some sort of Apple-y product. Using my discounts, the brand new 2008 models of the MacBook Pro, 15” screen are the same price as the 2007 models, that have the skinny hard drives.

Ahem. I think my decision was made.

Now, the only frustration is that I was thinking I was going to be playing with a new toy while the last storm of the season thrashes the neighbourhood. Now I’ve got to wait 5 days for an Apple Orchard worker to put my new toy together. Sheesh. Wait 3 months to come to a decision, and then have to wait another 5 days!! Ohhh the humanity!!!

:-)

Technorati Tags: Apple, Best Buy, MacBook Pro

Google Launches Health Information Capabilities?

Certainly the health care industry, both in the US and in Canada needs some sort of boost to get into the 21st century, but is Google's answer to patient owned health records the right direction to move in?

Everyone gets a little tense when thinking about ownership and visibility of confidential healthcare information... and who wouldn't? In an age where the health insurance industry has eyes and spies everywhere, and can use the fact that you've got an ingrown toenail, or filled a prescription for valium against you in future claims, who wouldn't be hesitant to contemplate Google's new Health Care Initiative?

Letting Google into your medical file could be akin to granting that sort of omnipotent power to your ISP, because really, what more is Google than another service provider? That being said - who *would* you trust your health care information to?

Goggle says that they wouldn't *sell* your data without explicit permission. That means that they too are thinking of the potential ability to sell your data. Gulp.

My Day Explained as If I was a Dog House Designer

This week has been consumed by a chicken and an egg theory.

Imagine I’m a dog house designer, and a customer comes and asks me to research how to build a new doghouse for him.

I ask “what kind of a dog house”?

He gets his assistant to reply, “here’s a photo of the dog, what else do you need”?
I respond: “It’s a pretty blurry picture… how big is this dog”?
The assistant replies, “Oh, just estimate for now. I just need an idea of what it would cost for a new doghouse.”

I take the blurry picture back to my very smart team of dog house engineers.
We scratch our head about this challenge.

• How big do we think the dog could be?
• What kind of a dog is it?
• Does it even use its current dog house?
  
• How small?
• Is it going to grow more?
• Is it old?
• Does the dog house need to be close to the owner’s house?
• Does the dog eat outside or inside?
• Do we need to think about food and water delivery?
• Does the dog have a full yard?
• Is it on a chain?
• Is it cold where the dog lives?
• Do we need to consider heating and cooling?
• Does it need a bed?
  

We make some assumptions, think about the construction of the house and the management of the dog, and even how to get rid of the old dog house.

We come up with an estimate, and it’s pretty high, considering we know nothing about the dog, let alone what kind of house he should have. We take into account what a Home Depot pre-fab dog house costs, and we think that the dog owner might be willing to spend about $x.xx plus or minus a percentage, to take into account all the things we don’t know yet. In a perfect world, we would require a due diligence agreement to come up with a real price, and a real design.

I go and talk to the money smartie, and take all my numbers (which are a little higher than what we think the actual cost is, but because we’ve thought too much about this by now, we have added to the estimates to be on the safe side.

The money smartie says: “Make your estimates match what you think the costs are, and compare with what the customer is actually willing to pay; then narrow the scope, document all your assumptions and exclusions, and maybe this will work. But there’s no way we are going to do anything about this when there are differences between the finances…”

I go back to the dog house engineers. We think about this some more.

We don’t know enough about what the dog house should end up being like, but the customer wants a price. Our estimates are high, and we can’t shrink them with any confidence until we do the due diligence. The customer won’t agree to the due diligence until they have an idea of what the price is.

Chaos.
Voila.

God help me if the customer ever moves and they want us to move the dog house for him.
P.S. I’m still waiting for an estimate for a new chain link fence for the back yard. Just in case that comes into scope.



Technorati Tags: work nuttiness, Dog House Designer

I Broke My Flock

It happened yesterday.
Flock had some updates to add-ons and what-nots.
I accepted them.
And then the wheels fell off.
For those of you unfamiliar with Flock, it's simply the absolute best browser in the whole entire world.
Right now I feel like I've lost my best friend.
Heck - even my best friend uses Flock!!!!

So - the updates happened, and then all of a sudden, the vast majority of sites I go to - Google included, stopped loading. No google, no flickr, no twitter.


Yes, I thought it was a silly internet problem.
Alas, running Firefox (gasp!!) and Flock in tandem proved the internet theory wrong. At the same time, Firefox could retrieve google, and yet Flock hung FOREVER. Trying to go into the add-on menu to see if I could get rid of the offending upgrade simply results in Flock crashing.
Removing and reinstalling didn't help either.


Now - It's magic.
The tears on my keyboard have somehow revived Flock.
It's the only explanation. The Flock gods have spoken.
Whew.


Technorati Tags: Flock

The Best Publicity is FREE

What a fantastic way to start the day - reading about do-gooders and volunteers.

TELUS does a very good thing - donating the corporate jet to wing transplant organs around the province on short notice.
Yes, I really do have a big smile on my face.



Technorati Tags: TELUS

Update on Wednesday, February 27, 2008 at 06:16PM by jules

Write up from the Aviation News

Letter from Canada.com 

Letter from Vancouver Province

Which BlackBerry is the Right One?

Oh - I've got some hard decisions to make today.
I've got to decide between 2 berries - one has got the full qwerty keyboard (which I love and am missing!!) But the other one has MP3 and camera functionality.....


Oh dear. I'm a big berry typer when I want to be.
QWERTY is completely easier than the sure type keyboard, which can never remember my fake words.....

HELP!?!?!?

BlackBerry 8830 World Edition (QWERTY)

or

BlackBerry® Pearl™ 8130 smartphone (Camera & MP3)

Still No Global Movement from GrandCenral

In January I wrote about GrandCentral, hoping and dreaming of their entrance into Canada.
I wasn't alone, that blog article continues to drive significant traffic, via Canadian folks who are also looking for GrandCentral to cross the border.  As of right now, there's still no option for Canadian phone numbers. The only real difference I notice about the site is that it now looks and feels Google-y


That being said - with all the hubbub of folks getting US mobile phones to combat high usage charges - maybe getting a real US phone number isn't such a bad thing any more....

Would you trade your 416 number for a New Mexico, or California, or Arkansas area code? Oh oh oh - I want Utah!!!!!

:-)

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Driving Canadians to US Mobile Providers

An interesting article from the CBC this morning of residents in Manitoba opting out of the MTS Cellular Phone Service in favour of Verizon.... People are *turning in* their 204 area code for a 701 - North Dakota Area code....

A growing number of Manitobans are dialling up big savings on their cell phones by hanging up on Canadian service providers.Myron Penner, a trucker based in Blumenort, Man., pays Verizon $200 amonth for 6,000 minutes of talk time anywhere in North America.

Speaks volumes... and now that Verizon's gone off the deep end with unlimited data plans, this trend could extend beyond Manitoba's Borders......


Technorati Tags: MTS Allstream, Verizon, cell phone

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Miley Cyrus Hurts My Head

It's one thing to watch Hannah Montana with the chickadees on the weekends.
It's a completely different scenario when Miley jumps to the mainstream and is played almost hourly on the Mix.
WTF? Tenny Boppers need to stay on the Disney Channel. No one plays Hillary Duff on the Radio, or The Jonas Brothers or The Cheetah Girls.

Am I just getting O-L-D?
I need an Advil.

CRIPES-------Rogers buys Aurora Cable TV

Cripes!!! I was shocked to read this morning about the purchase of Aurora Cable by Rogers.... I knew it was only a matter of time, once I saw the Rogers Digital bundles showing up at the Newmarket Best Buy over the holidays.The Aurora Cable folks claim that they are going out on top - and that Rogers had started to encroach on their territory, and it's likely true. But still. I love Aurora Cable. I love their internet, I miss their cable service (I have 5 months left on a satellite dish from Hell, and was counting the days to switch back to ACI)......What's most interesting about this article in the Post is the repetitive statements of *Silence on the Cogeco Front*..... For some reason, I would have thought that Mountain Cable would be a better fit for Rogers.... perhaps Cogeco has more synergies with Rogers than Mountain does? Imagine the complications in melding all their digital phone services...... ;-)Rogers buys Aurora Cable TV

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Tags: AuroraCable, Rogers, Oak Ridges

Sunrise on The Oak Ridges Morraine - Happy Birthday Mum!

It's going to be a Golden Grahams kind of day today. I can just feel it. Plus, it's my mum's 60th birthday. What could be better than that?

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