Photos From our New York Weekend
Photos From our New York Weekend.
My Photo Galleries
So, I have this dilemma about the photo galleries I have on my site, and what to do with them going forward. I’ve had them ever since I got a digital camera in 1999, and since then they’ve been a major feature of my site, although it’s one I never managed particularly well.
My Big Things Photos especially have generated a lot of attention; I’ve been recognized on the local news and in several local papers because of them, as well as getting lots of traffic.
However. I’ve been building my photo gallery pages by hand since I started, and it’s an incredibly tedious process, even though I’ve built templates and tried to make it as simple as possible. There are lots of events I took pictures of and should have displayed, but I just never got around to building the pages and the photos are sitting on my external hard drive or in iPhoto.
Another part of the problem is that I’ve built the existing galleries in different ways in the past, and I’ve refined my methods over time, so older galleries need to be redone to streamline the code and to make them web standards compliant. On top of that, I hate the design of my galleries, and although I’ve played with it, I haven’t found a look that seems as polished and professional as I think it should be.
And then there are the photos of my house. I always had a different method of displaying them, because they are such a specialized thing. Since I’m restoring an old Victorian, I wanted to show the different areas of the house and how I worked on them over time. Unfortunately, when Stephanie and I started dating, we had a creepy stalker who apparently used the pictures of my house to locate us, which was so terrifying that I removed them from my site. The whole experience really colored the way I feel about pictures of my house, and about my house in general, honestly. I used to love every nail and board in the old girl, but the event really killed my enthusiasm and my sense of security. There are several major projects that I’ve worked on (patio installation, exterior work, and this weekend’s fireplace mantel installation) that I’ve not documented like I would have in the past.
I want to put the pictures back up, but I need to take the time to rework them to make them standards compliant, and I’m thinking about re-arranging them also.
I should have a more automated process for building galleries, but I’m not enough of a programmer type of geek to have the solution leap right out at me. I’m more a interface design geek, and while I can build a lot of programming stuff, it doesn’t come naturally.
Then along came Flickr. If you don’t know what that is, take some time to play around on that site; it’s a way to build photo galleries of you pictures, and it’s also a social site, where you can look at and interact with other people’s photos, too. You can tag your pictures with key words, and they show up in photo pools with other people’s photos that are tagged similarly. You can comment on people’s photos. You can save other people’s photos as your favorites, have your friends pictures show up with yours, search for pictures, create themes. The site is nothing short of fantastic, and it’s so easy. I can upload pictures right out of my iPhoto storage, tag them, add them to sets, caption them and they’re done and on display. I’ve been playing around with adding pictures to Flickr, although I’ve been selective about what I’ve put up there so far.
Flickr is awesome, and I want people to be able to comment on my pictures, and I want all the features of Flickr. But it’s sort of important to be able to host my pictures on my site, where I control what happens to them. On top of that, there are THOUSANDS of pictures on my site, that I would have to upload, caption, tag, if I decided to move them over to Flickr. And it would really dilute the uniqueness of my Big Things pictures to a great degree.
On top of that, yesterday I came across a method of doing photo galleries in Movable Type, the software that I use here to blog with. I could use a plug-in to upload pictures right out of iPhoto in an automated way, and galleries would be built on my site that people could comment on. It seems to be the automated solution that I was looking for, with the features I want, and it’s probably the way I need to go, but I need to set it up and see if it works. At the same time, I should probably upgrade my Movable Type software. And again, there’s that dilemma of moving the thousands of pictures I have over.
Sigh. One way or another, I have to come to a decision and get started.
2019 Update: Over time I migrated most of photos to flickr. Eventually that became a chore, too, as that site made uploading photos more tedious. So I’ve been lax about keep up with pictures altogether. Recently, I’ve been going through dead links and either purging photo galleries, putting in placeholder links until I can update from Flickr galleries, or correcting broken stuff.
Art Car Day
Yesterday’s fun in Louisville was pretty exhausting. We got up very early to try to make it in time to see the art cars outside the The Kentucky Museum of Art and Craft, on Main Street in Louisville, which is one of the really interesting, beautiful areas of town. It’s part of downtown Louisville, and is filled with art galleries, small storefront shops, cafes and the Louisville Slugger Museum, which we visited on a previous trip. We only spent a few minutes in the Museum using the restroom, unfortunately, because there were some awesome clocks by Randall Cleaver and by Ross Brown I really wanted to see more closely. But there was so much going on that it was hard to stop and peruse much.
We met up with Stephanie’s friend Lisa who drove up from Durham, North Carolina. Stephanie became friends with Lisa through the large New Beetle car show they attend every year in Roswell; Lisa drives a silver biodiesel New Beetle called Spacepod.
Spacepod in Louisville
We also met Lisa’s friend Sarah, who had one of the art cars in the show, called Undersea Mah Jongg. It’s a blue sedan covered with under water decor including fishes that play Mah Jongg on the hood of the car. It also features a bubble machine that tricks out the underwater theme by giving you the impression you’re deep-sea diving. And driving behind the car while it’s producing mass quantities of bubbles is pretty entertaining.
Undersea Mah Jongg
There were 20-some cars there, and some other interesting vehicles, like a giant rat fashioned out of a tiny motocycle, and a riding mower converted into an artwork with a working ferris wheel on the back.
That Car!
motorized rat
Ferris Wheel Lawn Tractor
Louisville has several instances of public art similar to the New York and Chicago art cows. They have numerous horses (for Derby days) decorated various ways by different local artists, and this year on Main Street they also had giant heads decorated as well.
Derby Horse
public sculpture
After checking out the cars at the Museum, we drove with the cars through Louisville in a small parade, where they ended up in a church parking lot where people came and talked to the drivers and there were prizes for the best car. Sarah won third place in the people’s choice contest.
We were all pretty beat after the parade; so we visited Lynn’s Paradise Cafe again on this visit, to get some air conditioning and much needed rest. And later we said goodbye to Sarah at the hotel and Lisa caravaned with us up to Indianapolis.
Photo Set: Kentucky Art Cart Weekend 2005.
Weekend Update: King Kong at IMA
Stephanie and I saw King Kong with Dan and Doug, Josh, and David and Garrett on the Terrace at the IMA. It was great fun; the sound was much better than in the past, and I love seeing movies with Dan and Doug; I haven’t done that much recently, and I miss it. I spent a few minutes in the giftshop of the IMA while I was waiting around to buy tickets. They don’t carry as many art books as they used to, but it all looks very nice. I’m looking forward to visiting the IMA to see exhibits.
George and Timmy enjoy Kong
Photo Set: Pictures from the King Kong.
On Saturday, I got a lot of weeding done (I filled my entire trash dumpster with weeds) and managed to put a few items on eBay, so I rewarded myself with playing Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets on Xbox. It’s an older game I got used, but it’s a lot of fun. Stephanie and I caught up on watching Big Brother 6 in the evening.
Sunday morning, I mowed the lawn for the very first time since my surgery. I felt fine and really had fun doing it. I love mowing the lawn. I also did more weeding and cleaned up the side of the house where we broke out the stairs a bit. There’s lots more to do there, but it looks better. And I spent the afternoon at Stephanie’s house helping her and her dad get her basement organized and building shelves for her VW collection.
I’ve been feeling much better lately; like I did before the surgery, only with more energy. There were times before where I was doing something active and I felt like I was climbing a steep hill; now I can do the same things and have energy left over. I’m not as strong as I used to be; I can’t lift things like I could before. But that’s just because I was fairly inactive for four months. I’ll regain muscle as I keep working.
June Photos — Stephanie gets a hair cut!
[edit needed: update photos]
I adore her new hair cut. I think it looks amazing. She’s still getting used to it. She donated her long hair to Locks of Love.
[correct link/photos/2005/06.30_june/index.html] Check out my other photos to see my neighbor’s yard sign — the one about Patrice Abduallah, our City-county council representative, who’s not available to speak to his constituents about the Human Rights Ordinance, and who failed to show up to a mandatory Democratic meeting called by Julia Carson.
And then there’s my Day 3 shirt —
[edit needed: update photos]
Again, the sleeves are too long, and it’s looking pretty faded and worn. Probably time to go in the discard pile, although I love the Easter Island heads.
Weekend Visit at Dad’s
We have a family get-together at my dad’s every year in June to celebrate birthdays.
Dad’s Corvette
Photo Set: Weekend Visit at Dad’s
So Dick Wolfsie called me this morning…
From WISH-TV morning news. We’re going to do another interview about my “Big Things” photography, on June 29th. This time we’re going to film first and they’ll put it all together and broadcast it, and they’ll go grab shots of some of my favorite stuff around the city. I have to decide which Big Thing I should do the interview near, though, and it has to be in Indianapolis. Check out all the sites I have, and let me know what you think I should pick in a comment.