Otherwise known as the, Thank God This Is Almost Over edition.

Hello again blog. Another 100 days have passed (and then some) and I was looking over my Project 365 pics trying to make sense of what flickr thinks is interesting and what it does not. Still doesn’t make sense to me. I was also marveling at the fact that I’ve somehow managed to take a picture every day for the last 310 days. Only 55 more to go.

While it’s fun to look back on, and I’ve learned a good bit about taking photos and maybe a teeny bit about being disciplined, it’s not been all that I hoped. Initially, it got my creative juices flowing, and gave me an excuse to get out more in search of interesting photos. But, as time has worn on, I’ve started looking on it as more of a chore. I really don’t want to look at my camera with dread. I am still determined to finish the year however. It would be a shame to have come all this way and stumble at the finish. But next year I think I’ll find another project to occupy myself with.

Three photos dropped out of the top 10 list over the last 100 days, replaced with three new ones. Leaving the list are Day’s End (112 / 365), The Globe (78 / 365), and, ironically, Will I Ever Make Explore? (75 / 365). Day’s End and The Globe are actually two of my favorites. Sad to see those two go.

C is for Coronary (218 / 365) enters the list at #5. I love this picture. You can get a sense of my sense of humor from it, along with Video Game Violence (55 / 365) and Empty Headed (251 / 365). They all make me smile.

Raw Hammer: Anger (246 / 365) at #6? Really? 41 views, 1 favorite. Just below it is Icons! (161 / 365) with 1,184 views and 2 favorites. Just another mystery of flickr’s interestingness rating. It’s a bowling ball people!

Lastly, Stones River (195 / 365) enters the list at #10. Actually this one was supposed to be used in a hotel guest guide for Rutherford County along with an article about the Murfreesboro greenway. I’m not sure what happened with that, if anything, but it is a pretty good shot and it’s nice to see it getting a little recognition.

Wow, look how long it’s been since I’ve written anything here! My blog gets pretty neglected what with Facebook and Twitter. Usually I don’t have, or am too lazy, to compose any thoughts longer than a few sentences and those two services provide an adequate outlet for my micro thoughts. If it seems lonely over here, well you know where to find me.

This is supposed to be about my Project 365 though. But it’s kind of related. I set out on this project, taking one picture a day, every day for an entire year, and it was supposed to help my with several things. Learning about photography, taking up something and sticking with it, partitioning my time, getting out more, etc. And it has helped in some of these areas. We’re 204 days into the year and I’m still taking pictures.

On the other hand there have been some negatives as well. I’m starting to look at my camera with dread and count the days until the end of the year. This doesn’t seem like a good thing. And you can see, as you go through all of these pictures, that I’m just not putting the effort into it that I did initially. Of my top 10 most interesting pictures (according to flickr), 5 of them were taken during the first 2 months of the project. Only two were taken during the last 100 days and of those, one just happened to get linked to a very popular blog.

Part of the problem is that this project has worked a little too well in some ways. For example, I’ve started exercising and trying to watch my weight. So now I weigh myself daily, and go to the gym as often as I can. What’s happened is that now it’s usually very late before I have a chance to think about a photo and not only is there a time constraint, but also an environmental one. Limiting myself to a picture between 10PM and midnight doesn’t afford quite as many photo opportunities as you’d think.

So, I need to work this out somehow and try and raise the quality of my photography again somehow.

In the meantime, the list hasn’t really changed much since last time. Sylvan Stream, Night Settles on LP Field, and Fillin’ Station are gone from the list. New on the list are:

• Icons is a picture I took out at WWDC this year. It’s really of my icon for Lucky 7 Slots, and isn’t amazing or anything. What happened was it got linked to a Skype blog post and has gotten lots and lot of exposure and has zoomed all the way to #5 and is still getting lots of views each day. Thanks Skype!
• No Way Out is a pretty old picture actually and the only Photoshop composition in my Project 365 set. I really had fun making this and wish I had more time to devote to stuff like this. I’m not sure why the sudden burst of interestingness, but it’s jumped up to #6
• Day’s End is one that I’m really happy with. It squeaks in at #10. I went out to Hurricane Creek Recreation Facility on Percy Priest lake a few months back and took some pictures around sunset. And really liked the way it turned out. This one was even linked to by Nashvillest for their photo of the day. Thanks Nashvillest!

That’s about it for my photography update. Until next time then. Perhaps I won’t wait 3 months for the next update. Or maybe I will.

I’m jumping the gun a bit since I’ve not posted or taken my 100th Project 365 picture. That will happen sometime today. But I was curious to look at my progress, so there.

Having gotten used to Aperture and its features, I coughed up the dough to Apple so I can continue using it. I still haven’t really spent time getting to know all of its features, but I can find my way around well enough to crop, straighten, adjust exposure, levels, etc. The less I do to a pic the happier I am, but occasionally I spend a bit more time trying to get a photo just right.

Looking over my 99 pics, one thing that makes me particularly happy is that I try not to focus on a particular theme. While I do tend to take a whole lot of pics around the house because I still have a hard time making time for my hobby, there is still a good bit of variety. Mostly still life around the house, but several of flowers and naturey bits thrown in, as well as sports, architecture, and even a portrait or two. This is a good thing I think.

Taking a look at my Top 10

1. Evolution is still #1 and my only Explored pic. I still don’t get what’s so special about it.
2. Moonlight makes a well deserved move from #3 to #2. It’s still one of my favorites despite a smattering of hot pixels (not newly discovered red stars).
3. Video Game Violence moves from #4 to #3. I really had a lot of fun making this one. And so did my son. He regularly presents ideas for my picture of the day that include assorted toys meeting an untimely demise. Perhaps I should worry. I need more stuff like this. Not necessarily blood and violence, but like this and No Way Out (43 / 365) that require a little thought and creativity.
4. No Photos Allowed falls from #2 to #4. I took this for the perspective, but its popularity is also party attributed to the security guard, standing to the left in this photo, who came and told me that photography wasn’t allowed in the mall. The admin for the Photography is not a crime group stumbled across this pic and invited me to add it to the group whereupon it received many views. It actually has more views than any of my other Project 365 pics.
5. Assimilation jumped from #8 to #5. Still shocked that I was able to capture this on the first try without any sort of assistance.
6. The Globe is one of my favorite little bits of serendipity since I started this project. I knew I wanted to take a picture of this glass globe but wasn’t quite sure how to pose it. I laid it on a magazine and found the words were magnified nicely. Even better when I found words like “depression”, “uncertain”, “the globe” and “I don’t know” and managed to magnify them within the globe.
7. Will I Ever Make Explore? is another new one and a bit of a joke. Flickr’s Explore contains some fantastic photography. And while I don’t expect to see my pics on there everyday, I’ll admit I have uploaded more than one image thinking this might be the one. Sadly, Scout remains silent.
8. Sylvan Stream. Speaking of stuff I thought had a shot at Explore. In any case I enjoyed my little drive out to Burgess Falls where this photo was taken.
9. Night Settles on LP Field drops from #6 to #9 which is just as well since it is a painful reminder of the Titans loss to the Ravens in the playoffs.
10. Fillin’ Station drops from #7 to #10. While I like it, it also demonstrates the quirkiness of flickr’s interestingness calculations. Within moments of posting it, it had 1 view and 1 favorite and was therefore, somehow, immediately among my most interesting pics. Right now it has 46 views and 1 favorite and is my 24th most interesting pic overall. While Uppercut (59 / 365) taken the day before has 86 views and 1 favorite, but is my 30th most interesting. Strange.

That’s it for this time around. I am having a harder and harder time trying to find things to point my camera at, but so far so good. Just two hundred and sixty-five more to go. Thanks again to everyone for your encouragement and feedback.

So yesterday iTunes dropped all DRM from their music. This is good. In addition, they added a variable pricing scheme where some of the really popular tracks would be $1.29, but never fear (says Apple), this will be offset by many tracks which will be $0.69. This is bad. The majority of tracks should remain $0.99. I read this news with little interest since there was nothing in that news to sway me from Amazon back to iTunes.

Until this morning. Today I came across an article claiming that Amazon and Wal-Mart have followed suit and will charge a premium on their more popular tracks as well. Amazon will be charging $1.29 for premium tracks while Wal-Mart will be charging $1.24. I was a bit distraught. If Amazon prices their music the same as iTunes then they lose whatever advantage they may have over them. I’m certainly not using Amazon for the elegant user interface.

So, I did a little research. I looked at the top 20 selling tracks on iTunes and compared them to the prices on Amazon. Here are the top 20 most popular tracks on iTunes and the prices on both iTMS and Amazon:

Amazon has indeed increased their prices. But they are not anywhere near the changes that Apple has made. In fact it looks like the difference in price between Amazon and Apple has just gotten that much wider. Amazon beats or matches Apple’s prices on all but one track. While I can’t say I’m happy with the price increase, Amazon’s average price has only jumped a few pennies a track on average. While Apple’s prices have jumped almost $0.20 per track in this sample. I looked at a larger sample comparing Apple and Amazon’s top 100 tracks and found that in Apple’s case they are charging $1.29 for 41 tracks and $0.99 for the other 59. This brings the average down to around $1.11. An increase of around twelve cents per track on average. Amazon’s top 100 tracks had the following breakdown: 8 tracks at $1.29, 87 tracks at $0.99, 1 track at $0.89, 6 tracks at $0.79 and 2 free tracks for an average of $1.02 per track.

Now it may be, since Amazon has only recently adopted this price increase, that all of the changes have not yet taken affect in which case I may need to reconsider. But as things stand now, Amazon is in little danger of losing me as a music customer. I’ll be watching with interest though.

Last week I finally bought a new GPS receiver in anticipation of some exploring I planned to do Saturday. I was going to be in Kimball, Tennessee having lunch with some of my cousins, and so I decided to add some nearby waypoints from the National Register of Historical Places. While looking through these places I came across one called McNabb Mines. The Register is a bit sparse as far as details go, but I was intrigued. Google came to the rescue with a link to this article from the Chattanooga Times Free Press. The McNabb Mines was apparently a small mining town built in the early 1880s and abandoned around 1910. This place was supposedly just sitting right there next to a lonely stretch of road along the banks of the Tennessee River and only maybe 20 minutes or so from where I was supposed to eat lunch.

Lunch was nice. Three of my cousins showed up. We ate, and talked, and enjoyed ourselves, then went our separate ways. My GPS guided me along the Tennessee River towards the location that I guessed the most likely location of the mining town. The Times article described its location quite well, but they weren’t handing out latitude and longitude, so my coordinates were a guess. I was a bit worried I wouldn’t be able to find it, but I needn’t have worried. As I rounded a curve at the top of a hill, there right next to the road were the remnants of the old hotel. I drove a bit further looking for someplace to pull off the road and passed the ruins of the old company store. I found a place to pull off the road just a little further down the road.

I explored the old hotel and company store, but it wasn’t clear from the article just how much of the original structures were intact. The Historic Register application I found said that there were 76 documented features, but again it wasn’t clear to me how many would turn out to be nothing more than a crumbled ring of stones. Although I was satisfied having explored the hotel and store I walked up the hill towards the general direction of the mines. I found a bit of crumbled foundation and while it wasn’t all that spectacular, I came all this way, may as well take a picture. I climbed a little higher up the hill so I could get a better picture when I noticed some very large walls amongst the trees a bit further up. These walls were much taller than those of the hotel and company store below. So further up the hill I went. I really need to get in better shape.

The Two Story Structure looked as if it were being attacked by trees. There were several lying across it as opposed to growing inside it like the buildings below. This one still had chimneys on two walls and also a tiny bit of plaster on one of the walls.

I wanted to walk further up, but I didn’t have a whole lot of time so I decided to make my way back down. On the way down I found another foundation and another. I didn’t take any pictures of these. A bit further down the road in the opposite direction were the coke ovens and the incline leading to the old mines. The remnants of another stone building were visible from the base of the incline and so I explored it a bit, but the day was getting late and I needed to start heading home.

When I got home and started getting some pictures ready to post on flickr, I reread the PDF and realized I missed at least two other buildings that would have been a lot of fun to explore. There is a church / school building that apparently includes an archway that was still intact as of 2008. Also probably 200 feet away from the “Two Story Structure” was what the archaeologists supposed was the company owners house. Much of it is also supposed to be intact, including 3 fireplaces. And of course, further up the mountain are the mines themselves.

It was a really serene place. I think in the hour or two I was there, three maybe four cars went by. I’ll have to go back sometime and see what else I can find.

If you have any interest in Nashville, or an inside look at Griffin take a look at this video, it really is well done. Also, I highly recommend the HD version to avoid the stutters and audio sync problems. And, lastly, while you’re watching, keep an eye out for some Griffin / Nashville area Twitterers.

Twitter credits:
created by: @blatherskyte
music by: @tomyarbrough
cameos: @davedelaney / @griffintech, @keydesign, @rvalosik, @webslog, @jmrowland, @bradleyspitzer, @camerondaigle, and probably some others I missed.
sir not appearing in this film: @somegeekintn

Update: It looks like the video has been made private for some reason. I’ll update this if it is made public again.

As good as Blizzard’s games are, their online account management leaves something to be desired. Like pretty much every online game, WoW requires a username and password to log into the game. This username and password are vulnerable to keylogging software which can be installed without your knowledge through your web browser. This software runs on your computer and relays back information to the bad guys, who can log into your account and clean out your bank and everything of value. If you don’t play the game, this may not seem like a big deal. It’s just polygons and pixels, right? Sure, polygons and pixels that can be sold for as much as $1000 or more. One thousand actual United States dollars. Have a look and see what a geared level 80 toon is going for these days. People have invested weeks or months of time in their World of Warcraft characters and you would hope that this account information could be made secure, but this keylogger vulnerability is apparently fairly common.

I know this because recently a friend’s account was stolen. Someone gained his account information, changed his password, transferred his character to another server, sold all his stuff, and took all his gold. Cleaned him out. Adding insult to injury, Blizzard charges $25 to transfer your character to another server. And since they have your payment info for the monthly fee, they will conveniently charge that $25 to your account so you don’t have to reenter any messy payment info. They took his fake money and some real money to boot. I’ve heard that several others in my current and former guild have had their account stolen as well over the years so this isn’t uncommon.

Blizzard does offer a device to combat this vulnerability, but that device will cost you an extra $6. Instead what Blizzard could do, without much effort at all, is to confirm a password change, account transfer, etc., by simply emailing a confirmation link to the email address associated with the account. Or alternatively, requiring the answer to a security question. Easy. Lots of other sites do this or something similar. This only prevents part of the problem, but it’s an easy fix and with 11.5 million people paying $15 a month to play, Blizzard can surely afford to spend a little to make a more secure system.

The next step would be a bit more trouble, but not any more than the work required to for the little USB device that they’ve created. Basically they just need to add an optional signed key solution. Login to the web site, generate a signed key which is stored on your computer and only allow a computer with a valid key file to login to the game. Keys, can only be activated through an email confirmation link. Problem solved. Instead, Blizzard is spending time and money chasing down these stolen accounts and trying to put everything back together for their customers. They’re spending untold amounts of time on a solution that is making no one happy, except possible the thieves.

I’ve managed (somehow) to keep taking a picture a day, every day this year. Just 303 more days to go. Sigh. Anyway, I think I’m getting a little better. And I’ve made the switch from JPEG to RAW. Although using RAW means that I spend a little extra time fiddling with my photos before uploading them to flickr. I made almost no adjustments to my first 40 images and now, at a minimum, I crop, straighten, and check the white balance. And sometimes quite a bit more. Those that require almost no adjustment in Aperture make me happiest, so hopefully Aperture won’t make me lazy.

I’ve also started adding a small watermark to the bottom right of each image. Aperture makes this stupid easy. I don’t mind people using my images, but I would like credit. This hasn’t been a problem with my flickr images, but I noticed that someone took a bunch of scans that I posted on my genealogy site and uploaded them to Ancestry without acknowledging the source. Not sure what I’m going to do about that, if anything. But it is aggravating and thus the watermark from this point forward.

Anyway, I was going through my most “interesting” (as determined by flickr) pictures to see if the newer images were more likely to be more interesting than the older ones. In other words: Am I taking better pictures? My top ten most interesting Project 365 pictures are displayed to the right. I have two pictures from the first 30 days among my top ten and eight from the last 30. That’s encouraging. Also six of the top ten were processed in Aperture. So, even more incentive to continue using Aperture after the trial expires.

I’m not sure this has been interesting to anyone but me, but I wanted to make note of my progress regularly so I can see how my photography evolves (or devolves) over the course of the year.

Oh! And before I forget, thank you so much to everyone who views, comments, or favorites my pictures. I really appreciate the encouragement.

The first step is to organize your friends into several groups based on how well you know them. To do this open the friends tab.

Next click the “Make a New List” button which will let you give the list a name and then add your friends to it. You can see that I’ve made a few lists. My “Casual Friends” are acquaintances that I may have met but don’t know very well, or perhaps online friends. Basically friends that I’m not sure I want to share every single personal detail with. All nice people I’m sure, but still. Next I have a list called “Do I Know You?”. Sometimes I get friend requests from people that I think I may know but I’m not certain. Also, there are friends that I only know from certain Facebook games like Mob Wars. “Do I Know You” is for these people and I want personal information limited a bit further for this group.

Now that we’ve organized our friends into these lists, open the Privacy Settings under the Settings tab.

Clicking Privacy settings will open a page that contains the following:

Click the Profile link and you’ll be greeted with a page that lets you control how your Basic information is presented on Facebook. Basic information includes your Profile, Basic Info, Personal Info, Status Updates, Photos Tagged of You, Videos Tagged of You, Friends, Wall Posts, Education Info, and Work Info. The little “?” next to each item explains exactly what each items contains.

Click one of the popup menus next to an item and select “Customize…” and a dialog box will appear.

In this box I allow only my friends to view this information, and in the box below “Except These People”, I’ve excluded the people in the list “Do I Know You”. You could exclude people individually, but that would be pretty tedious. That’s what the friend lists are for. When I accept a new Facebook friend, I also add them to the appropriate friend list and these personal info settings are automatically applied. You can also have multiple lists and/or people excluded for each item.

Once you have all of your Basic settings how you like them, you can then navigate to your Contact Information.

Personally I feel that the items in Contact Information are the most personal and I tend to be more restrictive with who I share this information with. The items that can be configured here are: IM Screen Name, Mobile Phone, Other Phone, Current Address, Website, and email.

Lastly, you have to make certain that as you add new friends, that they get added to the appropriate list. If you don’t add them to one of your lists, then they will be able to see all of the information that you allow friends to see. This is easy enough to do. When you add or accept a friend, you are given the opportunity to add that person to one of your friend lists as illustrated to the left.

I hope this post has been of some use. If there’s anything I’ve forgotten or if you have tips you’d like to share, please do in the comments.

Way back when I first started working on my genealogy, I came across a bit of a riddle. Fleser is a pretty uncommon last name and so anywhere I found them, be it in old Census forms, newspaper articles, and even Google searches, I knew there was a really good chance we were related. We (Flesers) are really concentrated in the Grand Rapids / Kalamazoo area of the United States. But there was this other little group clustered in the Montana / Oregon area, and for the longest time I could not figure out how we might be related.

Eventually I discovered my relation to, what I’ll call the Northwest Flesers. Let me explain. No, there is too much, let me sum up. My great-great grandfather, Adam Fleser, had a bit of an, um, adventurous streak it seems. He and his family left Michigan and traveled along the Bozeman Trail to Montana in 1864 after word of the gold strikes in Virginia City made its way east. He not only didn’t strike it rich, his wife left him, taking his four children with her and marrying William Bowe founder of Melrose, Montana. Bowe named Melrose after his step-daughter Melrose (Rose) Fleser. I’m not sure who named Fleecer Mountain after my great-great grandfather, but they spelled the name wrong. On the bright side, the pronunciation is correct. Adam returned to Michigan sometime after 1870. There he remarried and had six more children, the last being my great grandfather Adam G. Fleser.

A few years ago I was contacted by Chelsia Rice, who had stumbled across my site looking for an email address of a family member. It turned out Chelsia and I are related. She’s my 3rd cousin once removed, and ol’ Adam is our common ancestor. She was nice enough to fill large gaps in my knowledge about the Northwest Flesers, and it was through Chelsia that I came to know another cousin: Deirdre.

Cooper’s First Photo: Michael and Deirdre

Which brings me to Cooper. Deirdre and her husband Michael have a cat and his name is Cooper. Cooper is becoming something of a celebrity it seems. You see, Deirdre and Michael decided at some point that it would be cool to affix a tiny little camera to Cooper’s collar which takes a photo every two minutes. At the end of the day they download all these photos from the camera and have been doing this for a year. What they’ve ended up with is a year of images in the life of Cooper from his point of view. Images that are interesting and in many cases beautiful. And now Cooper has his very own photo exhibit at Urban Light Studios in Seattle through March the 13th. News of Cooper’s exhibit has spread from nationally from Seattle with appearances on Animal Planet and most recently Good Morning America.

Michael and Deirdre also have a filmmaking company called Cross Films and they’ve created a special page to track all of Cooper’s news appearances. Cooper also has his own blog: Cooper – Cat Photographer. He’s an extremely talented cat.

Now normally the story of a cat photographer would be pretty interesting, but because of the connections I’ve made through genealogy, Cooper’s story has a little extra significance, seeing as we’re family and all.