Ryan McFarland

Finger Food Friday finally at Seth’s

Originally uploaded by zieak

Seth has been living in this place for over a year. As the former consistent host of FFF we expected him to want to have them there much sooner than this. The weather was nice earlier in the day so we had a fire outside and sat and ate, drank, and talked until midnight. In attendance: Seth, Coconut (Khan), Stacey, Eugene, Levy, Josh, Earl, Cena, Mitch, Lynsey, Beth and i.

It is always exciting to have something published…

Hi Ryan,
I am writing to you from Sydney, Australia - I hope you are well!
I am working on a book project for Macmillan Education about the life, environmental awareness and culture in Indonesia. The book will be published only in Australia, and only 10,000 copies.
I have seen that you have an image from the UNFCCC in Bali, named “UN Climate Change Conference close up”, and was wondering if you would be happy for us to publish it? If so, could you send me the high res? We will of course acknowledge you as photographer of any images used.
Do let me know if you require any further information.
I hope to hear from you soon!

Kindest regards,
April Lombardo
Freelance Photo Editor/Director

…of course it would be nice to be paid for photos, projects, and the like but if i build a decent list of work that has been published (i’ve had things in Popular Photography, international magazines, a book about crafting…) then perhaps i’ll be able to score some paying articles eventually.

There is a lesson here: Take lots of photos. Tag them geographically and by subject. Use Creative Commons licensing. And probably more!

Caturday

Originally uploaded by zieak

Cena and the cats enjoy a day of rest after a rigorous week.

Earl protecting his noggin

Originally uploaded by zieak

Earl is modeling one of the skate helmets we have at Zoom. I’m sure if you don’t know Earl that you’re impressed by his beard. Good. Earl is planning on entering the World Beard and Mustache Championships next spring. It will be in Anchorage. I’m thinking i’d like to go too. It will coincide with the Iditarod.

Flickr announced that you can now upload videos up to 90 seconds long if you’re a pro member. I thought I’d give some brief impressions comparing the Flickr video service to YouTube. Here’s a video i uploaded to Youtube a while ago…

I like that on myspace you can see a list of the sites that link to your video. Another nice feature is the number of views your video has.

And I just uploaded the video to Flickr. It gives you a progress bar while the video uploads so you know how long you’ll be waiting. After the upload and processing you can then embed the video…

I really like that there isn’t a Flickr ad on the corner of my video like YouTube has. I also love the way the status bar fades in and out depending on the cursor presence.  You also can easily watch the video full screen.

At the end of the Flickr video it provides a link to my profile, option to comment and even a share this icon. Finally, next to the link to my Flickr profile is a text link to Flickr.

I foresee switching all my videos over… now…which one’s default code validates better with my doc type?YouTube has 6 markup errors and Flickr has 4.

When do we get spring?

Originally uploaded by zieak

I woke this morning to a few inches of snow on the ground. It’s still coming down. But there are crocus in bloom!

Friday was a going away party for Orin. He’s moving to Sitka to start a pizza business. Because he works so much he hasn’t been to our place for a FFF in quite a while. This one turned into FFFF (Formal Finger Food Friday) when Mike, Josh, and Earl showed up dressed in suits. I went upstairs and changed of course.

Last Saturday I was in bed working on the computer. Having a laptop is a true luxury isn’t it? Anyway, Hex settled into my left armpit and after a while Yeti wanted to sleep on my chest. He slid off and right onto little Hex who took it like it happened a few times a day.

Peerflix sent out an email to members yesterday…

Effective April 23, 2008 Peerflix is discontinuing the Marketplace and DVD buy/sell/trade portions of Peerflix.com. While the Peerflix.com web site will be available beyond April 23, 2008, you will no longer be able to buy, sell, send or receive DVDs on Peerflix as of that date. While we have made considerable investments in our marketplace platform over the past four years, unfortunately the escalating costs of operating the marketplace do not make that business viable at this juncture. As we move out of the DVD marketplace business, we are focusing our energy and resources on building the Peerflix Media Network which is now the web’s fastest growing vertical movie network.

The Peersafe Protection Program will also be terminating effective April 23, 2008 meaning that you will no longer be able to make any Peersafe claims starting April 23, 2008. So, if you have DVDs that you have been holding on to but were planning to send at some point, now’s the time! If your Trade Cash account balance is greater than $10 and you would like to cash out your remaining Trade Cash balance, you must do so before April 30, 2008. To request a cash out of your Trade Cash, please log in to Peerflix.com and click “My Account” in the upper right corner, then click the “My Cash” tab and then click on the “Request Cashout” button and follow the indicated steps. As of April 30, 2008 you will no longer be able to request any Trade Cash payments from Peerflix and your Trade Cash will immediately expire and be forfeited. All cash out requests remain subject to the terms and conditions set forth in the Peerflix Service Policies and will be charged a $10 processing fee.

Peerflix was neat because you could trade your DVDs in by sending them to someone that wanted one and then you would have a credit to request one. At first postage was paid by the person mailing the disc but eventually the fee for postage was added to the exchange fee and it was included on the “envelope” that you printed out to mail the DVD. Eventually they moved from a 1:1 ratio for exchanges to a dollar value associated with a disc. If you sent one to someone then you were given a credit based on the price of the disc. If you bought one you would use your credit by requesting a movie. They allowed people to cash out their credit if you had over $100 accumulated. I have a $34 balance which i can now cash out for $24. So long Peerflix.

At first Cena and i used this system to trade in movies we had but didn’t want any more for things we did want to see. (If we couldn’t get any value out of selling them on Amazon of course.) Then when they shifted away from Peerbucks (or was it Peerbux?) and to a true dollar value we saw that we could make a little money by shipping things off but not requesting any. We set notification rules for our yahoo email accounts that whenever we had a notification that someone wanted a movie on Peerflix then yahoo would send us a text message. Plenty of sleepy mid-night scrambles to try and claim a movie to send off before other Peerflix users claimed it. It is time to pull the movies i have listed on Peerflix and move them to Amazon (one which was formerly worth only $3 was now worth $13) or pass them off on friends.