potential visitor increase
Dear Stephen Conroy,
I read today in The Age that you are planning to start monitoring blogs as part of a new “media monitoring strategy”. You particularly mentioned Whirlpool, a site that has been critical of your proposed “Clean Feed Internet Filter” (as I have been.)
As a blogger, I’d love to know that what I write about has a wide audience. If your proposed monitoring does indeed spread its net wide over the internet, (though I would question whether this is effective use of tax payer funds) you may well be visiting this website. This would be a boost to my visitor count, which of course is the goal of most websites. (Isn’t it?). I encourage you to read around- maybe you would be interested in a List of the 13 dwarves in The Hobbit? (one of my more popular articles.) Or perhaps, you could introduce bean bag skills for those rowdy back benchers.
Sincerely yours,
titanium_geek
No, I wasn’t game enough to send this to Minister Conroy directly!
COMMENTS
sharing photos
I like photography. I like sharing my photography- I guess it’s “showing off”- but hey, it’s fun. This is my process for getting pictures from the camera to the web.
- Take photos. I have a Panasonic DMC TZ3, but sometimes I borrow my parent’s DSLR.
- Transfer photos to computer via usb cable- I just copy the images to a folder in my “Pictures” folder.
- I name the folder something like 2009March18dump – this doesn’t give me full organization by date, but I can tell when the folder is rather than something like 20090318dump. Sometimes I give the folder an event name, if a lot of photos belong to that event. Usually I have lots of things mixed in.
- I now eject my camera and put it away. I go through the folder of images, sorting them into event folders, and/or picking out the good ones. (I usually make a folder called “gooduns”).
- At this point I might mess around with some photos in seashore or the gimp, (image programs) but not always.
- Now, I have either photos of people I want to put on facebook, or photos of a sunset, landscape, or of something interesting to put on flickr. I make a folder called either “small” or “flickrable” or “thumbs” (etc) and copy the good photos into that folder.
- The next step is to open up the terminal, and cd Pictures/2009March18/gooduns/small. Then, I run the mogrify command from imageMagick, like this: mogrify -resize 20% *.JPG. This resizes the images to a size that is more friendly for the internet.
- From here, I open up flickruploadr, and open up that folder. I can batch tag images, and add descriptions, set privacy permissions as well as rotate images. Once I’m happy, I hit “upload” and away they go to the flickr website. (Or, use the facebook website to upload photos.)
- I can always tweak names, permissions etc at the flickr website. Then I share the most recent upload on twitter.
So why not use iPhoto? I don’t like the labyrinthine ways that it uses to organize photos- I like to be able to find my photos without having to rely on another program. Sure, iPhoto can upload images to flickr, resize images and categorize them. I prefer a manual gear box to an automatic one when driving, I prefer to have the fine grained manual control over my photos. What about you? what’s your photo processing process? Am I wrong about iPhoto? Let me know by leaving a comment!
COMMENTS
music to study to
I have recently bought an album of music that I am really enjoying. It is called Cardio Classics and I bought it from iTunes. At first I thought the cover image was the ribs of a skeleton, tastefully covered with a black bow tie bikini, due to my association of cardio being heart. Of course, it’s really a white running shoe, with a black bow tie to indicate the snazzy dress of an orchestra. (Cardio meaning heart-rate, obviously.)
![[ album cover of Cardio Classics ]](cardio.jpg)
Advertising and its effect on me interests me. The reason I bought the album is the fault of one song- O Fortuna from Carmina Burana. The first time I heard this song completely, I was in the UK watching The Last Choir Standing on the BBC. One of the competing choirs, of welsh high schoolers, called Ysgol Glanaethwy sang this song. Since then it has been in my head. On a shopping trip, I heard part of the song playing in the ABC shop, and decided to look it up. First I found it on YouTube, then looked it up on iTunes. I liked the sound of it, and bought it. It sounded so good I bought the album. I don’t recollect seeing the ads around much, and definitely don’t remember thinking “oh yes, must buy today” on seeing the adverts. It weirds me out a little to see that the ABC shop had a big factor in my decision to purchase this product, by playing the CD in one of their stores that I happened to be passing.
I’m very happy with this mix of up beat classical tunes- I particularly like Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro: Overture and Vivaldi’s Gloria In D, RV589: Gloria In Excelsis Deo. There are also “fun” songs as well, such as Flight of the Bumble Bee and an excerpt from the William Tell Overture. There are some intense serious songs, like the afore-mentioned O Fortuna and parts of Dies Irae. I suppose that someone who listens to more classical music than I do and has earned the “expert” hat might sniff at all the excerpts, there are no lengthy 10 minute complete compositions on this CD. I like it though. I like how mostly (if not all) Australian Orchestras are featured. I like how it is good as background study music that won’t put me to sleep. I like that it feels academic- more academic than some of my other music anyway. 
I know this reads a bit like a review, but I’m not being paid in anyway by the ABC- I’m just very happy with this Album. More information from the ABC online website.