Lies-to-children

Manual: To upload pictures to your computer from your camera [install software, change camera settings, plug in, software autostarts...] Do not connect your camera to your pc until installation is complete!
Me: Gah, that's complicated. Why can't I just read the xd card like an external disk?
Me: But I don't have another card reader here, so I'll try it.
Computer: Installed. Click to reboot.
Me: Gah.
Me: Connects camera now.
Computer: Reads xd card like external disk.
Me: Gah! Couldn't they have said that? What's with the dire warnings? When will I accept that I know bettter than instruction manuals? (Sometimes. Often they mean their warnings.)

Anyway, lj picnic and family up north photos coming soon. Pictures of blossom and flowers and people in startrek uniforms at worldcon and amusing signs forbidding canoeing on hillsides were snapped with my phone and never saved, so gone now, sorry

ETA: Needs batch resizing. Thinks, "well, I have the software, ANYWAY", surely it's designed to do this easily. Crashes. Gah. Gimp, whereforartthou? Or maybe one of the online services designed to do this.

ETA: Gah. I don't know if there's a way to turn off rich text editing in livejournal. I'll disable javascript and sort it out later.

Google

Experimenting with Picassa... God, that is in fact creepy. It has the same cheery google interface as google, but with google I like the simplicity. Somehow, raring ahead and searching most of my hard drive, however non-intrusively, isn't what I like. I want to say "do this" and it does this, etc.

And please *don't* centralise any data on google's servers. That's fine if there's a reason for it, eg. with email, and it's probably not *actually* a problem with files on my hard drive, and I don't go to lengths to secure it, but it's actually creepy that my stuff might get easily (if with warning) uploaded to a server and remembered, over encryption I don't control.

The phising scam was thiiiiiiiiis big

I've finally joined you all in 2006, and set up discovered I already had courtesy of yahoo a flickr account. Photos of the livejournal picnic are: http://www.flickr.com/photos/49571367@N00/sets/72057594137137063/ (I think.)

( Cut for image, hand gestures and pomposity. The phising scam was thiiiiiiiiis big )

I don't have a particularly exciting camera, and haven't experimented very much with it (and have resized the images down) so they're not amazing, but they all seem fairly clear, and a few look to me like quite flattering views of people.

There are 75 photos, but were several duplicates when someone kept accidently ducking, or had a twirly skirt, or moved around too much for me to work out if I'd photographed them yet or not. I may have a fiddle and see if I can produce any interesting effects like black and white, but not yet.

I haven't described them because I don't remember exactly who minds their face and name being associated in public. People with yahoo accounts can comment on photos of them to tell everyone else who they are.

Haylp: This seems to fulfill the basic requirement of "put the photos online with automatic thumbnails and tagging". But any suggestions for easier or better ways, or on how you normally display flickr galleries will be gladly received.

Annual obfuscated mead drinking competition and dodgy ankle and bellybutton comparing competition

*shrug* This week provided those titles, but no post to go with them. The Carlton, the picnic, and CTS last night were just too surreal[1] to be able to encapsulate.

[1] Eg. involving more than 45% barn owl hooting.

DWJ: Time of the Ghost

I've just read Dianna Wynne Jones' Time of the Ghost. Has anyone else?

For some reason I had the impression it was more of a children's book, like Wilkin's Tooth, but that's not at all how I found it. Certainly it's not very complicated, but:

* It was eerie. Several DWJ are a bit, but this was more so.
* The which-character-turns-out-to-be-which, which happens every book, was well done. Not overcomplicated, but unsettling all the way through.

However:

* I just didn't engage with it at all. I didn't really enjoy any of the characters, and didn't find it funny, and it felt kind of dingy and pointless, and I had to struggle to keep reading until I got 3/4 of the way through.

I think if I reread it I'd engage a bit more, knowing what the people are like from the start, and find more humour not worrying as much about the bad stuff; but then it probably wouldn't be nearly as eerie another time when you know what's going to happen.

But I feel like this is an abrupt jump sideways, and books halfway between this and most of her others would be REALLY good, but she just didn't write any in that area.