Money Meet Mouth

Submitted this photo for JPG magazine's Noir theme...

What's the deal with JPG Magazine?.. It's user submitted and approved content. So people who are members get to submit and vote on things submitted for publishing. Lots of cool photos and articles 6 times a year. It's internet collectivity put into physical form. Get the scoop from JPG Mag.

Have a Gander

This is a link to my Zooomr photostream sorted by awesomeness.

Oddly enough, some of my favorites are ranked low on awesomeness. If you want to see more or less photos on a page, there are links at the top of the page.

Testament of Time

Zooomr is back up. And it is amazing. Much thanks to Kristopher Tate, Thomas Hawk, Zoho, Sun, Dell, [hide] and everybody else who helped.

Much love to Zoho!

It's amazing what happens in times of need. Amongst the people listening to Zooomr's problems were a few willing to help. The Sun reps in Zooomr's area responded quickly. Micheal Dell personally opened a help ticket to get the old server fixed. One of the evangelists from Microsoft even offered help.

The most amazing story has to be the help that Raju and his company Zoho. They've moved Zooomr into their data center, sticking with Kristopher Tate (CTO) to get the servers relocated, and have offered a lot of help during this tough time.

I can't thank them enough.

Zooomr and it's community has become incredibly important to me (I've donated a large chunk of money I don't really have to help out) and each bit of help we receive is personal. So if there's anything we (as a community) can do to thank our benefactors?.. You just have to ask.

Heartbreak

I feel like somebody kicked my dog.

See, I've been following the Zooomr launch all week or however long it's been. We've watched the whole thing live on USTREAM, with accompanying chat. That 24 hour stream, and chat are living web2.0 transparency. No, not all the secrets were released, but the loyal fans were able to chat with Thomas Hawk and Kris Tate the masterminds of Zooomr.

Getting to interact with the owners built a connection to the website, but getting to interact with soooo many other photo lovers built a community. I'm not just connected, but I'm part of it.

You AIESEC'rs know what I'm talking about... think about the first conference where you really belonged.

Anyway, after all the sharing and hoping, chatting with Rober Scoble, battling griefers, building cliques, hitting on chicks, throwing love and support to Kris & Thomas, the surge of a couple hundred people chanting ... Zooomr Mark 3 was LIVE.

All the new features were working, and it was fast. So sweet. It's gonna change photosharing. I promise you that.

But a db server went down. And things came to a screeching halt. And that's where things stand at the moment. Kris is going to go look at the server to see if anything can be done.

Robert Scoble put up an awesome post about how this is an amazing opportunity for evangelism... think how much good will a few boxes and techs would create among the zooomrati.

Thomas Hawk has a post up on the Official Zooomr Blog.

We'll be back soon, and when the world changes, we can look back and say... "Zooomr launch?. Yeah, I was there for that. I lost sleep for that. I was a part of that. I believed. And it was worth it."

**Update** Kris posted a video from the data center. It explains why this release has been sooo hard to do, and why things went down.






Zooomr Mark III: Hardware Crash from Kristopher on Vimeo

Upgrade

Zooomr is doing their upgrade to Mark III.

Lots of cool upgrades, improvements and new ideas about how photo sharing should work. Definetely worth checking out when it's done.

In the mean time, they're keeping people in the loop via streaming webcasts. It's a great way to get your questions answered about zooomr, the upgrade or life in general. It's one of those things that builds community, and helps channel the anxiety in the upgrade mean time.

Springtime

It's here.

And it's brought a new quarter. Though I wised up and only took on two classes this time. An online digital photography course, and some science course that I'm annoyed that I wasn't able to transfer anything in for...

Spring also brought new house work... the hard wood floor is installed. Next step is to sand, stain and seal it. It already looks beautiful and better than either of my brother-in-law's floors. Hopefully the leftovers bits of flooring will make good bonfire wood. That bonfire will be the official start of summer. Even if it's well before or after the official start date of summer.

The photography thing is treating me well, lots of activity on my pictures over at Zooomr. A lot of that is reciprocity for looking at, commenting on and 'fav'ing other people's pictures. But it still feels good. Boiling it down, the more pictures I take, the more pictures I want to take. This cycle could get vicious.

I looked at the internal counter on my old camera. Between January 2003 & last week, I'd taken nearly 9000 pictures. Last Tuesday was the end of my first week, and I'd already taken more than 1000. Lots of deleting going on there, but I'm going to be thankful for big phat harddrives. A real camera has a much different feel. The ability to change settings is empowering. The big phat memory card is enabling.

Anyway, it's spring, except for next week when we have our retaliatory cold snap. Mother nature can be such a cruel bitch sometimes.

Taking Pictures != Planning Terrorism

I was going through new photos in Zooomr today and ran across the photo above and it's related blog entry.

It seems as cameras were linked to planning terrorist attacks in the londonpaper in part of a 'see something suspicious/report it' campaign. While it feels a bit on the 'duh' side, it seems to be part of a bigger effort to restrict freedom based on fear.

This kind of thing pisses me off. God forbid I want to take a picture of my friends or of a neat building. It seems every week somebody gets harrassed for taking pictures.

Honestly?.. I think we should stage some kind of gigantic picture protest, gather peacibly, and take a picture of something.

Got Soul?

Is it true that taking a person’s photograph steals their soul?

Yes. This is why movie stars, fashion models, politicians and pop singers have such dreadful personality and relationship problems - their souls have been severely depleted by all the photographs which have been taken of them.