andrewlighten.com

When I said “TV is crap at 4am” I was wrong. Jeremy Clarkson has just popped up on Parky.

Our baby was born at 1:55am on Saturday.

We had a fairly major problem during delivery that meant Lisa had to have an emergency caesar at very short notice, but all went well in the end.

The surgical team at St John of God were amazing given such short notice.

We went from birthing suite to theatre to holding our beautiful new baby girl in little over half an hour. There were no long introductions and I regrettably don’t remember many names.

I’ve never sat in an operating theatre during an operation before. Watching the team work I was half nervous hoping that everything went well and half fascinated at how slick the whole operation was. There was very little chatter; everyone just did their thing perfectly. They worked really quickly but without any fuss or drama. Not at all like it is on TV.

The one time the team dropped their totally professional 100% focus was the slight chuckle after I said “caeser”, ”while you’re at it” and “liposuction” all in the same sentence.

Lisa is still in hospital and will be for another day or two. I’ll ask her to post something more substantial once she’s back home.

I’m still trying to catch up on sleep. Lisa’s parents were kind enough to mind The Kid last night so I got 8 hours of uninterrupted sleep, but my sleep patterns are still all screwed up. I fell asleep earlier in the evening but woke up to watch the Monaco Grand Prix and couldn’t get back to sleep. TV is crap at 4am.

There are a bunch of photos up on SmugMug.

The Age has a small piece on an operation to help a little kid be able to hear. The audiology software I worked on for ~3 years is shown in one of the shots. Left hand laptop, from about 0:50 to 0:40. Neat!

In the last day or two The Kid has just hit the tipping point with her reading. She’s just learnt a few more words and the skills required to identify new words have just emerged. She’s able to sit down and almost read some of her books herself. Still stumbles on some words, but overall, she’s doing brilliantly.

It’s rained on and off for two days now, which is an outstanding followup to the heavy soaking we got last week. Lovely.

Duran Duran meets Old Spice. Yuk.

Flickr has responded to the incident:

I’ve gotten the whole back story from the team and have read the forums, various Flickr groups topics and blog posts on this topic (as of a few hours ago), so I have a pretty good idea that we screwed up for which I take full responsibility (actually, several team members are fighting to take responsibility).

Still happy I’ve moved toward SmugMug.

I was talking to Lisa about this Flickr Yahoo thing last night and she said I should bite the bullet and open a SmugMug account. I already put a few photos up there using a trial account after I met a bunch of the SmugMug guys on the photowalk in San Francisco, but hadn’t actually given them any money to continue using it.

Well, this morning I did. I bought a basic account and figured I’d start uploading stuff there instead of Flickr.

Sniffing around their API tools info I found that there’s actually a Firefox plugin that lets you transfer files from Flickr to SmugMug, so I did that for a bunch of photosets on Flickr.

The Flickr model of photosets and the SmugMug model of galleries don’t quite match up. On Flickr you have one big continuous stream of photos, and each photo can optionally be associated with one or more photosets. On Flickr, password protection (which we care about for photos of The Kid) is associated with the photo.

On SmugMug photos always belong within a single gallery, and password protection is associated with the gallery, not the photo.

Because the import from flickr was done at the photoset level and not the stream level it’s resulted in some duplication of photos within galleries. It’s also meant that there’s some photos for which a password is required when you could easily make them public, and vice versa. I’ve gone through and cleaned these up, but if you see anything duplicated or in a place where it shouldn’t be let me know.

I’ll have to just think a little differently about how I publish photos online. I won’t change the way I shoot at all, but it might well be that each set of photos get put up in two lots: one set of public and one that’s password protected.

Oh, and I’ve settled on a password for the protected galleries. It’s the name of our female Persian cat (the skanky one; not the other two) so anyone who knows us will know what that is. You don’t need a SmugMug account to access these protected galleries — you just enter the password at the time. If you’d like to see the protected galleries but don’t know the cat’s name, let me know (email, IM, whatever…).

Finally: as you’d expect, SmugMug supports RSS so you can keep up to date with new postings. Two feeds are probably most interesting: new galleries and new photos. All six supported feeds are shown in the “available feeds” link at the bottom of my SmugMug home page.

This really sucks.

Someone complained that some of their photos from Flickr got ripped off because they were sold in print form without credit or payment to the photographer.

Flickr’s Yahoo’s response?

Flickr is not a venue for to you harass, abuse, impersonate, or intimidate others. If we receive a valid complaint about your conduct, we will send you a warning or terminate your account.

Really, really, stupid.

I truly hope that Flickr Yahoo apologises for this incredible lapse in judgement. I love their service, and happily pay my money each year for a ‘Pro’ subscription, but this sort of behavior is totally out of line.

There’s nothing that Flickr (or any online service, for that matter) can do to prevent your photos being downloaded and uses in ways other than you’d like. If you don’t want your photos used, don’t post them online.

But to censor discussion about the misuse it is completely wrong. Wrong enough that I’d consider taking my annual subscription money elsewhere, actually.

My favorite album right now is Daimonion by Project Pitchfork.

Daimonion: An inner voice conceived as partaking of the nature of a demon.

Sweet!