18 Jul 2007
by ryanin Ann Arbor, Entertainment, Flickr
Woot! Art Fair Bingo returns for the Ann Arbor Art Fair(s). ($DEITY forbid it be one, unified art fair.)
Art Fair Bingo is a wonderful tradition wherein you, the discerning resident/exile/art-lover voluntarily go to Art Fair and photograph people or things on the bingo card. There are no prizes aside from the admiration of those of us who couldn’t be paid enough to trudge through that idiotic soup of people. Or soup of idiot people.. I forget.
You know, being from Holland, you think I’d be used to huge festivals. Tulip Time was (or is) one of the largest festivals in the country and frankly makes Art Fair look like a cute bongo festival, except one where the bongos have been replaced by iPhones broadcasting Jack Costanzo tracks over $300 speakers.
If you’d like to play Art Fair Bingo and relish your schadenfreude as you watch the usual suspects waddle around downtown Ann Arbor, go nuts.
Art Fair Bingo
19 Jun 2007
by ryanin Flickr, News, Web
Backstory: J– has decided to start a business. She’s not quitting her day job or anything, but tossing her spare time into a new venture; henna. For those not in the know, henna is the mostly-Indian (as in the sub-Saharan continent) practice of staining the skin with a natural paste. Some of the design are incredibly complicated and complex, but J– has picked it up in an incredibly short time. Despite my family’s, er, chilly reception to her skills, I and everyone else she’s worked on has been impressed and have encouraged her to keep going.
So, with the help of her friend, she’s started booking gigs. As with all entrepreneurial endeavors, J– has to have a web presence, which is about all I can contribute. So, fire up Dreamweaver, Firefox, and TopStyle and start hacking away at her site, Fat Cat Henna.
Three hours into it, and beating my head against my desk over rounded corners in CSS and it occurs to me I’m going at this all wrong. Other far smarter people have tread this ground already and publish a pretty kick-ass product. It’s called WordPress.
So, off to WordPress we go, download, unzip, upload, configure and whadda yah know, we got ourselves a Hello World website. In slightly under 20 minutes. J– digs around the following day and finds a few templates that she likes and brings them home via thumb drive. Download, unzip, upload, configure and whadda yah know, we got ourselves a solid framework, a template that’s 90% to where she wants it (although not enough green yet).
So, aside from this post and some chores, we’ve spent the last 2 hours or so tweaking the site. Change some CSS, alter a couple graphics, copy and paste some content, upload some photos and whadda yah know, we got ourselves an honest to gosh, fully functional website.
The To Do list is short: Need to build and publish a Flickr slideshow, tweak the template a bit more (no blogging going on), and maybe a hack to allow her to publish gig dates without a hassle, but not a heck of a lot.
Did we design the site; I guess not, but I do know this. For a small business (of 1) with a $0 design budget, a $0 web management budget, and 2 days until her first solo gig, WordPress got it done.
31 Jan 2007
by ryanin Flickr, Technology, Uhm... yeah
You are the CEO of an online service, say in the media sharing space. One of your competitors is completing the final stages of merging into the larger company that purchased them over a year ago. Some customers (many of whom receive the service for free) are complaining about new limitations placed on the service. These limitations do not significantly impact the service provided, although the one the does was detailed long ago. This limitation is that users must use the existing, easy to obtain, authentication system of the acquiring company. Opting into this authentication system has been available for over a year and was detailed as eventually becoming the only method for signing into the service.
Now, all this said, if you’re the CEO of the competitor, what’s the best way to exploit this situation? That’s right, make it seem far, far worse than it is. Thomas Hawk, CEO of Zoomr, has done a brilliant job of generating a ton of traffic to his blog by detailign the woes of a small subset of Flickr users as they complete the integration into Yahoo. I’m not linking to his post because, frankly, he’s link baiting. Yes, some Flickr users are upset over the changes. But, with a major move like this, there are going to be some upset people. I personnally integrated my account into my existing Yahoo account (which I use for nothing but Flickr and a couple Yahoo groups) and it was dead easy; took under a minute.
Hawk’s getting more press because Scoble linked to him, further stirring the tempest in this teapot. The digg thread on this swings in both directions, but the fact that this is being driven by a direct competitor isn’t getting very much attention. The submission is at least questionable, possibly spam.
Digg – Flickr Users Are Mad as Hell About Today’s Yahoo News
17 Jan 2007
by ryanin Flickr, Signs of the Horsemen, Uhm... yeah
Dear Ann Arbor photographers,
It snowed. We get it.
Thanks,
Everyone Else
Flickr: Photos tagged with annarbor
07 Nov 2006
by ryanin Flickr, Made Me Laugh, Signs of the Horsemen, Uhm... yeah
Wow, I had no idea how close to annihilation we came this past week. How close, you ask?
How about a marching band forming Star Trek logos with Star Trek actors in the stadium. That’s close.
Photographic Proof!
Whew. (Oh, and Patrick Stewart was in the stadium; Royal Shakespeare was in town and he guest conducted.) God help us he even said “Make it so.” Perhaps all the Ann Arbor snootiness and entitlement somehow canceled out all that concentrated geekiness, nerdiness, and Star Trek fanboy, helping us to narrowly escape total destruction as the Earth herself would have reached up to consume all that social awkwardness and self abuse.
29 Sep 2005
by ryanin Flickr
The foster family from which we adopted Froggie sent us some photos of the mutt when he was just a pup (well, a pup under 15 pounds anyway). I’ve added them to the beginning of the Froggie Flickr Fotoset.
19 Apr 2005
by ryanin Flickr
Cool things starting to happen at Flickr now that they have Yahoo! money to burn. They’ve doubled the free account upload amount and doubled the number of photos in the stream. Pro accounts got an extension on their payments (basically doubling their contract lives), and new Pro accounts get more uploads (2 gigs) at half the price.
Very cool. Now if they do video, we can stop hearing about Google Video.
Link
17 Apr 2005
by ryanin Flickr
We’re back and I’ve posted some photos of Grand Haven. We walked the pier on Saturday night. The weather was perfect, the people were out, the boats were out–it really make me homesick.
Anyway, photos this-a-way.
11 Apr 2005
by ryanin Flickr
I’m quickly approaching the parity point on this, but one more. We have cats. Here are pictures on those cats.
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