November 16th, 2007, 6 Comments »
I agree that record companies are mostly evil. Still, I’ve always felt a little sheepish about downloading music without paying the artist. Often discovering a musician or band will lead to buying their CDs and attending their shows, but not always.
Plus, don’t even get me started on an adolescence of music taped off the radio and my Dad’s records.
So, how to assuage this musical guilt? I figured I could send five bucks to some of these artists I’ve never paid. Then I figured I could start a site documenting that process. Then I figured I could invite other guilty music fans to do the same thing.
Four hours later, I came up with DearRockers.org. Here’s the official spiel:
Many of us own music that we didn’t pay for. We don’t feel guilty about shafting the record company, but what about the musicians themselves?
Here’s how it works:
1. Pick a musician
2. Write them a letter
3. Scan or photograph the letter and send it to us
4. Mail off the letter along with $5
5. Enjoy your new, guilt-free life
That’s it, in a nutshell. I suppose it’s a bit of an homage to Post Secret. Subsequent to launch, Kirsten pointed me to MusicNeutral, which kind of does the same thing without the letters and fun and with transaction fees. The site is brand new, and only has nine letters, but I’m hoping to get more.
If you want to assuage a little guilt, please consider submitting a letter. On top of the good karma, you also get:
- A link back to your blog, website, Flickr gallery of vintage pants, whatever.
- If you submit before the end of 2007, a chance to win an iPod Shuffle. Your chances would currently be 1 in 8–the first two letters are mine, and I won’t be buying myself another iPod.
Thanks to the friends who answered my pleading call to submit a few seed letters and provide feedback on the idea–264 karma points for each of you.
Apparently the Maffinator mentioned Dear Rockers yesterday in his weekly tech column on the CBC, but I’ve yet to hear it.
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October 22nd, 2007, No Comments »
Julie just spent five days at Fontana Del Papa, a cooking school outside of Rome (booked via the excellent folks at Responsible Travel). That’s kind of an anti-holiday for me, but she had a great time. She took a bunch of photos, and here are three of my favourites:
She also spent a day in Rome, and some time in Barcelona and the south of France. I quite like this photo of seats awaiting Catholic bums in the Vatican.
It’s really a photo-bloggy kind of day today, isn’t it?
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October 2nd, 2007, No Comments »
I read about TiltViewer, a sexy photo viewer on del.icio.us. It displays Flickr photos, sorted by interestingness, in a three-dimensional black void that you can manipulate. The folks at Airtight Interactive built this bit of webby fun, and have a good attitude about it:
Does a 3D UI give more functionality than the equivalent 2D interface? No, but its certainly a lot cooler! Part of the motivation to build this was to explore ways to make 3D interfaces simple and intuitive.
Make sure you read about the controls. They’re not super intuitive (we don’t necessarily expect to use the keyboard)–the app could do with a little ‘?’ icon that users could click for pop-up instructions.
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September 28th, 2007, 3 Comments »
As I mentioned, we’ve had a couple of days of rain here in Malta. The first was an intense over-night thunderstorm. The next morning I snapped a couple of photos. The first is of the sodden fields behind our house:
And this is the rain in our pool. I took it while strategically folded under the patio table, to keep my camera relatively dry. I’m pretty happy with how this one turned out:
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July 29th, 2007, No Comments »
From our back patio, we can see the Ta’ Pinu Basilica, a big, modern cathedral and popular pilgrimage destination.
Behind Ta’ Pinu, there’s a rarity on Gozo–a big hill without any buildings. That’s because it features the 14 Stations of the Cross along a winding path to the top. It’s a lovely (if sweaty) walk, and the view from the top is one of the best on the island.
Being in a photographic mood. I set myself a challenge to take just three photos of each of the fourteen statues, and pick the best ones for a little photo project.
The result is a mixed bag–some are decent while others are pretty lame. I think this is the best of the bunch:
The other problem is that we only saw 13 stations. I gather that the first station is, in fact, inside the basilica.
You can see a little slideshow of the 13 photos I chose, as well as a set of the rejects and a few random photos I took along the way.
You can see small photos of each of the whole statues. Oddly, this isn’t on Gozo. Some folks created a series of exact replicas of the statues in Australia.
At the top of the hill, there’s a really cool amphitheatre. The top of the hill is also home to zillions of snails each autumn. I’m not sure why they prefer the slightly higher altitude, but you can see their little shells everywhere:
They also end up on the statues, to occasional creepy effect.
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July 28th, 2007, No Comments »
It’s festa or ‘feast’ week here in Gharb. What’s a festa? It’s a little difficult to explain, and I plan to write up my observations next week, once the festivities are over. In the meantime, here’s a decent introduction.
We’ve been to a couple of the processions that occur during the week, and I’ve been taking a bunch of photos. I’m not a particular skilled photographer, and unpracticed at night photos, so they’re kind of a blurry, grainy mess. I do think they kind of capture the spirit of the event, though. Here are three of my favourites:
Things come to a head tomorrow, on Sunday, so I may add some photos to that set.
UPDATE: I did add a few more photos from Saturday night’s festivities. This is the weirdest one:
Let me explain. Many of the installations have kinetic elements–mostly there are spinning rings of fire and so forth. This one was something a little different.
It took me a little while to figure it out, but it’s a depiction of Mary’s visitation to Elizabeth. That’s Mary in green, and she started at the left side of the street. You can see the edge of the frame she’s gliding along if you click through to see a bigger version of the photo.
I shouldn’t say ‘gliding’, because her path was far more jittery than that. After all, she was propelled by gun powder. She made it to the other side (and impressive feat in itself) and pretty much burned out.
I was disappointed that Elizabeth didn’t have a visible John the Baptist embryo in her fiery womb. As per the Bible, it could have leaped with joy when Mary crossed Elizabeth’s threshold.
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July 17th, 2007, 28 Comments »
Duane emailed with an interesting piece on stolen photos, attribution and the practicalities of Flickr and Creative Commons licensing:
While I usually try to use my own photographs, I have on occasion found suitable Flickr photos taken by others and used those. For anyone who has tried to do that, you will know that many photos nowadays on Flickr have no license associated with them, and instead show “All Rights Reserved”, which obviously means that those photos cannot be used in any capacity.
Is that obvious? There are millions of photos on Flickr that are listed as ‘All Rights Reserved’ but also feature the ‘Blog This’ button. Here’s a randomly selected example. Aren’t those two ideas contradictory?
I wondered about how this applied to my own site, and arrived at this somewhat Machiavellian conclusion. If someone has a ‘Blog This’ button on their photo, that’s tacit permission to use it on my blog. I always link back to the original photo, and try to pick CC photos, but frankly I pick the best photo, regardless of license. I’ve only ever had one complaint, and that’s when I forgot to link back. Maybe I should also include a text reference back in the ever-growing metadata at the end of each post?
Am I just being self-serving, or is that a fair interpretation?
Duane also calls up Mike Linksvayer, Vice President of Creative Commons, and asks him a few questions about usage and attribution. It’s a short interview, and worth listening to.
UPDATE: Ironically, the photo I just added to this post is (by the very talented Thomas Hawk) has a CC license, but no “Blog This” button.
UPDATE #2: I searched around the Flickr forums, and there seems to be a great deal of confusion about the ‘Blog This’ versus ‘All Rights Reserved’ issue. I’m none the wiser, but will endeavour to stick with CC-licensed photos to avoid the issue.
28 Comments »
July 1st, 2007, 5 Comments »
Tonight we’re going to a Canada Day dinner hosted by the Canadian-Gozitan (Gozitans are people from Gozo) Society. It should be fun.
In 2001, we celebrated Canada Day in a slightly dodgy Austrailian bar in Dublin (the city didn’t have any Canadian bars that we knew of). The Hip was on the stereo, the Molson flowed and Don Cherry was on the big screen. It was a tad surreal, but a good time was had by all.
In celebration of Canada Day, I cruised through my Flickr photos and found some that felt particularly Canadian:
There are more after the jump.
Read more…
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April 30th, 2007, 3 Comments »
Our hotel is right next to the Royal Dublin Society, commonly known around these parts as the RDS. The RDS is pretty much like Vancouver’s PNE, or any large exhibition grounds. Yesterday we saw a sign advertising a Supreme Cat Show at the RDS, and had to pop by to watch the feline strangeness.
In truth, it was less strange than I hoped. I did manage to get a few photos (as always, click for larger versions).
These cats just shouldn’t be:
I like the alarmed look on this cat’s face (and the creepy-looking kid at right):
This isn’t a cat photo, but what do you suppose this woman has in her Coke bottle?
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