Yule Heibel’s Post Studio © 2003-2008

Meandering in space

September 26, 2006 at 8:13 pm | In web | 5 Comments

Lost? I just logged on to my writely account, and found that the vast majority of my documents are gone… Very disappointing. It seems the service had some kind of massive consolidation / switch-over with email addresses, and in the process managed to lose lots of data. At least that’s what it looks like from here… [update: I was able to retrieve the missing documents by logging on (almost by fluke) to my old account and manually transferring them to my new account. I sent a message to writely that I consider the lack of guidance a flaw in usability interface, and had a message back from the service as well. Look, it's a great service, and it's free; but one does need good UI, otherwise people get ...anxious.]
Luckily I do have most of it backed up in some other way, but probably not safely — most of it is backed up in some digital, web-based way. And if writely can lose all my stuff, who’s to say that gmail won’t do the same?

Jeepers, does this mean going back to the horrifyingly dull 1.0 method of backing documents up to CDs? How disappointing… [update: good grief, I installed Word on the machine. But I'm still using writely...]
I’m too busy to mess with stuff like that…

Really.

Really busy.

But with time enough to say that I recently came across the most amazing blog, We Make Money Not Art. Brilliant, thought-provoking stuff, as well as fun stuff. For example, this entry describes a recently developed umbrella (by Pileus) that takes photos (camera mounted on top of umbrella) and immediately uploads these pics to Flickr (”with some context tags,” it says — perhaps geotags?). There is a control in the handle’s grip that allows for browsing, and judging from the picture, it seems the photos are projected onto the inside of the umbrella…? Whoa, just be careful stepping off the curb…

Our drought continues as expected, but by November our rainy time will (I hope) be going full drizzle, and thinking of those short winter days with rain made this umbrella look very attractive…

Today, We Make Money Not Art pointed to a YouTube link for Hungarian commercials from the 80s. WTF, you say? Well, that was my reaction, too — but I haven’t actually had time to view any of them. So, this link is for Maria at alembic, who also is far too busy to waste time on Hungarian commercials from the 80s, but who might, if she does venture to click through on one, be able to tell me what it’s trying to sell us!

And from Swen’s Weblog (also found very much by chance), I learned that there’s a spyware free Real Player version available from the BBC, and that Swen has figured out how to download Real Audio Streams and convert Real Audio files to MP3 format.

When I have some time, I plan to follow his directions and learn how to do this, too. And then I might even find the time to listen to one or two…