Paying attention?

If you rehttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gifally wanted people to pay attention to all the announcements made in the train and subway station, you'd put messages like this over the PA systems. People would listen to see what was being said for once!

Reuters: Announcer sacked over spoof messages

Is there any Blogger/iPhoto integration yet?

I am still searching for an easy way to post to this (and my other) blogs with pictures from iPhoto. There are ways to do it through flckr and some other kludges but no simple use of third party products to accomplish this. I'm trying out MarsEdit right now to see if it will do ANYTHING.

The above picture was uploaded with that and it was easy (just dragged from iphoto to the Media Manager) though it looks like its being hosted by google, not flckr or my site. What I'd really like is to have it FTP to my server and post the blog with a link to the picture via Blogger. I guess this is more complicated than I thought!

LinkedIn and Guy Kawaski

I've just started using LinkedIn which has been an interesting way to find old friends from work and school. I'm hopeful that it will be useful in hiring as well. You can check out my profile.

Guy Kawaski, known best (to me at least) as a Mac Evangalist has a great post on additional uses for it.

A Late Christmas

We had some family over this evening for a very nice post-Christmas gathering. It was the first time we'd all been together in a long time. It's hard these days with our schedules and the lack of cheap international flights (Max!).

Ithaca Friends

Evonne and I went out to an Ithaca College Alumni event tonight. We had a great time seeing friends and went out with them to dinner after. Click the picture for the full size version.

New way to Photoblog?

So shortly after ranting about an inability to post photos from iPhoto, I found a new site that may just be the thing. I used Tabblo.com to create the collage below. They have a iPhoto plugin to send pix directly to their site and integration with Blogger. Now, the integration leaves something to be desired, but its a new site and I'll give them the benefit of the doubt for now. I can't seem to change the blog setup once its set, so i may have to create a couple of accounts: one for each blog. That's a one time thing and easy enough to do. Keep an eye on the kids' sites to see if it gets used!

Jack & the Flowers

Jack has a thing for flowers. He starts out smelling them, then moved on to eating them. It sure made him smell nice though. ... See my Tabblo>

Trying out is hard to do

I've been looking for an easy way to push our pictures up to the kids' blogs with little success. I don't care if its even Mac or PC based, I just want to put a picture up with some text under it and have it be easy.

We use iPhoto on the Mac at home to organize our pictures and typically would like to post from there. We usually organize a bunch of pictures at a time into a folder and then export it to whatever the upload method du jour is. Sometimes we use the clunky interface Blogger has to attach pix, other times I upload them to my server manually and copy/paste the urls into the posts manually but that's a PITA.

So now I'm trying out ecto again. I'd tried it before, but can't remember why I didn't continue. There are Windows and Mac clients available which is appealing. There is also iphoto and iTunes integration. i just clicked the iPhoto button at the top of this post and it pulled up thumbnails from iPhoto and a list of all my folders. You can select multiple pictures at once to and it even remembers what folder I was in last, which is nice. I click the Import button, and ... nothing. I was expecting to see my photo inline, but no. The Preview button shows me there's nothing here either.

Damn, isn't there some quote about me being doomed to repeat history? Well, I stooped to looking at help and found this in the Image and Attachment section.

This feature is only available for weblog systems that use the MovableType API (this includes BlogWare, Drupal, MovableType, Nucleus, TypePad, WordPress).

How hard would it be to move over to one of those now? :-b....
Too bad too, because I'm liking this ecto thing. Its got some cool stuff in it but at the moment, it doesn't seem worth it. Well, until someone comes up with an easy way to post pix, that doesn't involve three programs and url contortions, I'll do it the slow and painful way. Can't someone just write a iPhoto Plugin for this???

Footnote: I ended up posting this via Blogger after Ecto gave me some parsing error and wanted me to check the console log for the reason. No thanks.