librarygrrrl.net

Oh why oh why has Flickr forsaken its Old Skool users?

Flickr got purchased by Yahoo a while ago.  Good for some things (stability) and bad for others - like the fact that we now have to sign in to Flickr using a Yahoo ID.

So the problem with that?  My long-standing Yahoo ID? I used it to create a test Flickr account.  So I had to create a new Yahoo ID yesterday to merge with my Flickr account.  I found an ID name that actually didn’t suck (unlike a lot of other people - yay me!). I followed Flickr’s rules.  I successfully merged my accounts!  Hooray!

Until….. today.  I got to work and signed into my new Yahoo/Flickr account.  Ooops - sorry, ID not recognized.   Damn.  So I waited a few minutes, then tried again.  No go.  And then a few minutes later I tried one more time. This time it let me in.  Later, I tried to get back in, and the same thing happened. (If you’re counting, I’m now up to 4 failed logins on this new Yahoo ID).

Tonight I came home (to our new fast FOIS from Verizon - swanky!) and tried to get into Flickr.  Guess what happened?  Now I can no longer reset my password and my account has been deactivated due to too many attempts to login incorrectly.

I’m so frustrated. So annoyed.  SOOOO ticked off.  And judging from the Flickr forums, I’m not the only one.

So I sent off a frantic message to Flickr, asking them to PLEASE un-merge my accounts, let me delete my test Flickr account that’s tied to my old-skool Yahoo account, and re-merge using my old-skool Yahoo account (which has always worked reliably).

Now I could just sit here and stew about how frustrating this is for me. But you know what?  I’m an incredibly savvy internet user.   I’ve been through this kind of thing before.  I know patience is important in cases like this, even when I’m annoyed as all get-out.

But not all users are like me.  There are a lot of other folks out there who are going to try to do this who will get so caught up in the obstacles that Yahoo throws at people that they’ll just quit.  And that will be a sad thing, because then Flickr/Yahoo will have their photos held hostage, and these people who get caught in the vicious circle that I’m in will have just one more reason to hate using computers and the internet.

Flickr lost a lot of my respect today.  I’m going to investigate a few other services (does anyone else remember the Fotolog debacle of 2004?) but will probably just install Gallery2 on my web server and host my photos here if I can’t get this resolved by the Ides of March (Flickr’s drop-dead date for merging accounts). If that has to happen, I’ll miss all of my friends on Flickr a lot - especially the Basenji boys, my friends who share private photos of their children there, and all the other folks I’ve gotten to “know” through this service.

Let’s hope that they can figure out how to make this work for me and for all those others who are locked out of Flickr right now (and thus can’t participate in the forums).

Grrrrr… I’ll keep you all posted on how (if) this resolves.

[tag]flickr, yahoo[/tag]

No no, not the coffee. I spent last weekend in Seattle for the ALA Midwinter meeting. After praying a little half-heartedly for a blizzard to strand me on the East Coast, I sucked it up and realized that a.) I actually really tend to enjoy the conferences once I get there and b.) I wanted to see my friends from … well, everywhere! Unfortunately, I only ran into one of my LSU Ex-Pats buddies since I didn’t get in till almost midnight Friday (we normally have dinner/drinks on Friday evening). However, I did see Beth and lots of folks from Swarthmore (although somehow I missed out on talking with Meg more… boo hiss!) And then I got to catch up with all my friends from WSS - Kelly and Piper and Jane and Heather and Jennifer and Diana and Jennifer and Rebecca and Cynthia and on and on and on. I can’t believe how much fun I have with these women - people I never would have met if it hadn’t been for the American Library Association and its annoying requirements that anyone who is on a committee must attend both the annual and midwinter meetings. So over the course of many years, if you stick around in the same section, you get to know people. And I like these people - a lot! I also like how each year someone new shows up and gets sucked into the fold. I’m hoping that happened this year with a couple of people.

Besides being in Seattle and walking around a lot, I ate some good food, went to a bona fide lesbian bar (with the WSS folks, even though they’re definitely not all playing on that team), and spent a lot of time in Pike’s Place Market trying to avoid the impending headaches that invariably come when I’m in places like that (I wasn’t successful - thank god for figuring out what OTC drugs keep my headaches from turning down the twisted path into migraine-land.)

Lest you think that all I did was socialize, I’ll have you know that I had a ton of meetings to attend, and spent several hours on the exhibit floor. Of course, I managed to mostly pick up advance reader’s copies of 18 (yes, eighteen) books this conference. I think that’s a record for me, and I’m not sure I’m completely proud of it. (My dratted cell phone won’t let me send the photo I took in my hotel room.  Suffice to say that the photo of all 18 books is funny). But hey - free books! I’ve already finished three of them (Summer at Tiffany, Bad Monkeys, and The Knitting Circle) and started the fourth this mornings (A Perfect Mess). I love getting to read books before they’re released to the general public. Often times I pick up books I wouldn’t give a second thought to in the bookstore and end up enjoying them immensely and passing them on to people I think would like them. Water for Elephants was one I picked up last year and passed around to about 10 folks at work.

So this year I’m trying to figure out how I can finagle going to BookExpo America. It’s right at the end of May in NYC and doesn’t cost all that much for a librarian’s one-day pass. I’m thinking that even if they don’t give out the number of advance reader’s copies that they do at ALA, it would be an educational experience.  Have any of you ever attended?  What were your experiences?

My assessment of Seattle: thumbs-up!  I’d go there again in a heartbeat and would love to see a lot more of the city than the area I could during this conference.

Success on one of my initial resolutions for the new year - to finish some of the decorating in the house. Over the long weekend I buckled down, did a lot of maintenance (mostly on the blog, but that has to count too…), figured out where to hang our artwork, and then I HUNG THE ARTWORK. It definitely feels good to have all our pictures hung on the walls.

The other major thing that happened on the decorating front is that we finished the dining room decorating. After Christmas we made a pilgrimage to IKEA in Stoughton with friend T & B and ended up purchasing a dining room rug. It’s simply perfect for the room - a neutral tan base with lots and lots of small strips in multiple rich colors (maroon, navy, dark green, etc.) Other than that, we’d been waiting for a chest of drawers with a mirror attached to it to be shipped from my folks, and it showed up last Friday. Amy and T unpacked it and brought it into the house. We’d already decided where to put it, so they set it all up and rearranged the room. It looks just great!

This first photo is the view of the dining room that I see each morning when I come downstairs. Kitchen is to the right, living room at the end of the room. Pictures on the wall are by Katsuyuki Nishijima.

Two views of the dining room - the left is from the living room looking at the stairwell (with a dog head violating the photo…). The print in the stairwell is also by Katsuyuki Nishijima. The photo on the right is from the kitchen doorway. You can see the rug quite clearly in this photo, as well as the two little girl prints my mom got in Japan in the 1960s when she was a flight attendant for what was then called Northwest Orient Airlines. Arent’ the prints and the rug pretty? You can also see my neighbor’s very silly tarp-covered woodpile outside the window if you look hard enough (it’s green). It’s very silly because the tarp is ostensibly to “protect the wood from getting wet” but all the wood we ever used to heat the house when I was a kid was left out with no ill effects.

I also did some work in my office, but that’s a huge project for another day or long weekend. Seriously - I have a “stuff” issue and I’m really good at making a lot of stuff fit into a small space. The only problem with that is that I don’t always remember what “stuff” is in those small spaces. Ah well, I’m sure I’ll survive somehow.

This weekend I’m heading to Seattle for the American Library Association midwinter meeting. Should be fun. Blogging will be light until I return (I’m NOT bringing a laptop with me). So I leave you with a photo of my adorable little dog, Maggie. It was taken a couple of weeks ago, atop Mt. Holyoke in western Massachusetts.

So if you were to head over to my LibraryThing account and check out all the books I’ve read recently, you might notice that the past 4 books I read (of the 8 I’ve read this year so far) are all by Christopher Moore.

My heartfelt thanks must go to my best friend, who sent me copies of Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal and Island of the Sequined Love Nun about a year ago. I devoured them and immediately picked up Practical Demonkeeping to keep on with the theme.  And then I must have been distracted by something, for I didn’t read any more of his books until earlier this month.

In the past five days, I’ve read:

• The Stupidest Angel: A Heartwarming Tale of Christmas Terror
• The Lust Lizard of Melancholy Cove
• Fluke: Or, I Know Why the Winged Whale Sings
• A Dirty Job

Oh my god is this man hilarious!  The second two - Fluke and A Dirty Job - I enjoyed more than the others (even Lamb).  I think it’s because the scenarios are much closer to home than the rest of his oeuvre.  Fluke tells the story of a whale researcher trying to figure out why humpback whales sing, and A Dirty Job tells the story of a man who becomes a Death Merchant, moving souls along from dying people to the people who need them next.  I suspect my love of the Death book stems partly from my love of Terry Pratchett’s Death books too - nothing better than knowing that Death isn’t some scary non-entity, but rather is an anthropmorphic personification or a second-hand shopkeeper.

Anyhow, if you want to read some really absurdly funny books, I can’t recommend Christopher Moore highly enough.  Your local public library should have some of his books, and if they don’t, you should ask them to purchase them.  Of course, you could also head to your local bookstore to get them.  Whatever floats your boat.

I’ve been unhappy with the pages on my sidebar for quite some time, wanting to hide some of them and only link to them from my “about me” page. It doesn’t look like I can do that without some poking around in the php files of my blog, and I’m just not up for that. So instead I’m moving a few pages (I’m into, knitting, wishlist) into posts and will update the “about me” page accordingly. Feel free to ignore the next few posts…

Edited to add: Okay, apparently something is going wrong with moving those pages to posts since I end up having to go poking around in my MySQL database to delete the posts in order to get the site to load. This stinks. I wonder if it’s the new WYSIWIG editor I’m using. I’ll try deactivating that and working in straight html code to see if that clears things up. Wish me luck.

Edited again: Well, nothing really worked, so I ended up deleting the wishlist page, cutting and pasting the “I’m into” page into the about page, and cleaning up the knitting page.  Not my ideal solution, but it’ll do for now.  I also renamed all the pages, but am not sure if I like that or not.  Harrumph.  I’m in a wishy-washy blog space today.