Yea! Another week of Learn 2.0 under my belt. I can almost hear my MP3 player from here! Though there is nothing this week that really breaks new ground for me, I’m sure that I can turn it into a record-length blog posting anyway.

I had a Flickr account even before they were swallowed by Yahoo, but I don’t remember my login. Fortunately, my Yahoo login allowed me to quickly get up and running again. To test, I stuck a picture of one of my sons out there http://www.flickr.com/photos/8722708@N05/534679833/ without much trouble. I will probably restrict access to much of my collection to friends and family, once I start to really populate the site.

I found Tom’s pictures. Clearly, hunting is a part of his life he pursues passionately. I’ve personally found that catch-and-release doesn’t work nearly as well with geese as it does with fish. Either way, I have a pact with the wild kingdom – they leave me alone, and I will only pursue them for food by proxy. For example, Mrs. Paul and that Gordon’s guy do my fishing for me. I can give the end product the hot oil treatment, but all the processing between swimming and cooking belongs to someone else.

On the subject of skateboarding, I can only say “Tony who?” Dude, I lost interest in skateboards at the speed in which the lamination on my first driver’s license cooled. As a child – as a younger child, anything with wheel was either transportation and my chance to escape and explore, or it was a Tonka/Hot Wheels-type toy which offered a chance for gratuitous violence and destruction. Once I had my driver’s license, I was ready to combine the two. I accumulated more cycling/skating miles than every other member of my family combined – ten-fold – before I got my license. In Mississippi, you could (can?) get your license at fifteen, and it was a watershed moment in my life. Okay, we hit some kind of shed, I was really going too fast to make out the details. One of the truisms I hold dear in life is that it doesn’t matter how much fun it is to jump something on a skateboard – it’s infinitely more fun to jump it with a 1979 Dodge Magnum XE with bad ball joints and the front torsions cranked all the way up.

So what would I search for at Flickr? Well, one thing I found was a picture of a restored 1968 Lincoln Continental. http://www.flickr.com/photos/25955360@N00/404961403/ It’s the same year, model, and color as the one that I drove back in the early ‘90’s. It lacks some of the character marks (surface rust) that mine had, but it’s very close. It was an incredibly comfortable, quiet, smooth, and thirsty car, consuming a gallon of premium (leaded) for roughly every five miles of forward progress. Sitting behind the wheel looking out over the hood was like standing in the endzone of a football field (or so I’m told – see previous posts about my lack of sports knowledge/interest). The hood seemed to stretch forever in front of you. The image would have been heightened by a goal post hood ornament, but for 1968, Lincoln didn’t put hood ornaments on the Continental in an attempt to reduce the sparkly pieces of the car and make it more “European.” “Really?” I thought, when I read that in an old automotive magazine. There was nothing faintly European about the Continental (despite its name), except that its turning circle was about the size of Western Europe and its aerodynamics were similar to the Berlin Wall. Oh, and cornering in it at any speed would make it lean like that famous Italian tower. (Whose idea was it to build a 6000-pound car with no sway bars?)

I was proud of my Lincoln. Some days, I was just proud that it ran and I could (sorta) afford to feed it. Looking around Flickr for cars I used to own and cars I’ve wanted to own, I can see that many people are proud of their cars. Sometimes this is for good reason – there are 79,000 results if you search for “Ferrari”. Sometimes for no reason whatsoever – there are 187 results if you search for “AMC Pacer”.

I stopped searching after a while because I was testing my wireless provider’s “high-speed” data connection and it… well, high-speed is a relative term, so I think they are safe from a legal standpoint. (“Now you can download from the Internet at speeds that rival semaphore…”) I’m just glad I’m not reliant on them for connectivity 95% of the time.

I love Creative Commons. I think that if anyone should make money from the pictures that I take, or the elegant prose that I create, as exampled here, it should be me. However, I am definitely an amateur photographer. I have a friend who speaks passionately about f/stops, shudder speeds, film speed, lighting and composition, focal length, etc. I know how to turn my camera on and which button to press to make it take a picture. I can zoom in and out, and I know how to set it for night mode to spy on my neighbors. I have learned that the term “white balance” doesn’t refer to a racial integration issue.

I’ll have to wait to get my supervisor’s approval for my images before I can post them. They will be part of the next post to this blog. I promise.

Learning online, for me, is as comfortable as learning offline but is much more convenient. Learning online generally is more flexible in the hours that you can participate, as opposed to structured, classroom instruction with its set hours and outrageous textbook prices. I have offered to help someone (name withheld) who has not advanced beyond the first couple of weeks, but they declined.

RE: Life.exe: My particular build of Life.exe keeps throwing up error messages about missing .dll files – money.dll, time.dll, etc., Sanity.dll keeps crashing the system, which takes forever to restart, and the work-for-a-living module consumes too much of the system resources. Some people claim that this is an optional module, but I have found that the system doesn’t run without it unless you happen to have one of the rare Life.exe Silver Spoon Editions. While these sound like what most people would want, the downside to running the Silver Spoon Edition is that when it crashes, all the news media are alerted. They then want to debug the system in public forums. Suddenly everything that was ever linked to your system at any time in the past is fair game for criticism, and a host of people are second-guessing where the breakpoints should have been. Still, it’s better to run Live.exe as ‘root’ than as a ‘user’ or even ‘anonymous’. These days, trying to running Life.exe as ‘anonymous’ really removes all your effective rights, and we don’t even want to get into the issues of running it as ‘guest.’

So, until next week or I get pictures approved, I’m outa here. Have a good weekend, everyone.