Marcus Hamaker is The Sleepy Geek

Last night I was out and started to receive large numbers of text messages. I couldn’t look at my phone all the time and I wasn’t sure what it was until we were on our way home. Strangely enough I started to received updates from Twitter. It was really late when we got home so off to bed I go leaving the investigation until this morning. Well sure enough when I login to Twitter I see a message saying “SMS Alert: Canadian SMS delivery is now enabled for Bell Mobility subscribers.” Well that’s great news but I am not with Bell! Their blog post regarding the deal can be read here: http://blog.twitter.com/2009/02/for-whom-bell-texts.html#links

It seems that their deal reached with Bell has opened up text messaging with Rogers as well and I can only assume if that happened it was a mistake that opened it up with Telus and Fido. So today I hope I am living the good life and we’ll see how long it lasts. They probably opened up all the texting because they don’t have a way to desciminate between different carriers… but I am sure they are working on that if costs are concerned :)

PS: Here is another perspective on the subject: http://mashable.com/2009/02/20/twitter-canada-sms-2/

I just spent about an hour on Facebook updating statuses, uploading a couple of pictures and looking around to see what others are up to. Maybe it’s just me, but in 2009 I expect more from a UI. It seems that when I log in I end up on a page with updates from my friends but it is never clear if all my friends updates are there.

In the past week I have been trying to spend less time worrying about the blog and just posting when something comes to mind. I am trying not to strategize as much and just post what I am thinking of when I feel like it. That has allowed me to followup on Facebook and Twitter a little more. So I have been watching for the better part of a week. What I have seen is that after some digging today, there have been a dozen pictures that I have missed from a friend because it never showed on the main screen. Facebook seems more inclined to let me know when everyone changes their profile picture instead.

So not to bitch and then run around without a solution… I think they need to allow us as the user to choose what we would like to see on our main page. I don’t need to see profile picture updates, however when someone uploads an album it would be nice to see it. Don’t think that I didn’t check the screen that is supposed to do this. I have all the features turned on and some of them just seem to get missed.

This weeks news is that Facebook reached 175 million users. The idea is amazing, don’t get me wrong. But there is no way that there are 175 million active users and I wonder how many people feel like I do.

I was looking at the page yesterday and it was way too “busy” or cluttered. It’s sometimes hard to walk that line between tools that make the site more effective and tools that make the site over bearing. Well I have decided to remove 2 things from the main page. The live stream is gone from the right widget bar and the Friend Feed submission box is gone from the posts.

I have decided to move away from the live stream because I have started to notice that it takes a huge amount of time investment to make it effective. People I have spoken to about this in person seem to think that I a referring to monetizing my efforts when that couldn’t be farther than my point. Effectiveness for me in this arena is the development of a following. Having people participate in the stream or blog is more important to me than receiving compensation for my time. The latter wouldn’t be unwelcome, but that’s not how I wanted to measure success at this juncture. So not only has the live stream been taken off the main page but I have removed the link to the live page as well.

So you need to update your Gallery2 from your Mac? There are built in utilities that work with any OS from Gallery2 but they are all a bit heavy if you have a large picture library. I by no means have the biggest but it’s around 1500 pictures right now which is too much for an FTP upload or the web interface.

Most Mac users are using iPhoto and with the release of iLife ’09 comes iPhoto ’09. I had a plugin that worked with iPhoto ’08 called Gallery2Export. It worked well, simple yet functional. After installing the new version of iPhoto Gallery2Export wouldn’t allow me to open the Export window in iPhoto.

After some digging around, I found another plugin called iPhotoToGallery. I have uploaded about 200 picutres so far using it and it is working quite well. It seems a little slower than I would like. I have been used to the Windows XP “Publish to” feature which is quite fast. I would actually bet that the iPhoto upload took about twice as long to upload my pictures than did the Windows XP upload util.

I was in the process of deleting some pictures that weren’t the best quality and hit the wrong button. That really ticks me off because I spent a lot of time keeping that up to date and with a quick clickety click it’s all gone. So all of you Gallery2 users out there be careful about what section you are in when you are deleting things.

Now I have a screwed up Gallery2 page and I am in the process of changing my OS. I am going to have to find a way to upload to Gallery2 from iPhoto. I know of a plugin but the issue is iLife ’09 compatibility. Not sure if it works.