Licence to Roam

You can now print from Flickr (or you can if in the US, other markets to follow). But even though I can’t print my photos, any contact I have in the US can. good extension to the service - reduces the activity required to get things done.

With all the problems around the merger of Flickr and Yahoo IDs, Flickr have proved why they have such a fanatical following by unmerging the accounts of anyone who asks. Although you can argue they should have seen this coming (the need to log in continuously is one of reasons I tend to stop using Yahoo aps) at least they are paying attention to the backlash. In my case, the unmerge was done promptly and I’m back to using Flickr with ease.

But I was surprosed at some of the comments in the groups on Flikr such as this one; absolute horror that we would have to use an ID of a company that acts as a ’spambox’ and make you have a Yahoo mail account. Obviously a completely different company than I’ve experienced. I signed up with my gmail account and I’ve never been asked to create a yahoo one. But the company have obviously annoyed a lot of people over the years.

One of the monthly London Flickr Meetups took place yesterday. The venue was Richmond, in particular Richmond Park. There were 8 people, which semes to be about average. The order of the day was pub, picnic, pub, with photos taken at many points along the way.

Flickr have launched a great new feature, an interestingness page, a place where you can easily explore far more photos than you did before. And there are some amazing images. Another great way to spend those timeouts at work. I can see my contacts and favourites list growing.

If you want to go and see one of the best sets of photos I’ve found on Flickr, try these, from Sarrah

I had lunch today at the Oxo Tower, with the team from work, as a farewell lunch for a colleague who is heading for the US. Took a chance to take a series of views from the balcony then used the software that came with the camera for the first time to stitch the images together. A pretty clever process, it managed to get all the joins correct with minimal manual intervention. Here’s a small version, there’s a slightly larger version here.

The food here was pretty good, I think well deserved of its reputation. However service was rather lacking. They got a couple of the meals wrong (which was quickly rectified) but in general it was very slow. Even though there were 10 of us, I would have thought they could have served the meal in less than the 2.5 hours it took - and even then the desert and the bill had to be chased. On a good point, the boxes they gave us for the deserts that were ‘taken away’ (for the people who had to leave for meetings) were very nice. On a bad point, it was annoying how they kept trying to top up the wine glasses all the time; it makes it impossible to track the volume drunk, which is not good when you do have to go back to work.

I got asked today by someone wanting to use one of my images of Chiswick on a site that supports a language school here in Chiswick. I’m happy to do this - they asked!

I see in the logs that one nice person has been ‘borrowing’ one of the images on the blog to provide a background image. So I’ve changed it to reflect his attittudes. Here’s the image as it now appears.

I would not mind if he’d asked and then hosted on his server, but not when he’s using a direct link

Spurred on by Doc Searl’s aerial photos over the last few months, I took some photos out of the plane window on the trip back. And now he mentioned this project over at Irish Eyes, so I’ve added some photos to the set on Flickr.