I ventured the post-Boxing Day sales today. I did the necessary returns, but I also stopped by OfficeWorks to pick up a laser printer for only $99 (down from $220).

After one of my university lecturers once handed back an essay with something like “You’re essay is better than your printer” written on it, I knew I’d have to get a laser printer eventually. I liked the benefits they hold: super fast printing, clean prints that can realistically be put on both sides of the paper, particularly useful when printing sheet music. The cost of the toner and drums can be a bit scary, but a quick check to eBay reveals the toner cartridges can be had for around $50 delivered.

I unpacked the box, glanced at the manual, performed the neccessary ritualistic incantations and now this thing is throwing pages at me faster than I can… well, hit Print.

Isn’t Flickr great? Not only can you check out my photos from last Saturday night, but you can overdose on both Zoe’s and Becky’s photos, each posted to their respective Flickr accounts.

Why is it, then, that I spent a few (cough) hours today researching alternatives? Well the 200-photo, 3-set limit is squeezing now and I find that old photos I try to reference have been pushed off the back of the stream. I also pay for this hosting and only use a fraction of it, so I’m not really willing to pay another $25 US a year for the pro account. There should be server-side software which does everything I need, and look good, right?

Well, it seems that isn’t the case… yet.

What am I trying to do? What’s my brief and what are my requirements. I need an easily and significantly customisable content management system for my photos so I can present them in the way I want that matches the rest of my website design. I want an easy method of uploading photos in album sets. I don’t care if that’s FTP or with some sort of iPhoto plugin, although the latter would be preferable. I would like an easy way to edit the metadata associated with the photos, and would like customisable thumbnail rendering. As an added bonus, I’d like built in watermarking, but that’s not essential. Other features such as commenting, rating and keywords would also be nice.

I tried a few software options. One came close.

Zenphoto undoubtably looks great. Full of Web 2.0 goodness, it bills itself as “a simpler web photo album”, implying a few less features than other packages. The Stopdesign template is very good looking. Better than Flickr in fact, but is in most cases going to present as a seperate design entity to your main website. A nice comment system is built in, along with automatic (and user-definable resolution) thumbnail generation. Metadata editing can be done through the admin interface or as-you-go, browsing through the gallery as Flickr users will be accustomed to. The simplicity of ongoing use is certainly this product’s highlight, but what’s missing? Ratings, keywords, email submission, and search. What would have sealed the deal for me, and helped me put up with a few missing features would be a customisable thumbnail editor. Selecting just the photo isn’t enough. When I’m imposing a rather impossible crop, I need to be able to position it just right to be effective.

Is it really worth all this work and to loose the great social networking infrastructure established by flickr? I think it is worth it if what I gain is complete control of my photos, the way they are presented how they are stored. I’ll keep working on it and see if I can come up with a solution.

Just briefly, with all this speak of photos, I sent in five old rolls of film I found lying around the house to be developed. I assume they are from early to mid ’90s, but some could be older. I hope they are still in a usable condition and that they bring back some crazy memories.

This is not the email you want to recieve at 5:03pm on a Friday.

Hey Tyson,

It has been a devastating afternoon.

The email then continued to describe a list of technical problems that have now arisen on a compilation DVD I was working on since 8am this morning. It seems the computer has been unable to burn a disc or a disc image of the completed project and some student’s files are now missing. At least the guys made me laugh through the tears of agony and dispair.

Looks like I’ve got my Monday planned!

The reason I haven’t posted is that I’ve been spending every waking hour (those which I haven’t been at rehearsals), working on a website for a new project. This website is becoming more and more involved, but I haven’t accepted any compromises. It takes twice as long to do the last 10% or so they say. I’ll be announcing it officially very soon, but until then, here’s a teaser:

In other news, I have long been an advocate that the best chocolate-chip biscuits you could buy (legally, at least), are the K-Mart brand Decadent Chocolate Chip cookies. They are thick, crumbly, delicious with large chocolate chunks in them which taste great. While they were temporarily ursurped by the Mrs. Fields’ cookies, the K-Mart cookies don’t require your heart to be beaten back into operation due to a large stream of butter travelling straight through the heart.

The Decadent Chocolate Chip cookies have a lot going for them, not to mention the fact that you get quite a few in a box (rather than Mrs. Fields singularly-packed offering of eight. However, you have to be near a K-Mart to grab them, not just any old supermarket.

That is, until NOW.

As those who tend to inform themselves about these issues will already know, Coles and K-Mart are both part of the Coles-Myer conglomerate, and Coles have recently taken to repackaging the Decadent Chocolate Chip biscuits in their own packaging. You still get the great taste, the huge chocolate chunks, and a whole pile in a box, and now they are available at your local Coles under the title “You’ll Love Coles Ultimate Chocolate Chip Cookies”. Ignore someone randomly named Sandra or Barbara spouting something inane like “Why bake when I can go to Coles!”. They really are worth the $4.23 every now and then.

I just ended a battle between my finger and a splinter that lodged itself in there last night during rehearsals.

I had grabbed the door to enter the ’store room’ during the Skid Row/Downtown number and scored myself a giant rod of timber hanging out of my finger for the effort. I pulled it out and kept going, and it wasn’t until this morning that I realised there was still a bit left in my finger, by which time the skin had buried it deep below, faded like a penguin in an ice coffin. I made several efforts during the day to find this tiny medical tool we have to dig splinters out of your skin (not without pain), and only just found it tonight. Then, armed with a pair of tweezers and both the “Grip and Rip” and “Sculptor’s Scalpel”* ends of the found tool, I got to work, eventually ripping the skin around the splinter away until it had nothing to keep it there. What a sense of achievement when I finally got it out! Sure, it feels worse now, but that will eventually pass.

In other news, I have just officially given up on my PC (… for tonight). Firstly, it decides it’s too good for my files, so it randomly starts throwing them away. I check for bad sectors because the drive is still under warranty, but it returns none. Then Windows XP decides to randomly reboot a few minutes after each boot, even after two entirely fresh reboots (installing on both FAT32 and NTFS drives).

A Mac would never do that to me. I’m going to buy another external case so I can use the perfectly fine, windows-rejected hard drive on my beautiful mac.

And I got a haircut.