In the Parlance of Our Times

I finally created a Flickr account, as part of our Learning 2.0 project. I still have reservations about keeping my photos on a third party site, but I have to admit that there are some cool things you can do here.

I like the idea of using Flickr for posting images to a blog. It's easier than uploading to Moveable Type and doesn't clog up the web account with images. Also, it resizes the image to something reasonable for a blog post. I think we should start teaching this to the study abroad students, rather than having them upload images to the study abroad blog. By the way, the photo here was taken on one of my trips to Ireland, but I have no idea where this is or when I took the photo.

I also really liked the Trading Card Mash-up site linked from the PLCMC site. You could make some really cute party favors with that.

Last month we took a quick trip east to the Boston area. Two technology trends struck me.

First, the NY State Thruway now has free wifi at all of the service areas along Rt 90. I noticed this on a trip in April and thought it was cool, but wasn't all that sure when I'd ever want to use it. Now I know. Just outside Buffalo on the May trip I realized I'd forgotten to download the NYTimes crossword before leaving home that morning. So when we stopped, I signed on to the Service Area wifi and downloaded the crossword while Michael ordered his coffee. Back in the car, we were able to complete the crossword offline while driving.

I can think of other times it might be useful, too, like booking a hotel from the road. In the past couple of years I've been in more than one situation where I had to make or change hotel reservations while enroute and it's been a pain to do it by phone. I'm hoping next time I have to do this I'll be near a Service Area with wifi.

The other trend I've noticed lately is that hotels are providing computers in the lobby for guests to use for free. I'm a little perplexed by this. Why, when laptops are cheaper than they've ever been and more and more people are buying them, are hotels adding lobby computers? Is it easier or cheaper for the hotel to provide a computer than to support guests who are trying to use their own computers on the hotel network? Or is there some other reason? I'm curious about this.

I found this photo when searching for something to post for our Copyright exercise this week. I wonder if the guitarist thought about the implied invitation she's sending out?

This was posted under a Creative Commons "Attribution" license. As I understand it, that means I have to say where it came from. Flickr's "Blog This" conveniently does that for me.

I'm confused about one thing, though. I found a photo I liked onFlickr, but the copyright said "All rights reserved". OK, so clearly I can't copy the photo and distribute it. But the "Blog This" button is still there in Flickr, which means the owner has made it public. And when you post a photo to your blog using "Blog This" you don't copy the photo - you just include a link to it in your blog.

So my question is this: How does linking to an image - and by that I mean displaying an image, but with the image source still on the original site - fit into all this? Is that OK, even under an "all rights reserved" license, because you are not copying it?

Last week Apple came through with the long-awaited updates to its MacBook Pro line. Michael and I took a trip to the Shadyside Apple Store the evening they were announced to pick up one of the new models. Not that I was anxious to get one or anything.

I love the new laptop. The LED screen is gorgeous. I took it outside on a bright afternoon and it was very usable even in full sun. That's going to be helpful when trying to use some of the free wireless available when traveling - in NYC parks, for instance.

It's fast, too, though nearly anything seems fast compared to the 12" G4 867 I was using up until March. I do still miss the size of the 12", but I'm getting to appreciate the added screen space the 15" offers.

At the moment I'm taking advantage of my new computing power to rip DVDs using Handbrake, for putting on my future iPhone. By the time I actually get my hands on one I should have our entire DVD collection iPhone ready!

I have my iPhone!

Friday was Michael's birthday, and he wanted to have dinner in Shadyside. I warned him that there was an Apple Store there and that I would probably not be able to resist visiting it - crowds or no crowds - and he was cool with that.

So we arrived there mid-afternoon to spend some time shopping and exploring the area before dinner. At 3:30 there was a small (maybe 20 or 25 people) line outside the Apple Store. At 5 it was maybe double in size, still not too huge. We headed off to the restaurant for dinner (Casbah - highly recommended, but bring your credit card with the high spending limit) and then after dinner wandered by the Apple Store around 7. The line was short - maybe 8 people - and they let all of us in the store after about one minute. The other people ahead of us in the line were just browsing and I was able to walk straight up to the desk to buy my 8 GB phone. In and out in 5 minutes!

When I got it home I connected it to the laptop (which I had updated with the necessary OS 10.4.10 and iTunes 7.3 earlier) and activated in a matter of minutes. From what I read, others haven't had such a smooth experience.

Since then I've been playing around with it a lot. I should be pretty proficient in typing by the end of the weekend, though I'm not too bad right now. Definitely faster than I ever was on a Palm PDA. Internet speed is slow, but usable for things like email and Google Maps, on EDGE. It's even fairly usable on some web sites, but obviously WiFi is faster.

I look forward to using this in my travels this summer - that will be the real test of it for me.