tuk tuk
took the tuk tuk to town tonight
Got off the sky train and the usual motorcycle taxi took the night off and the bus stop was a distance away - and there was a tuk tuk. i hardly take tuk tuk, it's one of those transport mode that doesn't make sense when you've gone through the novelty stage. motorcycle taxi is small enough to speed you through the congested traffic, taxi you get some comfort of a/c chamber. tuk tuk is pricy, stuck in traffic like any other car only you get to suck up the pollution.
logically i don't get these 'fee base' drivers. they don't get pay more than before if they drive fast. i mean i like speed, but in traffi filled street, driving fast only to break even harder don't make sense. Instead of getting tuned with the traffic rythm, so they would get the most milage for the o-so-expensive gas (and break pad). afterall gas price is directly effecting their bread and butter you know.
that said, i must admit that the only fun part about tuk tuk is the zig-zack-zoom-zoom-i-got-attitude driving style.
Flickr-ing
I started off using
Flickr for its slide show facilities. This is one of the few photo sites that detects ‘taken date” from camera’s
EXIF data and with their coolie slide show facilities, I gave it a try. It is more seductive than I thought.
I wanted to use flickr to do slideshow of the wine bar’s construction process without the hassle of arranging them. They have tools to organize and display by taken dates. I love construction photos set. There are there for a short moment and you won’t see them ever again in that stage. They are only cool to look at when you see them in sequence when there is beginning and end. Slide show was perfect tool to show them.
While I was trying out other features, i explored the community a bit more. The users and image pool is huge, and some of their pictures are amazing. There so many talented photographer out there. Some photographs they took made me want to travel and take more pictures. I thought this will be fun, I can learn a lot from these folks. Below are some fav' i picked up browsing around.
Now, I thought I would never spend on an online subscription anywhere! I’ve been around in the net business for a decade, there are many interesting sites, but none that i find absolutely worth spending membership fee.. until now. Maybe its because I like taking pictures. And I have tons of it. To load them all up, and arange them in multi sets, i'd need to upgrade. I thought i do have the patience to load 20meg per month, or put up with 3 maximum picture set, but i don't.
Photography was my 'thing' when I was a kid in middle and highschool. A small lil boy carrying this bulky SLR with my ‘so proud’ 28-200mm zoom lens. I practically took it everywhere I go. That was eight grade. I used to join up the photo club, did my art class on it, and was part of the school’s paper’s photographer. That was all fun. Playing with the prints in the dark room – stinky but fun. Then when you start being busy with college and working, playing with photo and prints can take up too much resources. My 2 slr is now busted (one stolen, one droped). After that I didn't really bother with film photography that much.
Then comes digicam. No more film! Better resolution, no more print lab cost! I can play around again. The past few years, i've used a couple of digicams but again, one stolen (Oly 3040c - man i luv that cam), then this oly C40 which is now half the time working. It was time to upgrade and went for the Olympus E1 digital SLR- although not totally happy with it, i'll stick to it for the time being.
Then another thing hits you, how do you display them to your family and friends? You still have to print and then go through the trouble of searching for the darn album you’ve miss placed somewhere in your book shelves. What a hassle. No more of that with this online photo sharing thing. Upload, organize and so many ways to display them. As millions others have found, it is great. And there goes my first payment to upgrade to a pro account. Not only that, I paid for 2 years account, since the baht is going strong at 37/1usd, why not.
So now I’m spending more time uploading and organizing my photos online. I like the privacy protection thing but I wish they have more setting not just private, family, friends.. It should be able to focus right on who is able to view. I know, there’s a lot of database crunching overhead but hey, it’ll be nice to do that. It should also let users chooses how to display their public photo-stream, not just by upload date. It gets cumbersome having to change upload date to organize the sequence of photos you wanted to display.
I have gigs of photos, stored in some CD somewhere, As I find time I’ll upload them up. It will probably take a while, but there’s no space limit. But the 2gig upload limit per month do bothers me even if i might not use that much.
So now with this flickr pro account starting May 1, I’ll be taking more pix and organizing them online. There’s a lot of things to experiment around. I still have not mastered the controls in the E1. The low light noise is still very annoying. How could a cam that used to cost more than 100 grand has this kind of problem. same 'ol complaint.
