Meme In A Box

vectored from gridlore, elynne, and others...

"So, say you were meeting a new person--blind date, new friend, who knows. And you wanted them to have some idea of what kind of person you are, and who you are. But you can't actually tell them in so many words. Instead, you have to give them a box, with a dozen things in it for them to look at/read/listen to/taste/whatever. "What would you put in the box? And a copy of your journal or a link to your LJ would be the same thing as just telling them directly, yourself, so that's not allowed."

Hrm. Interesting. Off the top of my head, i'd pack that box with the following:

1. A set of polyhedron dice
   
2. A copy of "Winter's Tale" by Mark Helprin
   
3. A copy of my filkbook
   
4. A recording of my OVFF concert set. (Or some other set of me singing)
   
5. A copy of Neil Gaiman's "Sandman" (yes, all 10 volumes)
   
6. A copy of Screen Door's "Greener" CD
   
7. A box of really good chocolate
   
8. A copy of telynor's cd, "Box of Fairies", which I helped record
   
9. A membership to Gafilk, so they can come see all my zany friends
   
10. A photo album of various conventions i've been to, including photos of me with each of my current sweeties
    
11. A cd collection of 80s new wave music
    
12. A copy of the quotations file from my webpage.
    

Pictures

Once upon a time, I took a lot of photographs. Whenever I go somewhere with a descent camera, I tend to snap off a lot of pictures, because I enjoy it. And when I get home, I put them on my webpage.

What I've always been really bad about is actually going through and captioning them, and providing thumbnails, and all the other things that really make a photo archive usable by, say, people who aren't me. It was always one of those "things to get around to" that I never got around to.

Well, some time ago, themouseshouse told me about an open source project called Gallery. The entire thing is written in PHP, and makes the entire effort of maintaining a photo archive on the web painless, or so it promised, so I thought I'd try it out.

Wow.

No, let me make this clear...

WOW!

The software was everything I wanted and more. It took a couple of hours to get working, mostly having to do with upgrading PHP and Apache on my server and installing several graphics manipulation packages for the program to do its magic. But once it was working, it was amazing. It automatically generates thumbnail pages, in a grid sized to your choosing. You can manipulate images on the fly, rotating them, resizing them, reordering them, however you like. If you want to remove a shot, just click on the "delete photo" button, confirm your choice, and its gone, and the thumbnails are regenerated to get rid of the gap. I was impressed.

The first batch of photos I set up were the shots I took at the Quinze Filk Festival last October. Those had seen these before will know that there were a large number of completely useless shots mixed in with some that were rather good. Once they'd been imported into Gallery, kitanzi went through all 900 shots and threw away nearly half of them. There's still some that are fuzzy or blurred, but the overall set is quite watchable. (And now needs to be captioned.).

The program managed uploading pictures as well, so it can be used to completely take over the management of this entire set of my webpage. You can even enable it to allow visitors to leave comments on pictures, so they can help with captioning, or just giving feedback on your photography.

I'm very happy. If you want to see the whole archive, go here. Note that large sections of these photos STILL aren't captioned. Its the ongoing project. But the photos are all there.

Now, I just need a new camera. I was lusting after the new 8 megapixel cameras while browsing at Circuit City last night, though the reviews I read on the Sony DSC-F828 lead me to believe it's not quite mature enough to spend that kind of money. I am thinking strongly about the Canon G5, which fits much more easily into my budget. Then I can take a few thousand MORE photos for my website.

bounce Happy ACat!

Whats in YOUR Box of Me?

Earlier today, I posted my entry in the "Meme in a Box" meme. epi_lj started up a variant which I liked, as modified by eleri, I think:

The new variant is: "So, say I'm meeting a new person--blind date, new friend, who knows. And I want them to have some idea of what kind of person I am, and who I am. But I can't actually tell them in so many words. Instead, I want to give them a box, with things in it for them to look at/read/listen to/taste/whatever beforehand.

What one thing would you add to the box to represent me or my tastes?"