Sharing Picasa Photos: Better now

My experiments with Picasa Web Albums have led me to conclude that trying to share pictures with friends while keeping them away from strangers does not work very well.  Worse, my advice to "use your <back> button" was less than perfectly helpful.

So, they are again out in the main (public) directory of my Picasa Web Album, where they can be conveniently viewed by my friends _and by everyone else on Earth_.

Mark's Picasa Web Albums

Mark_
18 October 2010

Sharing Pictures = Frustrations

I have been experimenting with Google's combination of desktop picture-management software and online picture-sharing service, Picasa.  It's quite nice in several ways.

The thing I like most about it is that it doesn't move anything around on the disk (unless told to do so intentionally and explicitly); it builds and maintains a database of all of the pictures on the drives it detects (JPEG and other common formats), supports some practical (and some slightly esoteric) editing features, can be used to move files into different locations on disk, can directly import picture files from cameras and cards, and so forth.  It can upload selected pictures to a Google host online, where some management tasks can be carried out in a browser window.

That's where the difficulty lies.

Picasa online supports three levels of privacy:  _all public_, _unlisted_, and _invitation-only_.  Because I am interested in sharing only with my friends (but not in the additional layer of administration needed to maintain explicit invitations for each event/collection), I put my pictures into the _unlisted_ area and noted the URL (link address) that Google/Picasa indicated.

I checked that it worked, shared it to friends by e-mail, and felt pretty clever.

Immediately, some people replied that there was nothing there.

I don't know for certain why this problem occurs, but I am working on it.

Please accept my apology. My feeling clever is just about over.

--Mark_
04 September 2010

Pictures! (2010 Ranger Cruise, and more)

My Picasa photos.

_Kattywompus_' Final Resting Place

For a look at the reef that ate Linda & Brad's Kattywompus, have a look at this lat/long by pasting it into the search field of Google Earth:

34° 53' 0.79" S   173° 24' 54.84" E

Brad pointed it out to me this morning as we were looking around at stuff during breakfast.

Oh.  That rock.

--Mark_ 

17 June 2010

We are relieved!

We have seen Linda & Brad, and they really are okay.  They are able to laugh about some of the little things among their recent _travails_, their insurance company (an _excellent_ insurance company!) has come through, and they have closed the deal on another boat: a Malo 38 that looks very nice.  (The original advertisement link has gone dead; this generic informational link should help.)
<http://cruisingresources.com/Malo_38>

Friends will mind the boat in New Zealand while Linda & Brad remain here rather longer than they had originally intended, picking up work to refill their cruising treasury.

They are fine--eager for more, in fact--and we are relieved.

--Mark_
09 June 2010
(19 August 2010)

Linda & Brad are home.

A few days ago I received an e-mail message from Linda: They are staying with her mother, have replaced Brad's PC laptop, and will drive up here Wednesday of next week.

They'll stay with us Wednesday night, and will be back in the area for Mike & Kit's get-together.

They'll tell their story, and perhaps we'll get details about a new boat. And we'll be happy to see them.

Linda has most of her pictures back.

Linda is again in possession of her external hard drive, which contains the bulk of her pictures. It was protected in a rigid, sealed, Pelican case < http://www.pelican.com/ >, and is apparently fine.

They have found Brad's PC laptop, but,

When I looked at the PC last night I had to laugh.  Pretty much of the bottom is ripped off.  All the little doodads that run the thing look like ---- from the battering on the rocks and salt water.

I have advised her to tear out the hard drive (for recovery later, just in case), and to not bring the battery indoors (because they can do dangerous things when in abnormal states).

Her own computer, a Macintosh PowerBook laptop, was also in a Pelican case, but it has yet to be found. I worry that it may have floated away from the bulk of the debris--probably not on the surface, but maybe not on the bottom either, partially buoyed by the air & foam inside the case.  I have sent an inquiry on the point to the manufacturer.

She is quite relieved about having found most of her pictures (a camera and card are still missing); I told her that we are eager to hear about any happy circumstances that come about.

--Mark_
14:56 16 April 2010

From Linda

Late last night I heard from Linda:

This is all overwhelming.  After the shock wore off we were running on pure adrenaline.  Then the emotional crash for me.  Brad wanders around cleaning up the aftermath and sighs a lot!

Jane has made a post on the blog today with a couple of photos.  We'll continue with the updates.

I haven't been back out to see Kattywompus.  Evidently there's very little left at this point and it breaks my heart.  I loved that boat and can't imagine that we'll find another boat like her.  The insurance claim is moving forward and all seems OK with that.  We have feelers out for a boat here.  Will see what we find.

Our network of cruising and land based friends has been amazing.  John and Amanda Neal from 'Mahina Tiare' are among many that are constantly in touch.  Our good friends Mike and Marnie from 'Shelette' received the news while in Denver.  I quickly connected them with my best buddy Mindy there and they have arrived back here in NZ today with a duffel bag of clothes and other things for us.  Email and cell phones are amazing.

Our new family here, John, Jacey, Travis and Grayson have let us want for nothing (except a good night's sleep which is not their fault).  Their friends and family continue to dive the reef looking for more of our stuff.  The locals who walk the beach about a mile away also pick up all the boat debris as well as any of our treasures that wash up.  I don't know how we can ever repay them.  We would have to stay here a long time.  Hmmmm...I think that's a great idea!

I haven't looked yet, but as I recall we didn't back up the photos from the PC onto the external hard drive.  I will check that soon but suspect they may be only memories at this point.  The ipod, drive and thumb drives survived the reef quite nicely in their pelican cases.  The mac is in one too but has yet to be found.  No pearls yet either.

Many lessons have been learned.


They had two computers and an external hard drive on board; we have been discussing what to do with whatever might be found of them.  I advised that even if a computer had been wet, its hard drive might be recoverable with some initial, stabilizing care, and with attention by an expert in drive recovery.

Her three hard drives contain pictures that we want to see.

Her message addresses an issue that had been troubling many of us--the question of insurance. Apparently many cruisers find the cost to be out of reach, so we were pretty worried.  However, it does sound as if they had coverage, and so expect to be able to replace the boat.

We hope so.

("Pearls" refers to a purchase she had made a few months ago. I think it's mentioned in her blog.)

--Mark_
07:35 15 April 2010

Some _Kattywompus_ news, at last: EPIRBs work!

We have, at last, a bit more news about _Kattywompus_:

• From Linda's blog, via Jane:
< http://www.sailblogs.com/member/kattywompus/ >

• From The Port Townsend Leader:
< http://www.ptleader.com/main.asp?SectionID=36&SubSectionID=55&ArticleID=26717 >
(Thanks, Phil.)

• From Latitude 38:
< http://www.latitude38.com/lectronic/lectronicday.lasso?date=2010-04-14&dayid=413#Story4 >

[Copy and paste these links into the address field of your browser.]

Most of us can only try to imagine the difficulty of their situation.

--Mark_
20:14 15 April 2010

News gets around.

Other cruisers have begun circulating the news:
< http://realityinterrupted.com/wpblog/2010/04/12/new-zealand-update/ >.
(Use _copy&paste_ to get that URL into your browser's address line.)
Thanks to Phil R. (Altrice).

Try searching for
"kattywompus new zealand -string -band"
(because there is another famous Kattywompus).
Let us know if you have success with a different search term.

Still no _capital 'N'_ News, though, which I find somewhat surprising.

--Mark_
15:29 13 April 2010

_Kattywompus_ News UPDATED

Not very much news, but a little (third-hand or more):

Linda and Brad are already talking about the next boat.

• Use the following URL (web address) to download a nautical chart of the bay in which _Kattywompus_ rests:
<http://www.linz.govt.nz/hydro/charts/nz202-chart-catalogue/acknowledge.aspx?chart_num=5114>
UPDATE: This is a different URL than was in place here yesterday (although it leads to the same image file).
Choose the tiff version, and use right-click to make certain that it ends up as a file on your desktop; this ensures that the image is zoomable when you open it in your favorite image viewer. ("Preview" is good on Macintosh; it will probably be what is launched when the file is double-clicked.) The file's name is "nz5114.tif".

• See Linda's "Sail Kattywompus" web-log for news as it arrives via her local sailing friend Jane:
<http://www.sailblogs.com/member/kattywompus/>

ADDED:

Bookmark the two blog pages before moving on.

These URLs (Web addresses) are not clickable here; use _copy-and-paste_ to put them into the address line at the top of your Web browser, then press _return_.
UPDATE: ARE clickable now.

--Mark_
Updated 08:31 13 April 2010

_Kattywompus_ is lost!

In the worst sense of that word, Linda & Brad's beautiful Kattywompus was lost yesterday. They hit a reef while entering Doubtless Bay, NZ. Into their liferaft, and flares and EPIRB got them rescued, but the boat went down before they could reach their ditch bag.

The news came to us while we were showing "slides" of our Kattywompus visit. My blood ran cold as I read it, and the room was full of gasps.

Linda says that they are "a bit stunned". I can hardly imagine.

--Mark_
21:55 Sunday 11 April 2010

Back @ Home

Alas, wi-fi was not terribly handy during our trip to NZ and AU, and anyway we didn't spend much time standing still near where it was available. Therefore no timely updates to this blog.

I worried that it might turn out this way.

Even so, we are again at home as of 16:15 today, 06 April 2010, after a total of nearly 19 hours in transit (train toward airport Sydney, transportation security lines, flight to Los Angeles, U.S. Customs & Immigration procedures, layover & change of carrier there, flight to Seattle, and shuttle home). We are not sure that we know how to translate all of that into Seattle time, except to note that the 16:15 here would have been 09:15 on our previous (Sydney) clock.

I think.

The mind boggles (and only a part of that is due to our being tired).

Okay, I realize that many of you, dear readers, have done this--and more--but this is our first such big trip and we are somewhat agog at the pure audacity of such an enterprise as traveling across more or less exactly half the globe, essentially engaging our share of the services of thousands of people (some of whose accomplishments stand on the shoulders of the people who invented the technologies that lead to the technologies that we used today).

More--with pictures--later. We saw beautiful and wonderful things, and we are eager to share them with our friends.

--Mark_

10:09 (a.m.) Sydney, AU time (for which Summer Time just ended).

17:09 (p.m.) Pacific Daylight Time.

Departing for NZ

In about 2o minutes we will be driven in style, by professionals, to our rendezvous with a series of carriers, also (we desperately hope) professionals, who will eventually deliver us into the hands of our NZ hosts, Linda & Brad (Kattywompus).

I have time for this post despite the powerful impression that I was falling behind in my preparations. At the last minute, everything fell into place. (There may have been some shoving.)

Cindy has had her bag packed for, like, two weeks. She gets full credit for all of the administrative effort in putting this together--including the last-minute acquisition of the intelligence that we do need visas for Australia after all. (We looked at one another and wondered where we had gotten that other idea.) Obtained them online. (Too easy.)

And now, with iPods full of music, podcasts, books, and pictures, we are off.

More later, I hope.

Oh--another thing I had wrong: That Australian tenner is worth only about $US7.50. Crud. (Still a very nice gift from my friends.)

--Mark_

A Nice $end-Off

As part of an unrelated event, some Ranger friends gave us a nice send-off. In the course of the festivities I was given not one, but two caches of "cast-off" Australian currency--money that had lost its value entirely in light of the difficulty of turning it back into spendable $US. I'll take it on a little trip, and--poof--it has value again. Isn't that weird?

Another note on Australian currency: I believe that some here at home may have proposed printing our folding money onto durable plastic such as is used for some kinds of commercial mailing bags. (Not Tyvek, which I am not certain can stand repeated handling. Maybe it can, but I don't know.) It appears that the Australians have beaten us to it. Their $10 bill seems to be on some kind of smooth plastic; there is even a transparent window in it.

I haven't tried tearing it--not while there is a chance that it may be worth nearly eleven dollars U.S. (if I have read the conversion correctly)--but it does seem quite robust (in a non-metaphorical way) and entirely non-paper-y.

Their coins are heavier and prettier than ours (higher relief), although they seem also to be minted of something base; they thud onto tabletops just about as badly as our new coins do.

I look forward to spending this money. Thanks, Phil & Pete!

Thanks also to Pete & Irene for hosting a nice afternoon; it was very nice seeing everybody. See you again soon.

--Mark_

Our Upcoming Trip

(Initial post.)

Next Wednesday, C. and I will leave for our first real international trip: We will visit our cruising friends Linda & Brad on their Golden Wave 42 sloop Kattywompus, anchored in the bay off Nelson, New Zealand (north end of the south island). After a few days' sightseeing on land and water, we will leave them and fly across to spend a week in and around Sydney.

We haven't been off this continent before. As small-boat cruisers and occasional train- and automobile-tourists, we have spent a bit of time in very mildly foreign southwest British Columbia, and Cindy has been just across the Mexican border, but this will be the first time we have had to deal with some of the long-distance travel issues that so many others (including many of our friends) find fairly routine (if that word even applies).

We have packed our passports; measured and weighted our luggage; bought the foreign electrical power converter and adapters; procured optical devices suitable to the tasks of seeing and recording some of the sights--and for the flights have bought sound-isolating earbuds and have filled our mp3 players with books, music, podcasts, and radio plays.

We have also dealt with the realization that although we will travel toward the south, we will actually move toward a place that is somewhat cooler than it is here. We have therefore switched from thinking about how to stay cool to thinking about how to stay warm.

In terms of climate, I had been thinking Australian beaches and such. Our destination in N.Z. is actually farther south (i.e., away from the equator), than the southernmost part of the bulk of Australia, by a non-trivial margin. It's in line with Tasmania, the little island that rather looks as if it may once have been part of Australia proper, but has been apart from it for long enough to have its own ecosystem.

The season is not as we had anticipated, too: like our late September/early October at roughly the same distance from the Equator. As our home enters our spring, they (and we) will enter their autumn.

Stupid mistake, but we caught it in time.

Our expectation regarding the culture we will find there is that the experience of encountering it will be like the experience of visiting in SE Canada: It will seem familiar, if very slightly shifted--and with different brand-names on most of the same kinds of retail stuff as we have here. We aren't going there for the retail experience, of course, but having grown up with such matters all around, I do find it interesting to walk through the grocery stores of other nationalities. (The Korean store a very few miles from our house is a wonderland of the amazingly unfamiliar. All mundane and probably comfortable to the local Asian population, but strange and almost unsettling to a midwesterner whose dining-table tastes are as narrow as I know mine to be.)

We expect to find some landscapes that may resemble some of ours (or more correctly some of what we have seen while cruising our little sailboat in B.C.): bays, fjords, mountains, valleys, trees, and such. Even so, no speculation, memory, gorgeous calendar photograph, or Google Earth view could ever substitute for the experience of standing there, breathing air right off the feature at which one is looking. We are eager for the excitement of that kind of novelty, and we have been advised to expect absolute wonder.

We aren't certain about what to expect of the natives we will encounter in the two somewhat separate places that we will visit, except that we have been advised by those who have gone before us that everybody there will be warmly friendly. We will expect this, and we do hope that we can reflect and project attitudes appropriate to that experience. One does not travel hoping not to be bothered by encounters with other people. I am not very good with "strangers", so I will have to be careful to engage.

Foreign travel is alleged to be good for (more than just) self-improvement. It can (also) permit one to compare his life, his values, his society, and his culture to those of others. I shall be interested in seeing a little of how they and we are similar and how we are different--and how our different ways of organizing ourselves fosters (or perhaps interferes with) the expression of our values. If it occasionally seems that some things are not going so well here, how have others solved or avoided problems with issues similar to ours?

For several reasons, we are eager for this first trip abroad (albeit somewhat horrified at the prospect of more or less an entire day in a voyage that will have consumed multiple days). We will get to spend time with friends | on their boat | in waters we never expected to see | next to lands and peoples we might have missed otherwise. The trips to arrive there and return will be long, and the time there is certain to seem terribly short, although probably quite intense.

We hope we're up to it.

[My intentions for this web-log are somewhat uncertain.

[I will not have a computer with me, and I do not expect to mooch or pay for computer time. I will, however, have my Apple iPod Touch, which can do many of the kinds of things that larger computers can do--including sending updates by e-mail (when within range of an open wi-fi station). It is not an iPhone, so it lacks a camera and the always-on wireless connection that iPhone users like so much.

[So: Use your own judgement about taking the trouble to monitor this space while we are away. It may turn out that I find I can easily keep it up-to-date, or that may prove inconvenient or even impossible. I shall try, but if real-time posting doesn't work out, updates may have to wait until after our return.

[Although this service does support pictures, most of what I have to share will probably be hosted on my Apple hosting service at < http://gallery.me.com/socrates4718 >.

[I believe that this blog isn't in the usual index of web-logs, and I have disabled some of the usual features such as comments. I do invite contacts sent to my usual e-mail address.]

--Mark_