My Big Stupid Project Is Almost Finished

More than two and a half months ago I began the project of converting what used to be "Picture Blogs" into "Albums." There were 155 to convert. Minutes ago, I completed #154.

One more to go.

It's been a challenging, frustrating, often agonizing process. It has continuously rubbed in my face the sad fact that this "new, improved" Wireclub is technically a lemon.

Using the Old Wireclub blogs as the means of permanently presenting my pictures had plenty of drawbacks. It wasn't designed for that purpose. The Albums of New Wireclub ARE designed for that. And, hypothetically, they function better for that purpose.

But New Wireclub has never worked right. It continues to be plagued with every imaginable technical glitch. And the process of converting these old blogs into new Albums has subjected me to an endless ordeal of glitch-frustration. Sometimes I was able to overcome these stupid glitches. Often I wasn't. For some reason, the inner workings of this new Wireclub format simply refuses to accept text for certain Albums. There's no reason. It's not a matter of Administration censorship, or anything like that (although that has been an issue, as well). It's purely a problem of a technical nature.

It pisses me off enormously.

At any rate, this ordeal is just about finished. Throughout this two and a half months, I haven't been posting ANY other pictures. I've still been using the camera, but I've refrained posting those pictures until this massive task is finished. The reason is organizational in nature.

I was determined from the beginning to have my Albums arranged chronologically. It's the only thing that would make any sense given the vast quantity of pictures I've posted. At first, the new arrangement dictated that Albums would have a default arrangement according to size, placing the largest ones at the top of the list, the smallest at the bottom. Thankfully, they realized just how FUCKING STUPID that arrangement was, and went chronological. So I can work with that. My Albums are arranged chronologically. They're numbered in that regard. As I make new Albums, they'll also be numbered, and go into the order that way.

So ...

After I post that final album - #155 - I'll start into the next project, one MUCH smaller in scope, of dealing with the backlog of pictures that have accumulated on my hard drive during this four or five months since the "BIG CHANGE" to New Wireclub. It won't take too long to do that, and that task won't be nearly as intensive. It'll take a couple of weeks or so, perhaps.

After that's finished, I'll settle back into the same routine I've been using for the last three years. New pictures will be placed in the "My Images" Album, a default album that essentially replaces what used to be the "Picture Gallery" in Old Wireclub. It's kind of a "dump" for new pictures. And I'll also be periodically removing pictures from the My Images Picture Dump and organizing them into new

One of the "defaults" of the new Pictures page is that posting any new picture in an Album automatically places it at the top of the list. So when I finally get this task completely finished, completely up-to-date, the "My Images" default Album will always be at the top of the list. (At the moment, it's down at the bottom because I've refrained from posting anything in it.) Keeping this arrangement will require me to occasionally "bump" that "My Images" Album to the top of the list somehow, so as to avoid having it descend down into the numbered, chronologically listed Albums where it doesn't belong. I'm not quite sure how I'll do that, but I'll probably delete - and then re-post - the last "My Images" picture to cause the "bump." That seems to me to be the least annoyingly repetitive clutter-inducer on people's Home page "walls."

Okay.

This blog is finished.

Happy Birthday, Barnesy ...

... wherever you are.

I love you always.

I've Just Passed The Half-way Mark ...

... in my project of converting all of my 155 "picture-blogs" into Albums. My Wireclub Pictures page now contains about 2000 separate images. I've run into many problems along the way (see my previous ranting blog), but I'm slogging through it. I've got the fairly complex procedure down to a routine now. At first it required working from a long, detailed check list ...


~ Open #101; compose “Preview Wall Message; close #101
~ Open #0.04; enter the date; scan the document for errors, etc.; Save the document; copy the “Original Blog Title; close #0.04
~ Open Wireclub to Home page
~ Open Wireclub Pictures page on separate tab
~ Open Windows Explorer to selected Album
~ In Pictures page, click “New Album”
~ Note the three-digit number of the top listed Album; enter the next highest number in “Album Name” field; add a space
~ Paste the "Original Blog Title" in “Album Name field; click “Create Album”
~ Open (and stack) all text documents in this order: #103/#101/#0.06/#0.05/#0.04/#0.02
~ Copy the text of #0.02
~ Upload #0.01 “Begin Here” slide
~ Paste text of #0.02 into comment area and post; close #0.02
~ Copy text of #0.04
~ Upload #0.03
~ Paste text of #0.04 into comment area and post; close #0.04
~ Go to Wireclub Home page; refresh the page
~ Copy text of #0.05
~ Paste text of #0.05 into “Reply” area of the notification on Home page and post; close #0.05
~ Scan #0.06 to make sure that all “XX” texts have been replaced properly
~ Go to Wireclub Pictures page; upload all photos, while copy/pasting in Picture numbers/Captions from #0.06 (following the standard procedure); close #0.06
~ Copy text from #101
~ Upload #100
~ Go to Wireclub Home page; delete notification
~ Go to Wireclub Pictures page; Upload #102
~ Go to Home page; refresh the page;
~ Paste text from #101 into the “Reply” area of the new notification and post
~ Close #101
~ Copy text from #103
~ Go to Wireclub Pictures page
~ Open picture #100
~ Paste text from #103 into comment area


... but now I can rip right through all of that without giving it much thought.

The one thing I can't do is chat, answer messages, etc. while I'm in the midst of that, so occasionally I might appear to be ignoring someone rudely. I'm not ignoring you. I see that little green number up there next to the "envelop" icon on the top of my page.

I've also been meticulously going over those pictures, and tweaking them here and there with Photoshop Elements software. That's a very tedious and time consuming process, but rewarding, because the appearance of my pictures is being improved significantly.

At any rate, I'm about half finished. Once I'm done, I will, of course, continue to create new Albums, but they'll be coming at the rate of perhaps once per week, rather than several per day.

Seventy eight Albums completed, seventy seven to go.

Once Again, I've Been Wire-Screwed

Here's the facts:

With "Old Wireclub," I used to post LOTS of photographs. And in Old Wireclub, there was a limit of 200 pictures in the Picture Gallery. I could typically fill that thing up in about two months. And rather than just discard photos to make room for new ones, I would typically create special blogs for those older pictures. As the Gallery would run out of space, I'd re-post pictures into blogs, and then delete them from the Gallery to make room for new pictures there. It was a continuous process, with many pictures moving through the Gallery and eventually into a blog.

When I did that, I preserved the comments that people had left with the pictures, and placed those comments in the text part of the blog. I figured that if someone bothered to actually look at the pictures, and bothered to write a comment, I owed it to them to preserve the comments.

Along with that, I created special blogs that held both pictures that were only posted in that blog, such as a blog that featured pictures of a pretty vineyard, or a cool-looking auto, etc. The pictures for those blogs were never posted in the Gallery as the others were. Those special picture-blogs also received various comments, and I felt that if someone bothered to look at the blog and comment on it, I owed it to them to preserve those comments.

The upshot of all of that is that my profile contains literally thousands of pictures, and it also contains a lot of text generated by all of the comments people left. Most of those pictures and text now reside in those blogs that I described above.

The Old Wireclub picture-blog wasn't a perfect way to display pictures, but it worked pretty well. But with New Wireclub, the workings of blogs, and how pictures work in blogs, is just a TERRIBLE way to display pictures. It's nearly impossible to view the pictures in blogs in any meaningful way now.

But in New Wireclub, we now have these things called "Albums." They don't work all that great either, but they work infinitely better than picture blogs.

And so, I spent endless hours trying to figure out just how to go about setting up Albums to work within the way New Wireclub works. And I thought that I'd finally figured out a reasonable way to do this. It still had LOTS and LOTS of things that didn't really work for my purposes, but I thought I had figured out the best way to work within these terrible design aspects of New Wireclub.

I spent endless hours of testing, experimenting, apologizing for subjecting you to the ways that all of my tests and experiments resulted in what can only be described as GARBAGE on your Wireclub "walls."

My endless hours of testing and experimenting resulted in communications with Administration, and many suggestions submitted by me for improvements. It also resulted in a great deal of bitterness on my part for what I will still argue were INCREDIBLY STUPID decisions on how New Wireclub would work.

At least one of my suggestions was actually implemented. I was thankful for that. But most of my complaints about, and suggested remedies for the INCREDIBLY STUPID aspects of the New Wireclub Pictures page remain ignored.

That's just how it is.

And I can understand that Wireclub doesn't exist to serve me, so I can understand that while some of what I consider to be INCREDIBLY STUPID aspects of the workings of the Picture page simply aren't important to others.

So I came to terms with the way that things are, and decided to work within the limitations. After all of that, I finally arrived at what appeared to be the best way to make these new Albums.

So I began the process of converting those old picture blogs into Albums. There were a few minor bumps, a few small revisions in how I went about doing this, but things appeared to be going along pretty well. Out of the 154 picture blogs I want to convert, I'd gotten up to #043.

And that's when I suddenly hit a wall.

Suddenly, I now am having trouble attaching text to those pictures. I had been doing that by using the "Comment" area below individual pictures to number the pictures, to add captions, and to replace the comments that had been left there when they were originally posted in the Gallery.

Suddenly, for all intents and purposes, I can’t do that. When I try, I receive a message that says:

~~ There was a problem submitting your request - we will try and fix this as soon as possible.

I’ve spent the better part of two days trying various experiments, trying to figure out why this is happening. Tink actually posted some pictures just as test subjects, a laboratory of sorts, that we could experiment with. And a few very interesting things were revealed …

~~ The amount of text wasn’t an issue. Tink posted a big piece of text on one of her pictures. I copied it, and used Word to make a character/space count. It was nearly three times as big as the text I’d been having problems with.

~~ I copied Tink’s text, and pasted it as a comment to her picture. No problem. So it would appear that it’s not an issue of ME posting large texts either.

~~ Tink went to the blog of mine that I was converting into an Album, and copied the string of comments that was included in the problem text. She then pasted it as a comment on her picture. It failed. That seems to suggest that the difficulty lies in posting THAT text.

So all of that, and some further experimentation on my part, seems to suggest that this might be a matter of anti-spam protocols here in Wireclub that recognize that the text I (and Tink) was attempting to paste as a comment exists elsewhere in Wireclub, and defeated the attempt to paste as a result.

I even re-typed the entire text – no copying WHATSOEVER – just looking at the text with my eyes, and typing the same thing. That failed as well.

And I tried to send that text in a message to a friend ... that failed as well.

The bottom line is that I can no longer make Albums as I want to.

So I’ll stop.

I'm Becoming More And More ...

... anti-social here in Wireclub.

I know that. I'm aware of it.

I'm sorry, but I just can't get enthused about what it's turned into. I can't pretend to have any interest in "the wall." That wall, and 95% of what gets written upon it, is of absolutely no interest to me. Wireclub has turned into something where it's ALL ABOUT THE WALL. Frankly, I just don't give a SHIT about the wall, or any of what gets written on it. I just don't care.

I don't even bother deleting all that junk by clicking "Hide" anymore. At first I used to delete like a fiend. Now I just don't bother. I just don't bother looking at it any more than a passing glance.

Once in a while something will catch my eye. If it's a notification of someone's blog, and it seems like it might be interesting, I MIGHT go look at it, but probably not. I think I've just become conditioned to just not bothering. I'm just more likely now to pass over things that in the past I would have scrutinized. I'm just habituated to ignoring almost everything now. And because so much just gets put on the wall, even if I might have had an interest in something, in all likelihood, it's been pushed downwards, off the bottom of my computer screen, so I never see it. And I DEFINITELY don't go scrolling downwards to see what's there.

Why?

I'm not sure. I certainly made no secret about hating the wall from the very beginning. So I ask myself if I'm just being petulant or spiteful, purposefully ignoring it just to make a point, to make a point to Wireclub, or to myself.

I don't think so. Of course, since I'm examining myself here, I can't be objective. So maybe I'm being petulant, maybe I'm not. I don't know. But I don't think so. It doesn't FEEL like I am.

Truly, I think I just don't give a shit about it. It doesn't matter.

And I've found that I'm not spending as much time arguing with idiots (and scholars) in Forums, either. I'll still compose long, elaborate, complicated arguments in some cases, but in a lot of those threads I would, in the past, be following very closely, and never passing up an opportunity to add a blow-hard opinion, I'm just seeing the notification, going there to see it, seeing that the same couple of people are talking, and departing without having read anything. I've started to click "Unfollow" a lot, too.

Yet I'm logged in a fair amount of time. Sometimes I'm "Online." Sometimes I'm "Offline." To be truthful, I often log on, barely look at what's going on, and then walk away from the computer, leaving the portal between Wireclub and my desk open ... but I'm just off doing something else in real life.

I've been working on a project.

But I'm not sure if I'll actually complete it.

I have a bunch of blogs that were created to feature photos I took, and some other pictures, silly printscreens I created, stuff like that. The old blog format didn't really work too well for this purpose, but in New Wireclub, pictures in blogs is simply a catastrophe. It's as if they tried to specifically create the clumsiest, shittiest, most user-unfriendly means possible for the integration of text and pictures. I swear, I think they did it purposefully.

So now there's these things called "Albums." At first, they were designed even WORSE than the new blog format. The new design was just a bad joke.

I nearly quit Wireclub. Seriously, I was just about to bail.

Nothing dramatic. No "I'm leaving Wireclub (unless you pity me and plead with me to stay) " message. I've said before, if I ever do leave Wireclub, I won't delete my account - I'll just simply quit logging in, and leave the profile to just hang there.

The very day I was going to log in, leave a precious few people the private message that I was now gone ... I found that they they actually made one HUGE modification to the Pictures page that will actually, though BARELY, make it worth my while to hang around. I won't bother detailing what the improvement is. It's boring to anyone but me.

But I digress ... I should go back and re-write this, compositionally clean this up, make this a more organized, logically structured essay here ... but fuck it. I'm just going to keep rolling, letting the stream-of-consciousness out onto the page, so this is getting messy. Fuck it.

Back to my "project" ...

I want to convert all of those clumsy blogs, blogs that are all but impossible for anyone to actually look it now, and convert them into Albums. But with those blogs, there is text as a component. It accompanies the pictures. And just as I was unwilling to throw away the text-in-the-form-of-comments that were attached to many of my pictures when I took them out of my Gallery and placed them in blogs, I'm determined to save that text again when ... if ... I convert those blogs into Albums. I figure that if someone bothered to look at the pictures, and bothered to leave a comment, I should bother to save it.

So I'm in the process of taking all of the text from those blogs, and copy/pasting it into Word documents. The idea is that when ... if ... I actually pull the trigger and start creating Albums, I'll be able to quickly and easily copy/paste that text into the very first comment that will appear under the pictures, to use that in place of captions. Doing this also allows me to tidy things up a little bit, to clean up the organization of it, make it easier to read, etc. The process of changing those blogs from the Old Wireclub format into the New Wireclub format really fucked up a lot of stuff, so I'm also trying to repair that damage as much as I can, too.

I figured out that the preserved text kind of falls in to a few standardized formats of organization, and I put together some "templates" where I can take the text, drop it into the proper template, and then save those documents in the same folder as the pictures that the text will accompany. Using the templates reduces the likelihood that I'll screw something up, although the sheer volume of material guarantees it's going to be IMPOSSIBLE to get it perfect, particularly because it'll be getting dropped into Picture Comments, which can't be edited. So if ... no ... WHEN I get something wrong ... if I actually do it ... it'll STAY wrong.

I've also just recently purchased a new monitor. As I had suspected, and as certain events surrounding the change-over from Old Wireclub to New Wireclub revealed to me, my previous monitor had been producing a drastically inaccurate image to my eyes, and as a result, for several YEARS, I've been processing my pictures, trying to get the best image possible, on a monitor that delivered an inaccurate reference. So if I actually embark on this big BLOG-TO-ALBUM conversion, I'll also be going back to the original unprocessed-in-any-way pictures, which, thankfully, I saved and kept filed away, and reworking them. So if I actually pull the trigger and do this project, the pictures will look significantly better.

I'm intellectually dancing around here ... I keep saying "IF" ...

I'm not sure IF I'll go through with this project or not. I'm not sure why I should. I'm not sure if it's worth doing.

You may have noticed ... no ... you probably haven't ... that I seem to have stopped posting pictures. I haven't stopped taking them. I just unloaded a hundred to two hundred pictures from my camera tonight. I just haven't been working with them, and posting them.

Why?

Because I'm unsure of what my relationship with Wireclub is now.

And that's why I'm not sure if I'll actually do this big conversion project or not. I'm just not sure.

I'm really not sure if I care, or not.

I started to proof-read this, and decided I don't even care enough about it to do that either.

(shrugs)

More Nocturnal Encounters With Fauna From This Area

This time it wasn't an owl I encountered on my nightly exercise walk. This time it was a mammal, with distinct markings, black with a white stripe, one that could certainly be considered dangerous if provoked.

Care to guess what it was?

Oh! I Keep Forgetting ... More Crap About Owls

Not too long ago I wrote a blog that had some stuff in it about how I was walking at night, listening to the Beatles, and saw this HUGE Great Horned Owl sitting on a telephone wire looking down at me. And then a bit after that, I wrote an update describing how I saw the same Owl sitting on the same telephone wire on a following night.

I continue seeing owls.

Since then, I've had several more less interesting encounters.

When I go walking, I'm carrying my little CD player. (I really need to update my technology, I know ... I know ...) And because my walk typically takes about thirty-eight minutes, and a CD typically lasts longer than that, I usually end the walk by sitting in the darkness on the porch, cooling down, and listening to the CD run its course.

While doing that, I've had the same owl fly past, low over the ground, flashing past. One one night, there was actually TWO of them, both flashing past in the darkness. They're really big, with a big wingspan.

Then the other night, as I was sitting there, I saw another owl flying, but this time, it wasn't a Great Horned Owl, but rather, a less exotic Barn Owl. They're smaller, and white with tan-brown areas. They have the freakiest looking face. They look like space aliens or something. But I digress ...

So I saw a Barn Owl. And it circled around, and landed in this bush about twenty-five or thirty yards/meters away. So I pulled my trusty little flashlight out of my pocket, pointed it right at the owl, and flicked the switch. Yep, a Barn Owl.

But then it took flight, and flew RIGHT AT ME, with that freaky face, big yellow owl eyes coming RIGHT AT ME and my flashlight. It veered away at a range of about 15 yards/meters.

Over the last week or so, I've seen the same Barn Owl around here, flying around, hunting, one time plummeting into the dry grass.

Okay. That's all. More owl stuff.

Regarding My 8351 Wireclub Credits ...

(posted September 1, 2011)

I ask myself:

Why are these valuable credits just sitting here gathering dust instead of being used? The obvious answer is that I never frequent chat rooms.

But ...

Perhaps you do. And if so, what the hell, I'd like to make MY huge stash of credits work for YOU.

So ...

If you're in a chat room, and someone is causing trouble in there, and you'd like a little amusement, come get me, and if the offending party is really being offensive, I'll wield my Superpowers on your behalf.

I don't want to be used just to settle personal squabbles or anything. I'm going to put my trust in you that the target of my Superpowers will actually be deserving of that treatment because they're causing trouble, not just because you don't like them or something petty like that.

Another thing: If my services are to be used, I will also require that it be known there in the chat room WHY they're being used, and on whose behalf. Besides, you'll have more fun if you say something like, "SITS, could you please do something about [name of troll] being such a troll?"

Note: This blog is the result of boredom.

A Little Test Of Sorts: Compare Your Computer Monitor To Mine

(posted August 29, 2011)

I've become convinced that there's a good likelihood that I have some issues with my monitor. Lots of times things just seem too ... DARK. Pictures. Graphics. The green dot.

So I've devised a little test that may shed some light (no pun intended) on this for me.

Okay, it's ready to go now. Here's what you do:

VERY SLOWLY and VERY CAREFULLY scroll down. You'll see a series of pictures that are just black images. Each is numbered. CAREFULLY scroll down to each one, making sure you're not seeing the next one beneath it, and look carefully at it. At some point, one one of those images, you should be able to see a figure. (It gets more visible on each succeeding image.)

Please note what number that image has, and drop a comment below telling me that.

Okay. Proceed, and indulge me with this little test. Thanks for your help!

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I Think I've Finally Figured Out ... That I'm Fucked ...

(posted August 28, 2011)

Originally, this was supposed to say:

"I think I've Finally Figured Out... just how to work the new Pictures page to get it to work for me."

And here's what this blog was supposed to say:

It's not perfect. It's not ideal. But after a great deal of experimentation, I think I have finally found a way for presenting pictures in a way that will work for me.

I have thousands of pictures that were originally put into (somewhere between 100 and 200) blogs, and I'll now be converting those blogs into "Albums."

In almost all cases, when I made one of those "Photo Essay" blogs, there was a necessity of having the pictures viewed in a particular order. In the Old Wire blogs, that process of viewing pictures in the correct order was a bit more intuitive, and I had a higher level of confidence that the pictures would be viewed as I intended.

After fussing around a bit, creating and deleting numerous test Albums, I think I've found a way to make my Albums pretty foolproof in this regard. I'm pretty sure that the pictures will be viewed as intended.

At least I hope so.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Now, here's the reality:

My hopes are dashed. It would appear that the Albums are listed according to how many images they hold, rather than when they were created. (see the image below)

I'm fucked ...

Not only that, but in the very short time that the first three Albums have been available for viewing, I've found that all of the efforts I've put into trying to find a way to find a means to present pictures in a cohesive, intelligent, organized fashion has totally failed.

I'm fucked ...



I simply have to face the reality of this.

No one else presents pictures in such a way that how they're viewed makes any difference.

This website presents a place for people to dump pictures.

And that's all anyone else requires.

Such is life.




August 28, 2011