Holy Moly It's E-Mail Hell!

My first multiply.com mistake? My e-mail alerts settings. I got e-mail alerts for each entry posted by all my contacts. Each blog entry, each photo album, each comment, every single entry imported to multiply from 360° by all of my contacts. It was hundreds upon hundreds of e-mails. So ... the first multiply lesson learned is to turn off those damned e-mail alerts!!

"How do you do that?" you may ask, well I'll tell you. If your inbox is getting inundated with multiply alerts click the "my account" link at top right of any multiply page then click "My E-mail Alerts". I highly recommend unchecking the "Posts by my contacts" option and keeping it that way for a while. If you leave it schecked you'll get a separate e-mail for everything any new contact imports from another blog plus everything new.

My latest round was a total of 171 mails, and that was at least the third time. Screw that!! Once most everyone has migrated to multiply or wherever else they are going to go I'll turn them back on ... maybe. They all show in your Multiply Inbox when you log in anyway.

M.O.T.A.S. - Puzzle Game From Hell

If you like a challenge and have time to kill try M.O.T.A.S.. It's room after room, each requiring that you solve some sort of puzzle or challenge before you can exit and proceed to the next.

Yahoo 360° Closing

Yahoo! has announced that they are closing down 360° early next year. They aim to make a universal profile to replace all the different ones currently used. Yahoo! claims that none of your content like contacts and blogs will be deleted but it is Yahoo! we're talking about here.

So now it's time to find a substitute, either as a backup plan or on a more permanent basis if you're fed up with Yahoo! and their inability to consistently offer services and/or make them work correctly. The three I hear the most are MySpace, Facebook and Multiply.

MySpace is kind of a pain in the ass. It generally seems to take multiple clicks to get anywhere or find anything. They've made it easier to customize your pages but overall it's still not all that easy to control how your page looks. Most customization requires you getting code from a non-MySpace site and pasting it in. Blog privacy options are good, each entry can be set individually unlike 360°. You can make photo albums and all that, but it's nothing special. I have a MySpace page but I never use it.

Multiply is much better in my opinion. Customizing is easier, there are several premade themes you can pick from and user groups onsite with thousands more. You can easily hide and restore content modules on your page or drag and drop to rearrange them. There are multiple privacy levels ranging from specific users all the way up to everyone. Blog entry sharing options can be set individually per entry. What I like most is that everything is easy to find, when you log in you are taken to a page that shows you updates from all of your contacts, or if you choose it can show just yours, or those from contacts of your contacts, etc... You also have control over how these are displayed to you. One huge plus is that Multiply has a couple of Import tools for 360°. One enables you to import your blog entries with almost no effort. You lose the comments but your blog entry is preserved, html and all. Another tool enables you to invite any or all of your 360° contacts to Multiply in a couple quick easy steps. Overall I much prefer the look and feel of Multiply.

Boooo Flickr!

   I'm already sick of Flickr, my introductory free PRO account is about to expire and when it does I'm only allowed to have 3 sets (albums). All the photos remain but the ability to organize them goes away. It seems pretty stupid to make people look through a couple of hundred photos to find ones they may be interested in seeing. 

Flickr doesn't allow you to reorganize the Photostream either so you're stuck with showing that in the order that the pictures were downloaded unless you manually edit the upload date of every photo one at a time. You can't even put a slideshow of your Flickr photos on a blog, they don't offer any such option. Screw Yahoo! for shutting down their own Photos service and leaving us with this as the alternative, the hunt is on for a new photo sharing site.

MyPhotoAlbum.com was my first try. Joining was easy, and figuring things out seemed easier than in Flickr. Drawbacks are that free accounts can't show the full sized originals, have limited ability to post slide shows in blogs and the code they provide does not function in Yahoo! 360° (then again, what does?). It does work in MySpace just fine though.

Does anyone out there know of any good free photo storage/sharing sites without these limitations?

Slack Blogging, Again

I admit it, I'm a sucky blogger. I'm way overdue and have been slacking. Let's see, what interesting things do I have to report?

   Back in August I met up with Mark and Nicole and got to see some of Pittsburgh. We went to the Phipps Conservatory and were fortunate to have our visit coincide with an art exhibit featuring the works of glassblower Dale Chihuly. There were hundreds upon hundreds of his pieces all tucked in and arranged amongst the plants in the conservatory. For once I even took pictures!!

We rode a tram thingy up some steep freaking hill, I kept trying to scare Nicole or make her turn green but she wasn't very cooperative, the party pooper. When we got to the top the view was awesome, Pittsburgh was all spread out in front of us on the other side of the river. We capped it off with dinner and games at Dave and Buster's. All in all it was an enjoyable day, I hope we can do it again sometime soon.

September, not a lot went on except the beach trip I mention in my last entry. The sunburn got progressively worse, I guess it was sun poisoning. My legs ended up a dark purplish color and so swollen that I had no ankles. I had pregnant woman cankles! I eventually peeled and after a month it's finally about gone. I'll probably be needing a melanoma screening after this one, I should probably get one anyway after all the bad sunburns I've had throughout the years. Ahh the joys of being fair skinned.

This week I was lucky enough to be able to spend a day with Dee. She got to watch me get a bs ticket from a semi-literate traffic cop (real cop wannabe) who appeared to have been at least partially lobotomized. We checked out Baltimore's Inner Harbor, and although most everything I wanted to do was closed due to the limited fall schedule we still managed to have a good time. I think Dee was glad about one closure, she looked kinda green at the thought of going to the Observation Deck on the 27th floor of the World Trade Center. I don't know why, it's only 420 feet up

I amused us while we enjoyed lunch on an outdoor patio by staging food fights amongst the multitude of pigeons and sparrows which were hanging around. Those little sparrows kicked the pigeons' asses and almost always got the food. Go underdogs! Or is that underbirds? Afterward we walked up to the top of Federal Hill and hung out for a while enjoying the view of the harbor area. I'm hoping we can do it again, this time when everything is open, lol. I tried to get some pictures but something must have been wrong with my camera, it seemed to only be able to take pictures of the palm of her hand or various hand gestures. Go figure!!

I am number one, she said so!

What else? Oh yeah, I got a snow blower!! Shoveling shit loads of heavy snow will now be a thing of the past! If I were anywhere near coordinated enough to pull it off without hurting myself I'd be doing the happy dance. I think that's about it, nothing else to report. Until next time ....