In my Lifetime?

I doubt it...

I once attended a presentation where they said it would take a generation to adopt a dramatic new technology. People of the 1900's would rather mail a letter than use a telephone.

Well I am from the generation of Computer Scientists, from 30 years ago when computers weren't used by people, pre-PC. The next generation saw a the birth and rise of PCs, but many, although they are required to use them in their daily work, are completely ignorant of how to do so. On the one hand, what's the big deal, its not like its a bulldozer and they'll knock a building down, on the other hand, ignorance of proper auditing of spreadsheets have devastated companies finances. So I submit that there really is not much difference between the two hands.

Use vs. Expertise

Back in my day, when computers weren't really meant for people, there was only one kind of "Computer Person", an expert. No floatees, no shallow end, only a deep end, sink or swim, be an expert, or don't use a computer. The advent of PCs, made computers accessible to "Regular People" who used them. These "Users" got better and some thought they were good enough to be called computer people.

This is the natural progression of a technology. Think of the corollary with cars... Early cars required a lot of skill, manual shifting, maintenance, etc. Today there are many drivers, but few are "car people" that could service their car unassisted. In time the blur of "people" goes away again and you can tell the difference between the users and experts. Of course there are "weekend mechanics" masquerading as experts too.

Know How to Use It

The computer keyboard is similar to a typewriter, and for some people, that's as much of a computer as they understand. Click to open something and then just type. Thank God they don't apply that kind of limited skill to driving. Open the door and step on the gas - LOOK OUT!

The computer has applications that are designed to do various tasks and have a right way and a wrong way to use them. You can drive a car on a wide sidewalk, but its not a good idea for the pedestrians.

Use the Right Tool

Let's look at some popular tools - Word, Excel, PowerPoint. You can type in everyone of them, but each one of them has a different purpose and an optimum way to use it.

If you are doing lots of calculations, Word and PowerPoint are not good choices. If you are writing a book or manual, Excel and PowerPoint are not good choices. You could, and some do, use the wrong tool, but it isn't pretty.

GIGO - Garbage In / Garbage Out

Back in the day, we all understood GIGO. I don't hear it much anymore, but its as valid today as it was back in my day. Another way to say it would be "Use the Tools Properly". So picking the right tool isn't good enough, you must use it properly.

Let's say you have lots of calculations to present, you'd pick Excel. But you need to design a good spreadsheet, include input boundary checking, cross sums, use the audit tools. And for Heaven's sake let Excel do the calculation. Moron Lawyer's I've dealt with, got out their legal pad and calculator, did a bunch of calculations, typed the results in a spreadsheet and the most they used of excel is the =SUM() function. That's garbage in, that's misuse of Excel. You know why? Because the first time someone makes a mistake copying a result from the yellow pad, or miscalculated it in the first place, or decides to update something, the spreadsheet will show invalid results.

Many people don't seem to know the difference between Word and Notepad. They just type and insert lots of blanks or line spaces to position text on a page. This is extremely inefficient, especially if the document needs to be maintained or used in an electronic fashion. People who do this would be better off with a typewriter.

Sure Word has tons of features you may not want to bother with, but paragraph styles, tables, and outlines must be used for anything more than two paragraphs. Paragraph styles and tables allow easy positioning and appearance changes. And don't use just one, use one for each distinctive use, they're free. Outline is a powerful feature we all (should have) learned in early school to brainstorm, build, and rearrange thoughts.

Think it doesn't matter? Do you remember dot matrix? Not acceptable! Now poor use of tools is less obvious than poor appearance, but it has a larger impact. I long for the day that people's poor use won't be acceptable. It will only take a few costly errors to get people to sit up and take notice.

Weakest Link

Just because it came from a computer doesn't make it right. Computers do what people tell them, so don't ever accept the "computer did it" bullshit excuse. A person did it. If you see some numbers scribbled on a yellow pad or numbers on a crisp color laser, which are more accurate? Depends on the person who produced them. YES, people can tell the computer to miscalculate numbers, just like they can miscalculate them, or miswrite them.

Am I being theoretical, nope, I've seen it. How? I don't ask for computer printouts, I have several printers in my home office. I ask for it in its native format, Word or Excel, not PDF. That's how you can see errors, and inefficiencies in the work product you are paying for.

Not Computer People

Some people, resistant to change simply say they are not computer people. Do you drive a car, make toast, use a calculator or pencil? Well a computer is just another device. Its hard to escape them these days, so we are all computer users. We can't drive on sidewalks, put our hand in a hot toaster, punch the wrong keys on a calculator or stab people with a pencil. There are right and wrong ways to use a computer too.

"I just don't do computers" is a poor excuse, and admission of ignorance. I hired a lawyer for $300 / hour, he thinks he's a lawyer not a computer person. Well he made multiple $10,000 + errors (see my DRD blog for lawyers are math morons) because he didn't use a spreadsheet properly. He produced an unmaintainable legal document that governs my son's custody for the next 10 years. In a decade it will be updated several times, but not before I spend considerable time to format the document they way it should have been done in the first place.

Now divorce lawyers get paid, regardless of their mistakes and inefficiencies, they have no incentive to do it right the first time. Notice the difference in a large contingency litigation firm or corporate legal team who is only paid on results. They are all computer literate and have a computer support group. Why? They understand the cost / benefit of efficient use of computers.

The Computer Didn't Do it

Computers don't do anything, people tell computers what to do, and they do what they are told. Because the technology hasn't been fully embraced people erroneously blame problems on computers. Some day people will realize that there are people behind the errors and they will start demanding higher quality in their software products. They can start with Microsoft.

There is Hope

My son's school curriculum has finally integrated technology into all activities. I used a slide ruler (yeah I'm old), he uses Excel, I drew graphs, he uses Excel, I used a typewriter, he uses Word, I used the library, he uses the Internet.

I used a chemical darkroom, even for color, and he has seen it. It won't be long before he is using PhotoShop and GIMP.


Status: Second Draft - Last Updated 09/12/09 1 am

Photobucket Slideshow in Blogger Post

As I mentioned in the first Photobucket tips, one way to use a slide show is with the blogger sidebar layout element, another is to use the Photobucket slideshow feature which generates a flash object that is static and remains unchanged.

While using the second feature in my new Spammed Humor Blog, I noticed a couple technical situations that are worth mentioning. After you have created your slide show you can either click Share SlideShow and let Photobucket create the blogger entry or you can copy the Blog HTML code and paste it where you want in your blogger post. This gives you the option to add text, several slide shows and to tailor the buttons.

The Web code consists of the following groups all strung together

DIV - this encapsulates the slide show
EMBED - this contains the Flash slidehow object
A & IMG SRC - this is takes the person to photobucket to create their own slideshow
A & IMG SRC - this takes them to photobucket and displays the slide show there
/DIV - this ends the encapsulation

The first thing you will find (as of now, if it changes, please comment) is that the EMBED is missing the clossing /EMBED that should be located before the first A (anchor). You will need to add this or you will recieve a blogger error when you attempt to publish.

Now here are a couple of my ideas that you can use or not.

• The first button is more of a photobucket advertising, it really doesn't help your readers, I deleted it.
• The second button is labeled View all photos, but that's a little misleading, it takes you to photobucket which is useful to have more options in displaying the slideshow and it puts you in the same subalbum.
• It seems to me that there should be two buttons, one to display the slideshow on photobucket and one to show you the photos one at a time.
• To do this you need to duplicate the second A & IMG SRC & /A group. Replace the HREF= with the first URL from the first slide image. Also put blank lines before each A & IMG SRC & /A group so they begin on new lines.
• Now you have two buttons looking the same, so on the first one add the text "In a Slide Show" before the /A., then on the second group add "One at a time" before the /A.
• When loading the photos to photobucket, you will want your first slide first, so load them in reverse order to achieve this. Then when they see the first slide they can simply click Next.
• This assumes that the slides were loaded in order. If they were not, then Replace the 2nd HREF= with a pointer to your subalbum and let the person browse the whole subalbum as they choose.

Take a look at this post to see an example of the finished product.
The first Photobucket Tips post is here. The rest are on this blog with the label PhotoHost.

Photobucket tips # 3

Photobucket has made some more changes you should know about.

Need Adobe Flash 9

In order to use the Grid and Slideshow views, photobucket now requires Adobe Flash 9. This is a free download and it installed into my latest version of Firefox and restarted smoothly. I don't know if I like this newest Grid view as much as the first Grid view. It loads slower on a lower speed link. I thought the older one displayed the description too, and the Flash version doesn't display it. There is a slider bar underneath the views in the upper right corner. This adjusts the size of the photos. As you adjust the slider to smaller photos, the title disappears and you just have photos.

The SlideShow shows a filmstrip on the bottom showing many thumbnails instead of just two (previous and next). It also shows the title (like Grid), and the description. This allows each photo to be bigger than the photos used in the grid.

There is a new link now shown at the bottom right of the web page so a user can be sent directly to that view. By clicking on it, it copies the link to the clipboard so you can paste it into an email or blog post/comment. The link contains a "?albumview=xxx" suffix.

Many display options

So now you have five view options, the three albumviews listed on top and two enlarged views:

• Links -
• Grid -
• Slideshow -
• Enlarged -
• Full Size -

Many slideshow options

And as if things were not confusing enough from my first photobuck tips post in my JQ's life blog, now you have the added albumview slideshow. So now we have,

• Dynamic slideshow albumview -
  
• Static slideshow -
  
• Shared static slideshow -
  
• Blogger Slideshow Layout Element -
  

Uploading

The standard upload process has changed, rather than three or more uploads at a time, you just keep adding files without titles and it will upload them in a batch and give you a progress indicator on each of them. You also have the option of what size you want the files to be after upload. When the uploading is complete you are taken to the "add tag and description" page for the uploaded photos. Five(???) medium size photos are displayed per page with room to add titles, descriptions, and tags. The updates are saved when you move to the next field to update it. This feature seems to be more reliable than in the past.



Status: Rough Draft - Last Update 04/20/08 10 AM

Layout Element Dragging

Nearly all of my Blogger tips I give will relate to the current Blogger with Layouts, the Blogger Classic with Templates is not used as much anymore.

Oddly this layout did not have a header. So I added a header to the sidebar and dragged it toward the post and above it and it anchored there. It isn't above everything, just the posts.

Vexing Vista

PLACEHOLDER

If you don't do much with windows, if you have all the software you want loaded on the PC and aren't coming from XP, then maybe Vista is OK.

But many of us have used PCs for some time and we have software licenses. Vista is incompatible with lots of things so now you can pay to upgrade everything. Their some attempted improvements but Microsoft remains out of touch with the typical user who just want to run their software, they don't want to be forced into some new look and feel, to upgrade all their software and hardware, and to hunt for familiar things that are buried in new and hidden places.

My biggest gripe is Microsoft picks an arbitrary date and all new PCs come with the new OS and you have to special order your PC to get the old OS.

PhotoBucket Tips #2

My first PhotoBucket Tips was done on my other Blog, but I decided to move popular technology (geeky) posts here. There are pros and cons to combining or splitting blogs, hopefully this will work out.

Photobucket Blog

If you use photobucket you may want to keep up on what's going on. Photobucket maintains a blog here, and it also has an RSS feed you can subscribe to so you can be automatically notified of new posts.

Two Feeds

When I first talked of using a photobucket RSS feed for the Blogger Slideshow Layout Element in my first post there was only the album feed. Since then another "account" feed has been added to cover all subalbums. I find this a little less useful than the orginal subalbum feed, but depending on how you use your album, maybe you will find it useful. My main purpose is to point out their differences so you select the one that fits your purpose.

New Views

In the upper right corner is a choice for selecting views. The first view "Links" is what has been available for some time. The other two new views "Grid" and "Slideshow" are interesting and useful.

Links View

This is the view that has been available for sometime. It is the only view that allows you to upload photos and contains link code. Personally I think this view is less useful for your viewers since they may be more interested in looking at your photos, with titles and hopefully descriptions rather than seeing a group of links displayed.

Grid View

I think this should be the new default view that people use to view albums. It does not contain link code, but has more room for titles and contains the description. Well I spoke too soon, Photobucket updated this feature, they removed the description and if you use the slider to make the photo smaller you will loose the title too. It uses Flash now, rather than straight HTML, so it loads slower and looks prettier. I guess its a wash on how you might feel about this view.

Slideshow View

The Slideshow view is nice, you simply select it and each photo is shown in turn with its title and description a filmstrip underneath gives you an idea of photos coming up. Now that some benefits of the Grid view have been removed, you may like this as your default view.

EXIF Data

EXIF data is captured by your camera and stored in the JPEG file. Photo enthusiasts may be interested in what camera, lens, flash status, etc you used to take your photo. Some EXIF data is displayed under the photo when you select a single photo to display. This used to be labeled as EXIF, but now it is labeled as "Show Details". Clicking this will show more of the EXIF data.

h4

xxx

Practical Use

I have implemented what I feel is a very practical use of photobucket and the blogger slide show layout feature. I have a subalbum where I upload new photos. The blogger slide show layout element will dynamically display whatever is in that subalbum. When people view my JQ's Life blog they see new photos in the sidebar. After they have been there a while or when I have a new group to upload I use go to the subalbum and I can either select all and move to another holding subalbum or I can go through the new photo subalbum and determine which subalbum will be the permanent home of the photo and move it there. After I have emptied out the subalbum, then I upload the new photos.

Status: Last Update 04/20/08

The first Photobucket Tips post is here. The rest are on this blog with the label PhotoHost.

Photobucket tips

I implemented a new feature of blogger on the sidebar called slideshow. Like most features from Blogger it isn't quite finished, but i figured out how to get it to work, despite that there are no help files or blogger employees answering questions on the support forum.

This will be a convenient way for me to display new photos before I put them into their final album or use them in a post. If you hover over the slide show a back/pause/forward buttons will display. You can also double click on the photo to enlarge it, but it will not show the extra photobucket things like EXIF, Tags, or the other albums. To see that, go directly to the photobucket account using the link in the sidebar. The sidebar slideshow is in the "SS JQsLife" subalbum.

Blogger SlideShow Layout Element

Some photo hosting sites have widget features that generate a bunch of HTML/embed/javascript code, which can easily be botched up. For those using the layout feature of the new blogger, then can simply add the slideshow element to the sidebar. it appears that if you use Picasa from Google it may work, but if you use another photo server their is no place to enter your album information.

I use photobucket and the trick is to use the media rss feature with the Other provider. In photobucket go to the subalbum of your choice and look in the lower left for the rss feed, which is similar to your photobucket URL, but prefixed with "feed" and suffixed with "feed.rss". Copy this link. Select Other in the drop down box, paste this into the feed.

That's it, no fooling with javascript, no redoing your slide show and repasting, its done on blogger. Now simply add or delete photos in the subalbum and your photo slideshow will dynamically be updated via the rss feed.

Photobucket Tags

Usually when we think of tagging we think of tagging the whole entity (photo or post). In photobucket tagging refers to a portion of the image. When you tag a photo, a small square appears in the center of the photo and it can be resized and repositioned to tag a portion of the photo. Multiple tags can define multiple areas in a photo.

You can find the tagged photos by clicking on the tag list on the album page. When you are on a tagged photo you can use it in one of two ways. You can hover over a tag in the tag list under the photo and the rectangle will highlight over the area of the photo. You can also hover over an area of the photo and a bubble will open with the name of the tag.

One very popular use could be to identify people in group photos. Clicking on their tag will highlight them in the photo. Hovering over them will open a bubble with their name.

There is new embed code that will appear for a photo that has been tagged which is supposed to allow it to be shown in a blog. I have not worked with this yet.

Photobucket Descriptions

Now you can add multi-line descriptions to your photos. The best way to take advantage of these new description or tag features is to check the desired photos in the album page and then click TAG SELECTED at the bottom. This will show multiple medium size photos that can be tagged, described, or re-titled. You may want to shorten your title and include the detail in the description.

Posting Photos

Blogger allows using hosted photos by putting in the URL (photobucket Direct Link) of the photo. But when you click on the photo it will show you just the enlarged photo only.

With a little editing of the HTML, you can show the photobucket page which will show you other interesting things like the album, EXIF, Tags, Title and new multi-line description. Photobucket has another form of URL called Email & IM, this points to the Photo page, but if you use it in blogger it won't show the photo unless you edit the HTML.

There are two links in the HTML, one is HREF= that points to where you will be taken if you click on the photo and SRC= that points to where the photo is. So if you use the Email and IM link then you can jump to the page with the photobucket info with the HREF=. But the SRC= has "?action=view&current=" that needs to deleted for the photo to show up properly in the Blogger Post.

Another item you may want to adjust in the HTML is the <img style="width: nnn px;" where nnn is the width of the photo.

Sharing Photobucket Albums

This feature displays the most current photo and then has a link to the photobucket album. This is done by selecting the Share button. The code generated tends to be too wide, so the table width needs to reduced and an additional parm needs to be added to the SRC= for the photo "width=narrower" to allow for margin of the photo. This photobucket feature does not seem worth the trouble.

The same thing could be accomplished by using the Blogger Post Photo feature with the Photobucket Direct Link (rather than the Email & IM Link mentioned above) and then changing the HTML for the HREF= by deleting "xxxxx.jpg" where xxxxx is the name of the photo. Clicking on the photo will then take you to the album page.

Sharing Photobucket SlideShows

A photobucket slideshow can be viewed at the photobucket site or using the Share feature it can be added to a post on Blogger. The first step is to select the Create Slide Show button to the left and then drag photos into it. This is different from the Blogger Layout Feature in that it is statically defined. Changing the slide show means going to Photobucket, generating a new slideshow and its code and making a new post. This slideshow can have custom frames, watch for this option to the left of the slide show window.

Sometimes this slideshow can be too wide for your blogger post. There also should be a way to find the slideshow URL so you can send the reader to Photobucket to see a specific slideshow, where they will also have the option to see your other slide shows.

Photobucket Summary

Photobucket is one of several possible photo hosting sites, others include Picasa, Flickr, and Webshots. Photobucket allows an unlimited number of photos to be stored in public or private albums. The free service limits the size to 1024 x 768 pixels. Ifranview is a great tool to view your photos, crop, or resize them. Picasa incorporates local viewing of photos with an integrated connection to the hosting site. Flickr allows you to post your copyright preference and have other users comment on them but has a limited number of photos on its free service.


Status: This post was originally published in my personal JQ's Life Blog but has been copied here where the rest of Popular Technology issues will be addressed. It was last updated 12/17/07 3 am . Many PhotoBucket comments are still made to the original post as it is in the Google Help files.