About two weeks ago, when I was checking out my Flickr Stats, which I do everyday because I’m obsessed with the line graph, I happened to see that one of my pictures had 50 views that day. 50 might not sound like a lot for most other Flickr users, but for me 50 is a HUGE amount of views of one picture in a day. I went to see what site the views were coming from and it told me they were coming from the bbc.co.uk website.

Now I thought this we very weird, because the BBC is a big company and why on earth would I be getting clicks from there. I went a little deeper and found it on the BBC Internet Blog on a post about the BBC’s iPlayer for the Nintendo Wii. The odd thing was, my picture, which is of an S-Video port on my laptop, had nothing to do with the Wii. I read through the post and saw that the author was talking about watching shows from your computer on your TV. I thought it was a little weird that my picture got chosen but looking at other first page results from an S-Video search on Flickr, I can see why mine was picked over the others, I just don’t know why a more suitable picture wasn’t chosen.

Well today, the picture made it into my top 10 most viewed pictures on my Flickr photostream. I’m pretty happy my picture got used on the blog site and generated hundreds of views of that picture, but I don’t really care that much. Its nice to have you picture on some biggish website for everyone to see, as long as the picture isn’t crap or humiliating. This is a win for me

Ever since I purchased my Flickr Pro account, I have been using Flickr Uploadr to put my pictures up onto the site instead of using the uploading tool on the site. It is much easier to use because you could just drag and drop pictures from your computers into the application and then just hit the upload button in they will be on the site, easy and quickly. It is so much easier then selecting all the pictures you want to upload through the website.

Recently, they released Flickr Uploadr version 3 and I rushed to get it and play around. My first thoughs were that this beta release still had a few bugs in it. Selecting images and right clicking and choosing “Send To Flickr…” didn’t work as it did in the previous version. It didn’t work at all, the few times I tried to do it that way. The only way I could get my pictures into the new Flickr Uploadr was to open the app and add them in that way. I’m sure this will be fixed and working perfectly when the full release comes.

What this has over the last version is the ability to add metadata to the images so they upload with the image. This means that I don’t have to upload them and go back to the site later to add a title, description, tags and put them in sets and such. All this can be done easily in the application and works perfectly. I have had no issues with it. You can even set who sees the image and the image type as well as easily adding it to multiple sets, including ones that you can create right in the app. This is the biggest feature added to the Flickr Uploadr and is the only reason to use it instead of the older version.

There are some things, other than the bugs, that I would have liked to see added to this. They added the ability to add title and description and such in the app but it would have been nice to have the ability to add those once the picture has started uploading. For the time it would take me to add the information, the picture would have been uploaded by then, instead I have to wait to add the description and then upload the picture. It takes longer for me to do this but shorter than uploading and adding the description on the site later. It would be nice to see them be able to do that but I’m happy with the way it is now.

For the past week, I have been using Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9, codename Minefield. I generally wait till the Beta to try the upcoming version of Firefox but due to the fact I was using a temporary computer with no bookmarks or extensions to break, I decided to give it a good test run. I am extremely happy with a lot of the small changes that I came across in the alpha.

The first apparent change is with the way it handles saving password details. It is so much better than currently in Firefox 2. When you log into a website, there is no more pop-up asking you if you want to save the password for this site. Now it comes up with a small, non intrusive alert message underneath the tab bar. It is better in the fact that you it does not require you to choose an option before you can continue logging on and allows you to select an option after you have logged on to the site. This is great if you are not sure what the password is and lets you make sure you have the password correct before you let Firefox save it.

They have also redone the bookmarks system. This is still in early development and was only added to the alpha about a week or two ago. I haven’t had a good play with it considering I started fresh with no bookmarks. I think that this is going to be way better than the current system, much faster too and display more information. Probably the major thing Places is adding to the bookmarking system is tags. The allows you to easily categorize bookmarks and find/access them. One thing I don’t understand is the reason to star webpages. When you star something it doesn’t bookmark it so I don’t really see the point of it. I am sure there is a reason for it, I just haven’t been told it. I can’t wait to see Places evolve through the alpha and betas of Firefox 3.

The address bar does a little more than it does in 2.0. Now when you type in a query in the address bar, it also shows the titles of webpages and searches them for the query as well as parts of sites. For example if you typed in yum9me in the query bar, it will show the sites in your history that have yum9me in the web address and the title of the webpage. This makes it easier go to pages you already have been too but there is also a disadvantage. Lets say you were going back to a site you visited about about pork and you type “por” in the address bar, included with the site about pork will be any site you have been to with porn in the title and in the URL. That is the disadvantage of the improved address bar but lucky this wouldn’t be a problem for me

Finally, one of the things I love the most is quitting the browser. On the even of you quitting, the message that alerts you that you are closing “x” amount of tabs is a lot more useful. Not only does it alert you, it now gives you options. You can either quit the browser, save your session and quit or cancel back you didn’t mean to quit. This is very useful in my opinion because it gives you the option to save the session or not. Sometimes I will want all of these tabs to open again next time I open Firefox and sometimes I might want to start a fresh session next time. Well it now gives you the flexibility to do this easily by deciding when you quit. If you don’t need this, there is always the option to never show this message again. I love how the alpha manages quitting in a much more useful way then before.

Well that is my first impressions of the Firefox 3.0 Alpha 9. There is more to it than the things I have mentioned, I just can’t remember some of the other features added and a lot of the stuff will be hidden under the hood. I think Firefox 3 is going to be a great product when it gets released sometime next year. I am looking forward to it. The thing I hate the most about having used Alpha 9 was going back to Firefox 3 and missing some of the cool features. It is a bit like how I feel about Vista, there are some small features in Vista that I really miss when going back and using XP. It’s going to be nice to see how Firefox 3 handles the extensions I use as well as how Places works with the 512kb of bookmarks I have in Firefox.

Twenty days ago I got an email through Flickr saying four of my photos have been short-listed for inclusion in the third edition of Schmap Christchurch Guide, to be published early September 2007. I was pretty excited and honored that my pictures were considered to be included in a random online guide. I sat here for a while waiting for a verdict and to see if my pictures were or were not chosen.

Yesterday I got another email saying two of my pictures were chosen and included in the guide.

I am delighted to let you know that two of your submitted photos have been selected for inclusion in the newly released third edition of our Schmap Christchurch Guide.

I then went to the site to see my pictures included in the guide, with credit to me. You can see the pictures here under the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. It is positioned at the right hand side of the page and you can click the arrows to see both pictures. Most of you guys will be like “So what? Its a stupid little online guide and doesn’t mean crap!” and you can be like that if you want but I don’t care, I’m honored to be in that guide!

I found out today, thanks to Peppery, that all Yahoo!Xtra Bubble users get free Flickr Pro. Of course I had to take up this offer so I quickly registered my families ISP email address to this service, and then made a sub-account for myself. This was a quick exercise and I soon had my own Xtra email address. Now was the time to get my free Pro account.

It wasn’t a problem transferring my Flickr account from my Yahoo address to my Xtra address to get my free Pro account. After I done it, I wonder what happens to that money I spent on my still valid Pro account. Does it just keep counting and expire when it is supposed to, sometime in June? If that is the case, can I get a refund or transfer my time left to someone else?

After a bit of research, it turns out that the Pro status I payed for get put on hold and will continue from where it left of either when I leave using my Xtra address or if the contract between Yahoo and my ISP ends. That gives me a lot of releif as I have not waisted $36 NZD on something that I end up getting free.

Thats all the excitement for ones day, parents getting me an iPod and ISP giving me Flickr Pro. http://flickr.com/photos/yum9me/

Yesterday evening I had planned to watch the lunar eclipse. The 4 days building up to Tuesday were perfect, no clouds and warm weather. On the day of the event, the weather changes, rain and clouds! 30 minutes before the event I went outside to look for the moon. Lucky for me, I could see the glowing ball in the sky. I got the camera set up and took a few pre-eclipse photos of the moon.

Just before the time it was going to start, the clouds came in I couldn’t see the moon! About 20 minutes later the clouds cleared and i saw the moon, being slightly shadowed. I was hopeful of seeing the spectacular event. But no, thing couldn’t turn out right, the clouds came back. Why do the might gods smite me?

As time went by, the clouds didn’t clear. I though I was going to miss out. Just before I was going to call it a day and hit the sack, I looked out the window to see a faint red glow in the sky. It was the moon. As I watched, I could see the clouds around it clear and could see a clear sky, full of stars. I tried to get a picture but I couldn’t hold the camera steady. I needed a tripod. I didn’t get the picture I was looking forward to taking but I guess there is always next time, in 10 years or so.

Here are three pictures I took. Better luck next time.

• Pre-Eclipse
• Shadowed Moon
• Blurry Red Lunar Eclipse

For other people’s pictures of this amazing event, go to the Lunar Eclipse Flickr Group

• Lunar Eclipse - Aug 28th 2007 (Pool)