3 posts tagged “flickr”

Enchilada night was Tuesday, and I first want to apologize for not getting word out in a more comprehensive manner. I tried to contact a number of people at the last minute, but I wasn't very successful. Sorry about that, guys. Anyway, Marian and Jnix were both in town, so naturally Enchiladas were a must. Since neither Jessica nor Marian live here anymore, the shindig went down at my house. I've uploaded the pictures for your perusal:

Enchilada Night Photos

The same photo set is available on Flickr. By the way, I've started using Picasa to upload my photos instead of iPhoto since I found this handy plug-in that lets you upload photos directly from Picasa to Flickr. I personally prefer Google's Picasa to iPhoto, so you if you're on Flickr and you have a Windows machine, I suggest you try it out. Both Picasa and the Flickr plug-in are free.

Instead, you're reading this. Last night, I saw Yo La Tengo for the first time in 6 1/2 years. That's how long it had been since their last time in Houston (and you know I don't go anywhere else). I wrote a review of YLT's 2000 show for Space City Rock. Six years ago I was underwhelmed. Last night, my favorite band in the world reminded why they've been my fave since 1993. The show was nicely balanced between lengthy psych-rock jams and brief, softly sung pop gems. They played quite a few songs from I am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, while mostly avoiding the two preceding albums (Summer Sun, And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out). They did draw heavily from older records, opening with "Double Dare" from 1993's Painful, and adding "Autumn Sweater" and "We're An American Band" from I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One. They even played two from 1990's Facebook.

The only crappy thing about last nights show were a few fans near the front of the stage who kept yelling during the quiet songs and acting like jerks. According to BDM, there was one fan who was yelling all night and giving the "thumbs down" signal every time the band launched into a soft-rock number. Another dude, who was standing near us actually managed to provoke Jordan into telling him to shut up. Now, you know that guy was being an ass.

Anyway, I took some photos, and they're available on my Flickr page. Unfortunately, my best photo was one I took of Times New Viking, the lackluster amateur openers.

times_new_viking4

Speaking of photos, I thought this was worth mentioning again. Last.fm allows you to tag your Flickr photos with a unique, show-specific event tag they give you. Then, Last.fm will automatically pull your photos and display them on a custom page generated just for that show. The Last.fm page for last night's Yo La Tengo show is here, and if you scroll down you'll notice photos from the show (taken by me and others) have already been retrieved. You can see the photos on Flickr here. The implications of this feature are breathtaking, if you ask me. Every show has its own page, and all the photos are in one place. Each show page also has its own message board. For real, Last.fm might be the most useful social networking site there is.

Flickr

One thing I used to hate about blogging or posting photos I found on the internet is that I'd have download the photo, save it, maybe crop or re-size it, and then upload it again. I say used to because you now there are few tools that make it a lot easier to grab a Web photo and save it to Flickr.

For a while, I used a Firefox add-on called Uploadr. With this plug-in you just right click and save it to Flickr. But you couldn't edit the photo before saving. A new Firefox plug-in, Snipshot, improves on this idea considerably by adding a ton of great editing options:

• One-click import from any web site (including Flickr) with our bookmarklet
• Save to a free permanent URL at WebShots or to your Flickr account
• Save as GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG or TIF
• One-click enhance improves most images
• Basic editing tools like crop, rotate, resize
• Basic image adjustments like contrast, brightness, saturation, sharpness and hue
• Unlimited undo and redo (Ctrl+Z and Ctrl+Y, or ⌘Z and ⌘Y on your Mac)
• Nondestructive editing—we always work from the original
• Edit big pictures—up to 10 MB, or 25 megapixels (5000x5000 pixels)
• Import PDF (first page only), EPS or SVG

A few of you (I'm looking at you, Jacob), should find this incredibly useful. Enjoy.

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UPDATE: A few more great things about this tool I want to point out. First, you don't have to install any plug in at all. As the first bullet above suggests, you can use the bookmarklet. When you click, it shows you all the pics on a given page and allows you to choose the one you want to edit and import. Also, you don't have to save it to Flickr (or Webshots). You can also save to your desktop. Finally, you don't have to register to use this tool. Go to the Web site, install the plug-in or save the bookmarklet, and it works perfectly.

One of the best free tools I've seen in a long time.