A Geeky Observation: Laity Farm Revisited

Michael at Laity Farm
[photo by gail on the web]

OK, I go on and on about Flickr on this site, but for the sake of comparison let me demonstrate how superior the Flickr compression engine is versus Blogger's.

Have a look at this photo of my nephew Michael, taken in October 2002, when he was 2 years old.

Now, take a look at the same image (opens in new window), uploaded to this site in 2002 via Picasa/Hello!/Blogger. It looks pretty muddy, doesn't it?

Exactly one year after I took Michael by himself when he was two, Allan and I took Melissa, Michael, and Maddy to Laity Farm: October 6, 2003 -- and the image looks no better there.

Now, if only Flickr would pay me a commission! What can I say? --I'm a happy customer.

Speaking of geeky, I've been re-jigging and re-organising my hard drive over the past couple of days and it's a never-ending project. I've had my 17" 80GB PowerBook for a year now, and I managed to get down to less than 10% of capacity. The photo and video files from May-July ALONE were nearly 8GBs! Yikes! I was shooting almost every day in Vancouver this past summer; it was probably my most prolific shooting spree ever.

I've got an external firewire drive that I've been schlepping back and forth across the continent, backing up directories in Vancouver, Toronto, and here -- basically whenever I dumped a lot of data on the computer and was on the move. But much of that was done in a hurry, not in the methodical way that I prefer, so I'm taking some much-needed filing time to deal with it before I tempt fate any further. The prospect of hard drive failure without proper backup makes me twitch just writing about it.