Month: July 2006

WaMu Unavailable

I’ve tried a couple of times today to pay my bills on line at wamu.com, but every time I try, I am getting an error and I can’t. It is beyond frustrating. I can understand if the site is down outside of business hours (or peak hours), but I would imagine (and I only speculate here) that when the sun is up the most people are making transactions on line. I have a rent check to mail and association dues to pay and I need this service to be up. I’ll check back again tonight, but I shouldn’t have to. It should have worked the first time.

How I Made My Flickr Badge

I recently got a comment asking me how I made my badge on the sidebar of my blog. Instead of responding directly to the e-mail, I figured that I might as well just write it up for future reference.

Step 1: Get your badge made

The first thing you’ll need to do, is head over to Flickr’s Make a Badge page. At the time of this writing, there are five steps that you need to do. Here is what I did on each step:

Step 1
Pick the HTML badge.

Step 2
I chose all of my public photos, but choose whatever fits your fancy.

Step 3
I chose to not display my buddy icon or my user name. I also selected to pick 5 photos (we’ll change this later) that were random and were of the square size. I also selected that I would style this badge myself later.

Step 4
I un-checked the boxes for no background and no border.

Step 5
We’re done… almost. Copy the badge code into your favorite text editor.

Step 2: Edit Output

OK, now we need to play with the code Flickr gave us and we’ll be on our merry way.

The first thing we’ll do is change the number of pictures to be displayed from 5 to 8. To do this look for:
?count=5
and change that to
?count=8
This will be within the script tags (since we’re changing the Javascript). Now, we’ll have 8 pictures displaying in our badge. Of course, you can really pick any number you want to… up to a limit.

Now, Flickr also includes a link back to Flickr.com at the top of the badge. I didn’t really want that, so I deleted it from the produced code. If you’re familiar with HTML, this is an easy find. Basically, you want to remove the a tags and everything inside of it.

Step 3: Personalize

Next, you’ll want to style it. The badge comes with some default styles that you can play with, but if you like the look that I have, I’ve provided the CSS and HTML I used here for your reference.

A Series of Tubes: Remix

Last month, Senator Ted Stevens (R-Alaska) gave a rather stunning speech on the issue of net neutrality, in which he made such clueless statements as: “I just the other day got, an internet was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday and I just got it yesterday,” and “[T]he internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a truck. It’s a series of tubes.”

Now, the good folks at Boldheaded have turned his “skillful fusion of political doublespeak and perplexing ignorance on how the Internet works” into the DJ Ted Stevens Techno Remix: “A Series of Tubes.

You can listen to it on AlterNet. It’s pretty funny and sad at the same time. Tubes? *sigh*

Degrees of Separation on the Internets

So, I’m reading my blogs on NewsGator Online, when I get to an entry by Robert Scoble titled “Flickr Analysis Tool Released“, which leads me to Thomas Hawk’s blog entry about the tool. This then leads me to the actual tool, which is really neat. I enter in my user name and this search result comes up. Way at the bottom there are various links to see who might have linked to some of my pictures, I click on all of them that point to Technorati, and I am looking at the one for “Ryan Prins”, when I see that the top link has my name in an online survey. Curious, I click the link and find out it is the MySpace page of my first girlfriend, Kelly.

Phew, so, yea… how random was that.