Kees's blog ^pro

This post is a reply to one by Sarah (AKA Half_Jack, AKA Hija de Rebujito) who challenged a number of Ipernitians to tell ten facts about themselves. I have no possibility of filming myself (thank God for that!), so unfortunately you’ll have to do with some text and a few new or unknown pictures.

Forgive me for not passing the assignment to others: I could mention your mom, to put some more pressure on her; otherwise, I fear I don’t know that many people well enough...

1) I am slow. You may have gathered this from the time I needed to answer, Sarah, and it’s true. I feel deeply ashamed. But it also feels good that some are slower.

2) This is where I went to school:

Baarn - Guido de Brès school

It is still called “Guido de Brès School”, but it is more colorful now than it was in my time (this kind of buildings don’t age very well, and attempts to defy age usually fail, as proven here). The sign says it’s a “Christian Elementary School”; it used to be a “School with the Bible” –perhaps to entrap Catholics who weren’t aware that Guido was a Protestant martyr? Though it was already there when I came (in 1960), you can still see that the second floor was added later.

I wasn’t happy there; only kindergarten was worse. My journey through the various educational institutions led me to believe that life just got better, a belief I still haven’t quite given up.

3) I can do this:

MultipleMe

I can do this for hours and hours, depending on the number of cigars available.

4) In my entire life, I have attended two pop concerts, or three –if you’re generous. The first one was more or less obligatory, and I wouldn’t count it: a Golden Earring concert at school (the band had a few hits in the US, too). The second was Paul Simon in 1991; he was on his “Born At the Right Time” Tour, then, and Cora was due some months later, so symbolism was heavy. The last one was a Who concert, in 2007.

TheWhoTickets

BTW, next August I hope to see Eric Clapton and band live.

5) I got involved in some pretty crazy sexual liaisons, ménages à trois and the like, with some scary women, which was all rather sordid.

is what I read in Eric Clapton’s autobiography (p.237, UK edition). I can tell you: I was shocked!

6) In the past, people have thought that I’m

– a girl (I was very little then, and wearing a hooded anorak, but I felt really offended)

– a homosexual (according to the landlady of my future wife)

– the musical clown of Zirkus Krone (it’s hard to recognize someone when he isn’t wearing make-up)

– a famous piano player (famous? yes! a piano player? no!)

– a maniac (walking Robbie, in the heat of the night, I scared a girl to death who had just watched “A Beautiful Mind”; I haven’t seen the movie, and I have no clue how this could happen)

– a Jesus look-alike. Last week, I spent my afternoon break downtown, and a woman distributing flyers told me I looked a lot like Him:

Us

And I don’t even have a beard! Because she didn’t say I actually was Him I refrained from performing a miracle.

7) After not having mastered the guitar (acoustic/electric) and the ukulele, I’m now learning not to play the mandolin. It’s big fun! And because the mandolin has the same tuning as the violin, I eventually won’t be able to play the violin either!

UkululeDelight

8) The only head-banging I have done is after washing my hair, to help it dry. I stopped doing so because of a whiplash.

9) It took me 49 years to get into hospital. I even was born at home (my mother used to be a midwife herself, and put great faith in her profession), but finally a stupid fall on the Maximilianstraße in Munich led to a shattered elbow –diagnosticized three days later when I still hadn’t seen improvement, and visited a doctor. Two surgeries followed, one to fix the fragments, and another one to remove the metalwork. If you study the picture closely (which I cannot recommend) you can see that there are two cuts.

OneThingYouCan’tHideIsWhenYou’…

I pay a fortune for my health insurance, which granted me the services of an orthopedic professor. So the first thing I had to do was sign a document saying that I agreed with someone else doing the surgery, and in the end the professor only removed the stitches (he forgot one, and I had to do a professor’s job myself).

I can’t get my arm quite straight anymore: I’m a cripple ... for 15%, if I remember right. You wouldn’t notice it, though.

10) There are only nine interesting facts about me. When I think of all those people who could go on and on telling interesting things about themselves I feel deeply ashamed...

Oh, I have said that before! Well, at least we have come full-circle!

Ipernity’s Geotagging feature employs Google maps and is clearly superior to ... what we were used to. The hybrid mode, especially, makes identifying motifs a lot easier, and you’ll be able to differentiate between objects which, in real life, are only a few yards apart.

Unfortunately, that’s not all there is to it.

It’s all very fine if your image focuses on only one thing: just taggit! (and don’t ask yourself if it makes much sense to geotag a tulip). But what if there are more? What if there are a great many? Sometimes, you could fix your tag to a single object, if it is prominent enough: the Eiffel Tower or Mississippi River. But you won’t always be as lucky as that.

Suppose you have a panorama shot: it shows the tops of the trees on the other side of the road, the wide valley of the river that happens to flow past your village, and also a chain of mountains far, far away. This example is purely hypothetical, of course.
Now where do you put your tag?

I wouldn’t know. You could use a small scale view of the map, and place the tag where all three elements –trees, valley, mountains– are covered. That wouldn’t satisfy me, but you might argue that you have determined a certain “average”. Alternatively, it could be your own location, if it can be identified. However, this would revalue an habitual location, for instance your balcony, in a way that you may not always be able to choose between the two criteria: you may have shot a particular building both from your balcony and from the street, isn’t it?

I find this all very difficult. Still, though I occasionally do have a bad conscience, I like the feature a lot. Somehow, it puts the obscurest of places on the map (quite literally) and thus ranks them among metropoles. And you also learn something, for instance, where your friends are at home...

I looked up one of my dearest Fl..., no, Ipernity friends. She appeared to live on a crossroads in Evansville, Indiana, probably trying to flag a ride (yes, I know my Robert Johnson!). She hasn’t deserved to live on the street –it really made me sad...

Yesterday, using the “Contact us/Report bugs” link at the bottom of every Ipernity screen, I sent a mail to Support and asked for extra bandwidth so as to be able to transfer all of my Flickr pictures to this place. Only a short while later, Christophe of the Ipernity team notified me that my request had been granted. Bandwidth had been tripled.

To transfer 750+ high resolution pictures would have been virtually impossible without having the GreaseMonkey script. I read it was written in one hour –I wished I could do something in one hour which would make life so much easier for so many people!

So thanks a lot, Christophe and Ipernity, for your efforts to make us feel at home! We really do appreciate!

Kees

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I had a nightmare, last night. I was signing up to Flickr, and Flickr was called “Flickr beta”. I shook my head. Looking again, I saw the name had changed to “Flickr gamma”. I closed my eyes with confusion, and when I opened them there was yet another change: “Flickr loves you”.

Then I finally woke up, bathing in sweat.

I’m sure this has nothing to do with our present situation, but beware when you log in, one day, and find Ipernity spreading the news that it loves you!

So this is where we meet again.

I won’t give up Flickr entirely: one has certain obligations, mainly to the AlphaSmart group (www.flickr.com/groups/alphasmart), but also to the three people who told me they like the Icking pictures (www.flickr.com/groups/icking). I’ll hardly renew my Pro account, though, which means that Flickr can’t serve for backing-up my original photos anymore.

Are Stewart, Heather, and the other members of the Flickr staff bad people? I don’t think so. As far as I’ve read their explanations I’m inclined to accept them. Though their intentions may have been “good”, they were remarkably naive in thinking that a German localization would outweigh the loss of pictures, your own pictures and those of your friends. And I blame them for ineffectiveness and the consequence of destroying a community. The “Flickr community” as a whole never meant much to me, but I do care about my personal deminutive community on Flickr, and they have destroyed that one too: some Kees club members stay, some move away. It will be hard not to lose any. And it will certainly be a hassle.

What also disturbed me is the display of anticipatory obedience (vorauseilender Gehorsam): the German government has done nothing to warrant the measures taken. There are legal regulations to protect people from certain contents –child porn and other aberrations of the sick mind–, but most of these contents weren’t allowed on Flickr in the first place. As far as I can see, the only field where regulations may be more strict in Germany than elsewhere is the celebration of violence and nazi symbols. If Flickr.de would dispense with that, just with that, there would have been no uproar, I think. As it is, many harmless pictures are classified as unsafe. I grant filtering pictures must be hard, given the large number of uploads, but Flickr members are entitled to –let’s call it: just censorship.

True, you can always open a Yahoo.com account, link your Flickr account to that, and everything will be alright. Alright? When many familiar people don’t think so and take their leave? Besides, it is true: what happens on Flickr.de today, may happen on Flickr.com tomorrow... It may even happen on Ipernity. God forbid.

PS: I’m no blogger by nature, and if I post I’m not sure which language I’ll choose. It may be English (EN), German (DE), or Dutch (NL). I promise it won’t be French.