Tikkabik

I went a bit crazy with Flickr today and uploaded a ton of stuff that has been gathering dust in iPhoto -- mainly old photo albums that show the kids when they were younger. It's bittersweet -- Bonnie said she wishes we had more video of the kids when they were younger (in truth, I've never been much into family movies, so it's a bit lost on me -- I barely even use iMovie and iDVD). Some of the pictures are lower-res than I would have liked, but there's a lot of cool stuff in there.

One of the coolest Flickr features that I've been making use of lately is moblogging -- I have a camera built in to my phone. It's a simple lens and it only takes a 640 x 480 image, but it does take a pretty decent picture, at least in full light. I've been using it occasionally when I'm out with the kids. So far I've uploaded just shy of a dozen pics that I've grabbed from my phone. Flickr makes it dead simple -- you're assigned an e-mail address to use, and when you send images to that address, Flickr automatically tags them and catalogs them.

Unfortunately, it seems my mail service through my cell service provider (Verizon Wireless) is less than 100 percent reliable -- I tried several times to send this picture this afternoon, and while my phone said the picture was sent successfully, it never showed up. Finally, this evening, it showed up after I sent it again.

The other problem I've come up against is typing with my thumbs. Flickr makes it really simple to moblog: Your subject line is the title of the image, and the body of your message is used as the picture's description. But trying to type a subject and description using the numeric keypad on a phone is a pain in the ass. One day Verizon Wireless will carry a phone with a QWERTY keyboard that I'll want to use, but until then, I'll make do with what I have.