BadTomatoes

Olyvia asked me for an explanation of how to get people access to the photos on flickr that are marked as only available to friends/family. I figured this might be of use to others (let us know if you want to see this extra material), so I’ll duplicate it here.

1. If you want to see public photos, just go to http://flickr.com/photos/littlechicken.  Clicking one of the photos at the bottom of this page will also take you there (starting at that photo).
2. If you want to see photos of something, I’m pretty consistent with tagging, e.g. dog, sam, coffee group, adam.  There’s a ‘tag cloud‘ with the most common tags.
3. If you want to see photos that are marked as for friends/family only, anyone can create a free flickr account, and it doesn’t matter if it stays empty (i.e. you don’t put any photos there).  Just go to flickr.com and click the “Create Your Account” button at the top right. When you have an account, they just go to http://flickr.com/people/littlechicken and click the “Add as a contact” link at the top right.  We’ll get an email about this and will reasonably promptly mark you as friend/family and you’ll be able to see everything that isn’t 100% private.

BTW, if anyone ever asks for a photo that they are in (or their kid is in) not to be there, then I take it down.

One last entry for our recent Taupo trip: here’s a short (3 minute) video (33MB, or there’s a 19MB version) of Sam at the playground and having a swim in the resort pool.

The quality’s not great - the video is all taken with the still camera, which takes nice still photos, but pretty terrible video. We took the video camera with us, but taking both out just for a playground trip leads to pretty bulky bags. I have nearly an hour of short clips of Sam playing at home (over the last year) taken with the video camera, which I’ll try to make some short videos from at some point.

The book catalogue software we use (Delicious Library, very highly recommended, but Mac only) just released version 2.0. There are many improvements that will be of no interest to most of you, but two possibly are:

• The scripting support is much stronger. This means that I should be able to re-do my query-by-txt tool so that it is quicker and more reliable.
• It has built-in web publishing. This means that instead of the old dull (but functional) list of books, there’s now a very pretty interface you can use to browse our library. This is using the default template at the moment; I might play around with different ones. There’s also support for browsing friends libraries (assuming they also use Delicious Library), which would actually be really neat if I knew anyone that also had this setup (speak up if you do!).

We had a week-long holiday in Taupo a couple of weeks ago - a Christmas present from (Great) Aunty Beryl. We stayed at Taupo Ika Nui, which was quite nice (certainly very conveniently located, right across the road from the lake, and a very short walk to the shops). The start had a bit of a hiccup - we planned the date for the holiday months ago, but it ended up clashing anyway - Olyvia did a duathlon on Mother’s Day in Mangere, which was two days into hour week-long stay. We ended up deciding that Samuel and I would go to Taupo on Friday as scheduled, and then come back Saturday night, watch Olyvia finish the race, have a mother’s day lunch, and then all go back to Taupo Sunday afternoon.

This worked out reasonably well, except that Samuel and I couldn’t find our way through Mangere (most of the roads we needed to go down were closed; some sort of “spectators this way” signs would have been nice) so missed Olyvia finishing. Then the post-event stuff took forever, and so lunch was very, very late, and so we got back to Taupo later than we would have liked.

The rest of the week was great - we didn’t really do that much: a visit to Craters of the Moon and Huka Falls were about all the tourist-y things we did. We did a little shopping, quite a bit of walking, and Samuel spent a great amount of time at the playground. There was a heated pool (and two spas) where we stayed, so we also spent a reasonable amount of time in the water, despite the time of year.

Unfortunately, for some reason Samuel woke up around 5:30am each morning we were there (he normally sleeps until about 7:15am), and didn’t sleep for that long during the day (and didn’t eat that well either), so we came home rather exhausted rather than refreshed. Thankfully, once we got home his habits reverted to normal, so we’ve recovered (and I’m nearly caught up with work) somewhat now.

Photos from the trip are on Flickr (some were taken with my phone, and some with Olyvia’s phone, so they aren’t as good as ones taken with the camera). There’s also a short (~4 minute) Animoto video (18MB mp4) of the photos (view directly from Animoto).

Here’s a short (~ 2 minutes) summary of Sam in the first quarter of 2008 (or here’s a more relaxed version, if you prefer).

These are somewhat large (17.4MB and 21.4MB) - if anyone wants to see them and doesn’t have that much bandwidth free then let me know and I’ll put up some smaller versions.

(The videos were made with Animoto (”welcome to the end of slideshows”), and the non-classical track features music from The Clintons. Check them both out!)

Update: if you want to sign up for Animoto’s unlimited pass (as many videos as you want to make for a year for US$30) rather than just make 30 second ’shorts’, you can use my code lshxyboj to get US$5 off (and give me 3 months free).