Looking for places to store pictures

Since Typepad and my initiated seperation, I have been looking for alternate places to store my photo albums to share with friends et. I mean everyone wants to look at my 1000s of pictures of my dogs, right?

So there is myspace, facebook (no idea how to direct this to MY facebook LOL), and flickr that I am toying with. The advantages of myspace and facebook is that if you have friends and family already on there, you can share your photos without sharing everything else. It's just a quick cute little tool for sharing and storing what you are up too, without potentially giving out too much info (TMI).

I find facebook a bit confusing in other areas, but the photo upload is super easy, and you can hold 60 photos in an album. I haven't figured out whether the albums are limited or not!! Flickr seems easy to use to, need to look into it more. Myspace allows you to make slideshows, but the whole thing is slightly confusing.

Anyhow, that's what my geek techy side has been doing lately.

And you know those great photos that come up on your screen saver, but you actually can never find. I found that the Windows Media Player allows you to pull up all photos WITH the dates they were downloaded. It's been easier for me than doing a computer search and everything is just sort of jumbled together.

Finally Figured Out Box.net As You Can See

It's a bit slow in downloading the files, and the computer I am at allows me to edit more, et. Since it's free and cool, I will try not to complain too much, however .

Some day this will all cost money, sigh. I hope they at least consolidate storage companies (pictures, videos, music) so you aren't paying for each service. In the meantime, love these people that allow us to borrow their technology and storage space.

And I do hope it profits them at some point, but just don't want to pay more than I already do for technology LOL.

Thursday Thirteen-Thirteen Services I use to Post My Blog

Here are thirteen services I use to promote and publish my blogs:

1. Well blogspot of course. The only downside to typepad is there is no photo album!! However, there is also no fee, and no hyjinx with billing. I hate typepad, and I love blogspot. As soon as I get all my typepad stuff over here, they are gone!!
2. Feedburner. This is what gets your blog out there to various services. It also foots posts that you program on blogspot's site feed to your blog. There can be some fun had there, let me tell you .
3. Technorati. Not sure exactly what this does, other than puts my blogs on yet another service, which is not a bad thing. Also let's me customize tags for my blog as a whole. BE CAREFUL WITH THIS ONE, IT WILL POST YOUR REAL NAME ON EVERYTHING. SERIOUSLY. DON'T ASK HOW I KNOW THIS, BUT IT'S HOW MY FAMILY FOUND MY SITE!!! WHOOPS. OH, IT ALSO POSTS YOUR USER ID, SO DON'T USE YOUR NAME, UNLESS YOU WANT TO BE FOUND. LIKE MY BUSINESS USES MY NAME:)
4. Google Video (used to be video egg or YouTube). Course this has had many glitches lately so in the meantime I have gone back to Youtube. Video Egg has gone commercial as in advertising, and you can no longer store your misc videos on there.
5. YouTube, a great place to store your video. Pretty easy to use as well, once you figure it out. You can also upload your video now right to blogspot, but I think there was a glitch so I stopped for awhile. Or I couldn't figure out how to have that video recognized elsewhere.
6. Yahoo images, to get those great cute cartoons on my blogs that I do not do or own myself.
7. http://mainepets.mainetoday.com/, is an alternate source for my dog training blog. It is peopled by mostly purely positive dog trainers and other professionals, and other people looking. So it's a great venue to get an alternative point of view out. Course, you can tell they are completely one sided, and I will likely never be a "featured" blogger no matter how much I contribute.
8. Sitemeter, so I can see who is visiting. Hahaheehee. Also to be very impressed with how much my visitors have grown, and that people seem to identify with the same, yet not much talked about, situation that I am in.
9. Livejournal. I can't remember why, but when I need it, I remember why!!! Do not use this that much, I suspect there is a blog there I frequent that required membership.
10. Google, I use the bookmark feature to store the blogs that I like to frequent.
11. Typepad, refusing to use for anything else other than to transfer my records over!!!
12. Blogroll. I also don't remember why. (Oh, whoops, okay it's because I found MyBlogLog that puts readers on your blog of the most recent kind, and catelogs blogs that you frequent)I think it's to be able to post other blogs you like on your website or as you add them. However, I haven't been able to really figure it out yet. Apparently there is also Blogrolling, of which I am also a member, and see where I can add the code.
13 Box.net I keep trying to figure this out. This is a service where you can share music downloaded to your computer on your blog or website!! There is a Pink song that I have wanted to put on THIS website for awhile. "You're just like a pill, instead of making me better you're making me ill." Pretty much says how I feel about certain members of my family!! Well not any more, the no contact thing has made me better ie not taking the pill.

Typepad Is Holding My Money Hostage

Middle Aged Princessis moving this blog to this new blogspot address..

Typepad is a service that I have used for a couple of years now. I haven't been entirely happy with them as they say you are paying the "pro" charge for a certain space of storage for files that you can never upload. Then they began hiding that info in the account, so you wouldn't know how much you were not getting.

So they prebill years, and that's fine. Last year they collected two years of payments from me erroneously. I was fine with that, as I saw my account page showed me up to date until June 2009. Then the end of June comes, AND MY ACCOUNT IS SHUT OFF. I explain what happens, and the accounting/customer service department starts talking to me like I am the idiot. I just love that, and they are not listening.

From June 19th until June 24th, they insist there is no fax number or e-mail to send billing documents to, but that you need to upload. What a perfect opportunity to demonstrate how the upload tool DOES NOT WORK. Yeah, good luck with that.

So after having to send several nasty messages to customer service, I finally get the e-mail that I needed. Course they send over the wrong one first, and then taunt me that if I send it by fax it will just take longer. I have very rarely had such bad service before. I can assure you, that I have never done business with the company again that gave it to me.

So I send the the pdf file with all of the credit card info, they can't find the e-mail for two more days. By the time they do, they claim they can only see one page of a 9 page pdf. Fine, I start sending them it page by page. Now the story is the file was damaged, they couldn't read it at all, but brought in a team of experts that worked on it for 30 seconds, and bingo they have the info that they need.

Course now they are refusing to refund me the money, even if I cancel the service and they can't deliver the service that I am paying for. So I will now commence my daily posting on this blog of exactly this statement for every day of service. You know, you just don't want to piss me off in this way.

Technology Bitch

So I got behind on all my blogs, thanks to Norton Fing Virus software. See, I didn't see the sense in renewing my subscription for 50.00 a year. I was looking for another software to replace (which I found for free by the way, and found an amazing number of virus and spy ware that friggin Norton never found). In the meantime, what I didn't realize is that when you don't renew, Norton (on it's own by the way) ramps up your firewall.

So the next thing I know, Microsoft is mentioning the firewall and a subscription to their service (but not the fact that your actual virus software may be Fing with you). Took my computer administrator (aka husband), who has a day job by the way, to figure this out in his "spare time".

So I can't get rid of Windows or Microsoft products, but I sure don't need my virus software screwing with me. (bye bye Norton)

Why do I post about this stuff?

You know a number of times I have thought about not posting to this blog. The reason being, that a lot of times I am not thinking about this stuff, and I am so over it. The thing that stops me each time, is this is the first time I have done a real exploration of my feelings about estrangement. Or about my family. Or about me and my family.

Many times I think I am all done, and I find another subject or feeling comes up, and the best way for me to explore it (strangely enough) is to write about it. To write about it all good, bad, and ugly. I don't know for some reason it's sort of an exorcism, releasing these thoughts ideas and mean pictures of my family. I am acting out in a way I wouldn't and couldn't before.

S Donor and Monster's New Condo

Can you imagine that the S Donor did not send me a forwarding address? It was very embarrassing when I sent the family calendar out with the address of a man who shares the S Donor's name (and was also a principal LOL) but was no relation. I am sure embarrassing for him.

I did figure it out by talking to family members, but haven't updated the address to reflect it. He can change it if he wants to call and explain how he did not bother to send contact info (unlike how I did in my last Thanksgiving Greeting 3 years ago that went ignored). He's a loving guy, and I remain surprised that no one has replied to my advertisement to find him a new daughter to be emotionally and verbally abusive to.

Any who, here's his new house, and I hope he and the monster spent all their newfound inherited gains on this property and their new cars. I hope all those material things give them the happiness that they have searched for in vain, and perhaps made them a bit less miserable to be around.


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Google Maps-My Grandparent's House and Street

Here is my grandparents home (deceased and since sold) and street where I spent a fair amount of time as a child.


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Google Maps-Where My Husband Grew Up

Here is the street (no street view available sorry), where my husband did most of his growing up.


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Google Maps-Attempting to Add The Street View

Trying to add the street view of my old street. That would be the large grey one with the for sale sign LOL, still out in front on it's third year, sponsored by the cracker jack real estate agent OR also known as my monster. Pretty friggin cool, huh? The street view map is a bit fickle, if it does not open up, just click on the title of the post, and you will be brought to google maps location.


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Google Maps-My Old Street

This is where I grew up from age 7 to 17 approximately. Not good memories, except some activities that I used to do alone. We are the second house on the left, counting as if house number one is the one on the corner of Main Street and Hawthorne.



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Blogger Update

Helpfully, a blog buddy told me how to delete comments when you have unmoderated status in my last blog tech post. Thank you so much. Now I can just leave this unmoderated, and delete the disgusting spam posts when they come through!!! So irritating. Especially since, it doesn't even work that well for them, just hangs onto your blog.

Typepad Vs Blogger Yet Again

Blogger:

1) Unless you put them on moderated status, comments apparently can never be deleted (normally not a problem but I detest spam comments). Therefore, I have changed this to moderated comments, but no fear, as long as you aren't a spammer, I will put you through.
2) Space on blogger is free, and recently (like months or a year) I haven't had problems with space or pictures like I first had.

Typepad:
1) You can at any time delete comments, but it will show you deleted them if they already went through unmoderated, which I find a minor inconvenience compared to blogger number 1.
2) No longer a way to measure how you are using the space you have bought. Ugh. Plus they keep your bandwidth (not a problem for me I don't think) a surprise until they want to charge you more.

Lovely Weather Again

Ahhhhh, weather in the high seventies again, and not the nineties. Just lovely. I was taking like three showers a day, changing my clothes about that many times, while training the dogs before. Now I can be in cute little outfits for the whole day again and not wonder if I have started to reek!!! LOL.

My camera is back, so pictures of the Thai Ridgeback puppy at Mannerly Mutts Academy for dogs are bound to show up soon. How sweet, it cost nothing to get it fixed. So relieved as I am totally in love with that camera.

The phone thing works okay, but then I need to take the extra step to e-mail each one to my computer. Yuck. And you can only take so many on your phone of course.

****Another blogger plus recently added, is that it automatically saves your posts now.

Microsoft---Cool

Okay this is pretty cool. Computer screen in tables with advanced grabbing techology to be marketed to hotels and restaurants first. Only one minus that I see, some servers are about to loose a portion of their jobs and lively hoods or become too busy with all the orders flying in.

I can't decide. Ordering will become easier, but will your food actually come out on time. What about special requests? Still, way cool. I want one LOL.

Tuesday Tech Blogger vs Typepad

How could I have missed this very important fact? Blogger does not have a built in photo album, you have to go to an outside free service.

Typepad, you have more than enough room for photos. I haven't even made a dent in my space yet.

Videos are a farce, you aren't going to get the file onto typepad. Despite the fact that you get like 100 GB or something like that, it just won't load video, and they have all sorts of excuses. Video Egg or YouTube are the best to use for either.

I used to think Video Egg loaded the file onto your blog software or service, but I was wrong. I realized that something would have shown up eating SOME of my space if that was true. Bummer.

Tuesday Technology, What I have figured out about RSS and XML

In typepad, my problems of XML feeds were solved by the simple ticking off the the "syndicate" menu item found under "design" tab for my blog. There if a subcriber signs up, they are able to select (Yahoo, Google) the feed reader that they want. I won't tell you how many other things I tried.

See the thing is, this was set up before, so I don't know how it got unset. I am assuming that I must have unticked this not knowing what this was. Otherwise my Feedburner smart read settings overwrote this, which is probably impossible. Who knows though, all these widgets are controlled by outside programs.

Alright, so blogger, you need to be a feedburner (free service that you just need to register to use) user (or be more talented at HTML code than I am). Feedburner is free and a pretty handy service. So I set this blog up there (even then my other Typepad accounts are there, and I have the horrors of certain people linking the two), and in the "Publicise" (sp I know) under "chicklets" that is where you can set up the subscription for readers. Really way easier than annoying e-mail or yet another annoying service that you need to log into. For instance, I use Yahoo, and so now all the blogs that have this set up, I can now see anything new posted on My Yahoo.

Another Blogger vs Typepad problem. On typepad, when you are editing one post, there is a menu option to go to the next. For instance, I was updating my posts with advertising for my dog business, and I could just go one by one and subject matter that I had already determined would be discussed in the future.

On Blogger, you can have a footer which will automatically log certain keywords (like look up family estrangement and you will get this blog on most blog search engines) in the blog, even though your audience won't see them (have not determined a way to do this through typepad yet).

Other Blogger Frustrations

No calendar that you can click on to select a posting date (if you are like me and occaisionally post topics to write about in the future now so you can remember what you wanted to write about then).

That you need to mannually go in and change post from draft to published (unlike Typepad which has both the calendar and the ability to save the post and publish it automatically for the date AND time that you choose).

Another Blogger Frustration Which I Keep Forgetting

There is no easy way that I have found to do a RSS feed in blogger, other than to download orginal HTML as backup and then try to edit it to work in blogger. (ie nightmare for those like me who are not HTML literate, as easy as it supposedly is.

Reminds me of a conversation I had with my 21 year old tenant going to college, and for some reason they still make the kids suffer through cobalt. If you are too young to remember what I am talking about, I don't want to hear from you.

Or DOS.

More Pros and Cons Typepad vs Blogger

So, YouTube video, I figured out that if you type something before the insert to the videosite on Typepad or Blogger, it keeps the entry so you can change the tags and dates. While I was doing this before, stuff was disappearing. So frustrating, and so I just left the sucker alone once it was there.

So now there is Videoegg, also a free service and one that I prefer for videos. I still haven't tested it on this site, will need to do something so I can. If you upload that, it has you make your post up on Videoegg. Also the infor for the video is actually kept in your blog files (which I prefer though I am not sure why ) then in the video service, though you can do that too.

Oh, I remember why, because I have gigs and gigs of space to play with in Typepad to keep files like that, while you are limited to MBS of storage space on YouTube. Course you could just keep opening up accounts, but a pain. So in Video egg, you don't need to store it there, but can instead store it in the service that you are actually paying for the space to store those things, since an amazing amount of text takes up almost zero room these days, while video still can suck up the MBS or GIGS quite quickly.