A Few Ramblings…
Forty-six year old Christian happily negotiating the world with a wife and three daughters
The shutter finally closes on Fotopic – 15th March 2011
The Fotopic logo
On Wednesday 9th March, Fotopic, a photo storage website went offline.
This wasn’t entirely unusual given it’s performance over recent weeks and months had been increasingly unreliable and creaky.
What was more annoying, was the fact that I had been using Fotopic to store and display all my photos since 2003. In total, I had over 15,000 images displayed on the site. These had been built up over the years and included all those taken since the birth of our three children.
As well as thousands of family photos, I had also maintained a photo blog since June 2004 adding a new photo a day for almost 6 years.
Of course I have all of these photos stored on laptop and external hard-drives and of course I know that nothing online lasts forever, but I wonder whether I can really be bothered to spend the countless hours needed to start again from scratch, reload and relabel them all on a new site.
Fotopic was unique in many ways and to some degree far more customisable than many other sites such as Flickr.
In 2009, Fotopic went offline for a few days and I joined a Google Group full of Fotopic users to discuss the situation. Back then, Fotopic came back online after a few days following a major technical issue.
Now the same group is once again alive with correspondence concerning the demise of Fotopic. It is even mentioned on Wikipedia!
One ray of hope rests with the original creator of Fotopic, Joel Rowbottom, who is currently building a new site – Pikfu. This is being created along similar lines to Fotopic, but with various modernisations.
Until this gets off the ground, or until Fotopic miraculously returns, I, like thousands of other dissatisfied Fotopic users, must try to patiently wait in a photographic no mans land.
Japanese Earthquake – 11th March 2011
Today, a huge earthquake struck the north-east of Japan causing a huge tsunami that resulted in immense damage and destruction.
As things stand currently (8pm), 350 people are dead and a further 500 are missing. These figures are certain to rise.
Here’s how things unfolded on Twitter.
Pancake Day 2011 – 8 March 2011
Rebekah helped to make pancakes while she was at school and insisted on making the pancake mixture at home when she got home.
Rebekah adding lemon to her pancake
Rebekah and Emily enjoyed their pancakes, but Holly isn’t really a fan and only had a couple of mouthfuls.
Traditional lemon and sugar were Rebekah’s preferred choice of filling for her pancake, meanwhile Emily was allotted jam on hers – it being softer for her to eat.
Emily finishing off her pancakes!
Most of the mixture had already been consumed by the time I came to pour it into the frying pan.
Whether it was the consistency of the mixture, the heat of the pan, the thickness of the pancake or just the ineptitude of the chef will never be known.
Sadly, my first couple of pancakes were somewhat on the crunchy side! I ably served them from the pan and topped them off with generous amounts of lemon and sugar.
Unfortunately this did little to redeem them of their brittle nature, and rolling them up proved nigh on impossible.
Fortunately, the addition of more fat seemed to sort out the consistency issues in time for my third and final pancake. This was cooked to perfection and served, again with the addition of lemon and sugar, with aplomb.
My third pancake in front of the football
Hopefully next year’s Pancake Day will be marginally more successful!
February 2011 on Twitter
February has been a quieter month for me on Twitter than January was.
@Ben_Duffy found himself dethroned by Messrs @nutterfreddie and @jonee.
More names in general seemed to feature this month and thanks also showed highly, following message received after Dad’s passing.
Finally, it’s nice to see Studley featuring, after my unexpected, but nonetheless enjoyably brief stay there!
It will be interesting to see what March will bring!
A Few Ramblings... 