It’s amazing where you run into yourself

The Danube at night
I use the free version of Google Alert (which is not the same as Google’s own “Google alerts” system) to hunt around for instances of my name and “Unhindered by Talent” and pass them along. (So I’m vain, but too cheap to pay for the more expensive service.) Most of the “alerts” are pretty uninteresting, but every now and then there’s a suprise. Today, for example, I discovered via this mechanism that

  • Someone had used the image above of Budapest at night to illustrate a blog post about being away for a while. (The Babel Fish translation of the german is pretty amusing: “I am times away. The Mansenmann will surely contribute its song of the week on weekend, but I probably keep still until Tuesday the feet.”.) It’s a minor bummer that they didn’t tell me (the ego stroke would be nice), but it’s still cool that they liked it enough to use it.
  • More suprisingly, someone decided to use the image below from the Duomo in Milan on the Wikipedia page for that cathedral. There are quite a few images there of the cathedral, so it’s not so amazing, but still it’s pretty cool. Again, there was no notification, but with the Creative Commons license I’m using on Flickr that’s totally OK, and it’s nice that people are using them. What are the odds that I’d ever appear in Encyclopedia Britannica, right? So I’ll take what I can get and call it a good thing!

Woot!

A long journey

Added a few minutes later: I searched for “Unhindered” on Wikipedia Commons, and turned up two more images of mine (this and that) in their images collection, both from the excellent Helmshore Mills Textile Museum (which we visited last wummer). I’ll obviously need to pay more attention to that stuff!

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Just busy playing with the cat

Playing with the cat
I’m not dead, just busy with a thousand things (including playing with the cat). I’m up to my ears in playing sysadmin at home (any suggestions on Mac OS X backup systems for a collection of laptops and a desktop/server box?), getting some photos printed for the PRCA (go here for a set of semi-finalist images), spending time with my family (and the cat). I’m also putting in way too many hours learning Python and Ruby (and TurboGears and Rails) so I have some clueful idea about what role these languages should perhaps have in our curriculum. (Thoughts on these are quite welcome as well.) Somewhere in there Brian Ohs (a UMM student) and I also generated 3.2Gb of compressed text (research data) in 24 hours, and now we’re slogging through it trying to make sense of the results. And then some idiot scheduled 6-8 hours of high quality soccer matches a day to distract me when I really can’t afford it.

So, I’m not dead, just busy.

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