Request for online photo hosting/sharing suggestions and opinions

I'm looking for a good online photo sharing/backup solution. The three options I'm considering at the moment are SmugMug, Flickr and Picasaweb. None seem to be quite up to my requirements, so I'm hoping someone can suggest something better or how to use one of these services better. I'm leaning toward SmugMug, but I'm not entirely happy with it.

I want:

• Reasonably priced for a large amount of storage. I have over 40G of photos and don't want to pay >$100 a year. This seems to eliminate Picasaweb.
• Access control. I actually like SmugMug's access model, but would prefer finer grained (per photo control) rather than having to move photos around between albums to change access. The three tiers of public/unlisted/password-protected work well for me.
• Automatic/easy upload from iPhoto, iPhone and Android. Most seem to do fine in this regard, but opinions are welcome.
  
• Decent file management. I want to be able to search browse and share all my photos at once, not have to go fiddle in dozens or hundreds of albums. I don't want to have to keep track of what I've uploaded and what I haven't. I don't want it to end up with bunch of duplicate uploads. All of them, including SmugMug seem to have issues here.
• Reliable. I'm want this in substantial part as a backup solution.
• Good temporal organization/photo finding. I think of my photos as organized by time, not by "album" and none of the sites seem to do well with this model.
  

In all, the main reason I'm not so sure about SmugMug is that it doesn't deal well with things like duplicates, it seems very locked in to the whole "album" metaphor (as do the others), and their site is a bit slow.

Thoughts, experiences, suggestions, ideas?

Update: I think I'm going to go with flickr. Easy browsing by time, good price, and it's fast.

Federal Triangle Flowers

(Preface: I enjoy photography. I take a great deal of pictures, exclusively digital. Many of them are obviously family pictures and photos of my beautiful baby and other things that are of marginal interest to my blog reading public at large. But, sometimes I take some that seem worth sharing. I've thought about adding slightly more regular photos to this blog, but never got around to it. I just recently got a new digital camera, a Fuji FinePix E550, and that seems like a good excuse to start posting some. I've tried to tweak the style info so it looks right in aggregators and the like, but if it looks wonky or otherwise has issues, please let me know, either in the comments or via email. I've tried to make the linked image large enough to include nice detail, but small enough to download a reasonable time. I'm more likely to make future photos smaller, rather than larger.)

Federal Triangle Rose

I was in DC for a wireless conference for work at the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center, when I came across this sculpture by Stephen Robin. Somehow the oddly awkward but literal name of the piece "Federal Triangle Flowers" adds to it. The sculpture also includes a lily, not shown.

Gathering Photos

I just posted
50+ photos from the thirteenth Gathering of Friends.

Extended Essen Thoughts/Photos, Sackson Auction list

I've put up my Essen 2002 photos. I've
also played several games of Trias, ad acta, ZooSim, and Fische
Fluppen Frikadellen, and all have held up well. The only one I'm
beginning to have some questions about is "ZooSim", which seems to
have a bit of a rich-get-richer problem. Next time I play I think
I'll play with a fixed income variant. That is, everyone gets 3
income at the end of each round.

I've cataloged my acquisitions from last week's Sackson auction. I
came home with:

ASAP, Ad Liners, Avante, Bazaar, Buried Treasure, Casablanca, Cloak &
Dagger, Corporate Pursuit, Das Erbe des Maloney, Das Super-Blatt,
Dragonriders of Pern, Eddie's Eleven, Focus, Foil, Fuedal, fun-et-iks,
Gold Connection, Gold am Yukon, High Hand, Jumpin, Lone Wolf and Cub
Game, Mad Marbles, MageStones, Maze, Mississippi, Mr. President, New
World, Oil Tycoon, Orbit War, Perfect Wedding, Phlounder, Ploy,
Quinto, Robin Hood, Round Four, Scoop, Stocks & Bonds, Stop Thief,
Swoggle, Tribond, True Colors, Twister, Twixt, Ultimate Stratego,
Whosit?, and Xanth.

In particular, I have more than one of Buried Treasure, Gold
Connection, Phlounder, and Mr. President and would be open to trades
or purchases.

Game Card Catalog

My full collection

Over on BGG, a cool simple idea was discussed: Create a card for each
game you own, and use it as a sort of "card catalog" of your games, or
even as a way of deciding of what game to play. Tom Kiehl made href=http://www.superpowernosissies.com/games/idkwdywtp/>a very cool
tool, that was href=http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/153521>extensively
discussed. It automatically generates these cards from your BGG
collection.

An example sheet of 4

Unfortunately, the cards are less image focused than I'd
want, and I wouldn't want to deal with printing on labels and applying
them to some other material for hundreds and hundreds of games. So, I
decided to write my own card generator, with some changes.

Just the Knizia games in my collection

First, I made the image as large as was plausible, automatically
rotating the image if that would allow it to be larger. The only text
information I wanted on the card was game name, number of players,
time and designer(s). I also wanted to be able to override the game
name, not just the game image. Finally, I wanted them inexpensively,
and in full high-quality color. So, I decided to print them four to a
"page" and have the pages printed as 4x6 photos from Costco. I ended
up having to do a fair amount of cutting, but less than applying 600+
stickers. Overall, the result is very cool. Having one's entire
collection "in hand", physically, with all games being equal is useful
and fun.

Lulu.com Review

Ever since I was very young, the idea of self-publishing was very
appealing. I recall thinking at around age 11 that everyone should be
able to publish "book(s)" even if the potential audience size for it
was very small. I was frustrated at the large and (at the time)
mysterious barriers in the way of someone publishing something. Since
then, the web has partially filled that niche. Anyone can publish
content to the entire world at very low cost and independent of the
size of the audience for that content. It's still not a book, though.

About two years ago, I researched various self-publishing options.
Several were around, and while the barrier to entry was dramatically
lower than traditional publishing, they were still a bit prohibitive.
Set-up fees in the ballpark of $500 were typical. If you have a book
that has an audience of a few hundred, this makes a lot of sense, but
if the audience is tens or fewer, that setup fee dwarfs the marginal
cost of the individual books. I gave up on the idea.

Earlier this year, I decided to give it another look and discovered href=http://www.lulu.com/>lulu.com. They were offering exactly
what I had always imagined: Zero up-front cost on-demand production of
books from a user-supplied PDF file with a real book binding at
a reasonable price, even for color printing. So, I decided to create
a test book. I created a 40 page photo book of a recent vacation and
had Lulu print it. The result is remarkable, with a couple notable qualifications.

I got a 41-page full color 8.5"x11" photo book with a real ("perfect
bind") book binding printed for under $16 including shipping. The
quality of the printing is outstanding. The paper is heavyweight, the
binding is professional and the photo quality is extremely high. The
photos are almost photographic print quality. In that regard, I'm extremely satisfied.

The qualifications, however, are several, but none overwhelming.
First, the book contained very little text, but much of it is simply
missing in the printed copy. In particular, the text that were in
their own seperate text boxes (I used iWork Pages for the layout)
didn't appear at all. Text that was simply on the page in the usual
way appeared fine. This is relatively avoidable in the future, but it
makes me somewhat nervous about what else might simply not appear.
The other qualifications are more in the vein of RTFM: Lulu
warns you that you should embed your fonts or use a standard font. I
didn't do either and while the text came out mostly fine a couple of
punctuation marks ended up a bit odd and the letters "fi" together
became a hyphen. I'll listen next time. Finally, for the covers,
they have very high resolution requirements. The picture I wanted to
use wasn't that high resolution, so I simply upsampled it. The
resulting cover actually looks fine, but it isn't quite as sharp as it
clearly could be.

Overall, highly recommended. I expect to do at least one more
(larger) project with them and will comment here on that experience.

Genevieve Photo a Day

I know I can't get enough photos of my adorable little baby girl, but some people mostly come to this site for greasemonkey scripts or game reviews or the like, so I won't post them here. Instead check out the Genevieve Photo of the Day page. Isn't she cute?

I may eventually write an RSS feed for the page, so if you're interested, email me and I'll let you know when I add it.

All new at the Gathering

I usually play a lot of new games at the Gathering, but this year, it
went to an even greater extreme. With two exceptions (Liar's Dice and
Quack Shot), every game I played at the Gathering this year was new to
me this year. In fact, with only a two more exceptions (Diamant, Walk
the Dogs), every game I played was new to me at the Gathering. This
is a good thing, since I haven't had much other opportunity to play
the new stuff. In the 6 months leading up to Gathering 2004, I played
63 new games. In the 6 months leading up to Gathering 2005, I only
played 25 new games. This month alone I've played 34 new games (2
pre-Gathering) which is about the same as last year, but I played many
fewer total games this year.

More new games: Farfalia is good. Dancing Dice is another good dice
game and more fun than I expected. I'll post more details and an
overall summary along with a few photos when I get home.

Pounce

In my
earlier entry about dexterity games, I mentioned Pounce as one of
my favorites. I got a request for more details, so I figured I'd
describe it here.

Pounce is not a German game, but an older (early 90s, I think)
American game, though clearly aimed at adults (the box art depicts
only adults playing). Sadly, it is out of print. This game has has
everything. And by everything, I mean it has a miniature toilet
plunger and rubber mice with elastic tails. Oh, and
cheese and dice.

The games comes with a trifold cardboard game board which depicts a
piece of cheese. In the center is a circle. Additionally, each
player gets a rubber mouse (a couple centimeters long) with a long (30
cm -ish) elastic tail and fifteen units of cheese.. All players place
their mice in the central circle and hold onto the tails. The player
whos turn it is removes their mouse from the circle and takes the
minature plunger (actually, the plunger part is full sized, the handle
is just short) and the pair of dice. They proceed to roll the dice
and one of three things can happen:

• They roll a 7 or an 11. In this case, they must slam the plunger
  down on the table, trying to capture the mice which are sitting in the
  circle. Simultaneously, the players try to pull their mice out of the
  circle. If they are captured, they pay the active player one cheese.
  If they escape, the active player pays them one cheese.
  
  
• They roll doubles. Play passes to the next player clockwise.
  The player with the plunger puts their mouse back in the circle and
  the next player takes the plunger.
  
  
• They roll anything else. In this case, nothing should happen.
  They should just roll again. If however, the plunging player plunges
  or the mice players pull out, they pay a penalty. If the plunging
  player plunges, all captured mice are payed one cheese. If a player
  pulls out, they pay the plunger a cheese. If the plunging player
  plunges and a player pulls out, no cheese changes hands, since both
  players were in error.
  
  

That's it, and it's a great game. The game ends when one player runs
out of cheese. The player with the most cheese is the winner.
Obviously, this is a serious twitch reflex game, but there's also the
key tactic of psyching out the other players. When you're
plunging, regular fakes are critical for both encouraging mice to
prematurely flee and to desensitize them to the plunging motion when
you do roll a 7 or 11. Further, mice players can motion as though to
flee in order to try to get their opponents to erroneously do so.

The idea sounds simple, but boy is it fun. Here's some photos of the
game:
[small] and
[large].

Del.icio.us clusters

Del.icio.us is interesting. It lends
itself well to the following experiment/analysis: Some tags co-occur
with other tags much more often than others. This creates natural
clusters. For example, "php" and "mysql" are a pair of tags that are
more likely to apply to the same URL than say "philosophy" and "web".
So, it's pretty straightforward to analyze the RSS feeds they provide
and automatically generate the clusters, so I did it.

(Note, to illustrate some of these clusters I use a stylesheet which
will not get picked up by most RSS readers, so visit the actual page
if the diagrams make no sense) Most clusters are exactly the kind of
thing you'd expect, though some have interesting structure. Others
are amusing or surprising. One "standard" cluster is essentially a
web development cluster. I've collapsed some of the sub-clusters for clarity:

Web development cluster php mysql lamp apache mode_perl perl work creative css html design javascript webdev foaf semantic xml rdf software web jsp java j2ee programming

So that's a pretty coherent, straightforward cluster. There are others including the Blogging/RSS cluster (rss atom syndication cool tech blog), the Recreation cluster (photography art photo annotation flickr geo photos games fun flash humor funny comics comic) and the Politics cluster, drawn out here.

Politics cluster

rumsfeld iraq

rnc dnc

democrats

political gop

bush

politics

kerry

election fraud

usa

When you get to the somewhat higher level connections (which are that much more tenuous) there are some less obvious arrangements. All caps words represent an entire subcluster that doesn't have its structure shown:

RSS/BLOGGING

LINUX

mail windows

ftp

spam

IETF RFCs

imap email

sputnik darpa

1950s 1960s

INTERNET HISTORY

free reference

snort security

tools

WEB DEVELOPMENT

Some of the odd connections (eg "mail windows" and "ftp") may just be an artifact of the relatively small sample (less than 6000 tagged URLs).
I'll have to collect more data and continue the experiment. In any case, it's interesting to me that it exposes a hierarchical ontology in a rather straightforward way.

Just back from Essen, first comments

Well, I just got back from Essen, and thought I'd post some quick
comments. This is my second time to Essen, and you can href=http://www.mkgray.com:8000/essen/>read about my trip in 2000, if you want. This year,
I was only there for the end of Thursday and all of Friday and
Saturday. The "buzz" of the fair was Friedman Friese's new game
"Fische Fluppen Frikadellen", in which players can switch between
tables and multiple copies of the game. I didn't get a chance to play
this, but it seemed very well received.

I'll discuss other games below, but another nice thing about Essen
this year was I knew far more people there. It was great to see Scott
Alden, Greg Schloesser, James Miller, Mik Svellov, and many others.

Trias

This game of plate tectonics from Gecko Games was featured in the Doris
& Frank booth, and though the art was by Doris, the game was not by
Frank, but Ralf Lehmkuhl. I was very impressed with this game, and it
seems to have a variety of interesting options and the continental
drift mechanics are very nice. I'll try to write more later, but the
basic idea is one is competing for control over the new continents
that are being formed. On each players turn, they have some control
over the drift, and then action points to do things such as force more
drift, reproduce, move, and the like. Very nice. The only negative
comments I heard was that it was a bit dry, but I didn't find it so,
and unless players are very ponderous, it moved along at a good pace.

color=f8f0ff>ad acta

This small production game has a theme that seems hard to make
interesting: paper pushing. But, the game is quite fun, and lends
itself well to its theme. Each player runs an office, and documents
get pushed around and processed by various offices before being filed.
Precise timing of this processing is key to the game, as different
documents score different points depending on when the are filed. The
game is all about queue management, as documents come in to offices on
a last in first out basis. A few special action cards mix things up
nicely. Some found parts of a little too chaotic and hard to track,
and I see where he's coming from, but I very much enjoyed and
recommend the game.

color=f8f0ff>ZooSim

This is a beautifully produced new game from Cwali, where players
produce competing zoos, attempting to attract the most visitors. This
game has a few nice mechanics that interlock nicely. Players
participate in a series of blind auctions for tiles which are layed in
a domino-like fashion, and compete for dominance in several categories
(types of animals and trees) as well as receiving bonuses for creating
path loops. I like auction games, so that part appealed to me, but I
found the other aspects very engaging as well. The art is also very
nice, though some speculated that people might assume it was a
children's game because of it. In any case, highly recommended.

color=f8f0ff>Canal Grande, FFF, Cannes, Age of Steam

These 4 also got a lot of good buzz (highly rated in the Fairplay
booth, and spoken of highly by those who'd played), but I didn't get a
chance to play them. I picked them all up except for Age of Steam.
I'll comment more once I play them.

color=f8f0ff>Rumors

Many people commented to Friedemann Friese that Frisch Fisch should be
republished. He commented on a certain irony in this because
apparently it took several years to sell out, and only once it had
completely sold out did an upsurge of interest start. The possibility
of another publisher doing an edition of Frisch Fisch seemed to be in
mind, but nothing specific, of course.

I also heard some other folks mumbling about the possibility of
Friedeman doing a new game for Alea. Would the box be green?

Nothing in the way of details, but a new Reiner Knizia "big" game from
Hans im Gluck is supposedly going to be out at Nurnberg, and
presumably this is the Egyptian game Chris Lawson mentioned last
month.

I'll post more later, with photos...

Gathering 2005 Photos and Summary

Louis XIV, one of the Gathering favorites

David Hansel goes for worms to go with his 4's in Heckmeck

Genevieve Gray watches a game, kindly avoiding pointing out her father's strategic errors

James Miller, Greg Schloesser, Patrick Korner and Herby Levy play Dorra's Kreta

As usual, the Gathering was a great experience. I played many fewer
games this year (about half) partially because I played longer games,
but mostly because we had to spend a lot of time with Genevieve. I
still managed to play over 50 games and over 30 new-to-me games and
had a great time gaming, socializing and visiting some sights around
Columbus.

Games

As previously mentioned, the big hit for me was Fiese Freunde Fette
Feten. Other games ratings, though many of these are based on a single play:

Very good games I expect to have some longevity: FFFF, Amazonas,
Heckmeck, Carcassonne: The Discovery, Diamant, Fjorde, Jambo, Louis
XIV, Ticket to Ride Europe.

Games that have potential, but I didn't play enough to be sure:
Dungeon Twister, Farfalia, King Arthur card game, Kreta, Manila, Oltre
Mare, Submarine, Tower of Babel.

Not bad, but probably nothing special in the long run: Adventure
League, Boomtown, Dancing Dice.

Not impressed: Montanara, Oriente, Walk the Dogs.

People & Sights

Genevieve was very good in general and spent some time in the hall,
playing on the floor, playing on the table and socializing with and
charming everyone in sight. She didn't win any tournaments though.

Gorilla at the Columbus Zoo, expressing disappointment in Knizia's "Tower of Babel"

Genevieve Gray meets a sea turtle at the Columbus Zoo

We didn't spend all of our time gaming though, and visited the
Columbus Zoo with friends at the Gathering who also brought their
kids. Genevieve enjoyed the zoo and loved the aquarium portion
with manatees and sea turtles.

21st century baby monitoring

I'm very glad we figured out the baby monitoring solution, and it substantially increased the amount of
gaming we could do. Genevieve wasn't so thrilled with the hotel room
and a couple times we had to run up to the room and comfort her back
to sleep, but she did well. I suspect she just wanted to be
downstairs gaming with us.

Graeter's ice cream is very very good

We also went out to Graeter's Ice Cream which is delicious. In
particular, their "Buckeye Blitz" is a chocolate peanut butter ice
cream that is among the best ice cream I have ever had. I can see why
Keith Lockhart gets it shipped in to Boston.

Fabulous Friedemann Friese

Gaming glitterati - Rick Thornquist and Greg Schloesser

Back at the event, I got to talk to a lot a lot of folks "in the
business". While I remain mostly uninterested in being in the
business of games (I like keeping my work and hobbies separate), I'm
always interested to know more about it. Jay Tummelson and Stefan
Brueck are always interesting to talk to. And, as always, Friedemann
Friese is always a real pleasure to talk to. I gushed profusely to
him about FFFF and it was interesting to get his take on some of the
cards and bits from the game. It'll be interesting to me to see which
things get changed in the US edition other than some discreet
obscuring of any exposed nipples. For example, one of the cards is
"Kutterpullen", or lifeboat racing, a hobby that Friedemann apparently
has done. It sounds like it may change to "Bowling" or "Softball
League" or the like.

Some board game geek

Scott Alden of boardgamegeek
and I got to play a few games and talk quite a bit. With luck, some
of the stuff we talked about will make it to the geek soon. Scott
spent a lot of time recording GeekSpeaks at the Gathering, and
everyone should keep an ear out for them.

Lots of Heroscape on the prize table

At the prizetable, we got very lucky. Tournament winners get first
picks, followed by everyone drawn randomly. My wife's name was second
among the non-tournament winners. We got "Piratenbilliards", a great
dexterity game I first played at the Gathering in 2002. Then, the
luck of the pick ended, and my name was picked second-to-last. I
still got Zendo. Maybe the luck handn't actually run out.

Overall, it was a great Gathering. For me, only one standout hit
game, but overall one of the best Gathering experiences I've had and
they've all been quite good.

Gathering Report, part IV

While I may write more later on the Gathering, I wanted to wrap up
here with comments on other new games, "old" games, the prize table,
and non-gaming stuff at the Gathering.

color=f8f0ff>Goldland, Cairo, Lumberjack

None of these really impressed me a lot, but they weren't bad.
Goldland in particular a lot of people liked, though it wasn't to my
taste. I like the idea of exploration games, and many of the
mechanics seemed appealing, but the whole thing just didn't gel for
me. I'll give it another play sometime, but it's not high on my list.

Cairo I really wanted to like. It's a flicking influence game. Some
combination of lack of skill and monotonous play really left me
unimpressed though. Lumberjack, I also wanted to like, but it ended
up feeling rather dry. Oh well.

The only game I played which I'd actively warn people away from is "A
Dog's Life". Stay away from this one. I have so many other ways I'd
rather spend my time.

color=f8f0ff>Great New-to-me Games

I played a lot of games that I'd never played before but have been out
for a while. In the truly "great" category were Code 777 and Frisch
Fisch. I also substantially enjoyed Haste Worte? (not entirely new to
me), M, Elchfest, Entdecker, Guesstures, Pig Pong, and Tabula Rasa.

I was expecting to like Code 777, since I am in general a big fan of
deduction games, and this has a reputation for being one of the best.
I was not disappointed. This game is much like "What's That on My
Head?", but with colors and a different distribution of numbers. The
result is outstanding.

Frisch Fisch, I had heard nothing about, but was described as a "brain
burner", which I often find a positive attribute in games. This
Friedemann Friesse game has some very nice mechanics. Simple tile
laying impacts where roads will be built according to a simple set of
rules (all roads must be contiguous and all buildings must be adjacent
to at least one road). Placing a building in one place may cause
several road tiles to get placed elsewhere. The somewhat
collaborative puzzle solving of everyone trying to determine if any
new road segments are built as the result of a person's play was very
entertaining.

Sadly, both of these games (Code 777 and Frisch Fisch) are out of
print and hard to find. If anyone knows where I can get one for a
reasonable price, please
let me know.

I don't have a lot to say about the other games, but I feel like
saying something, so here's a sentance or two on each. "Haste Worte?"
is one of the best word games I've played in a while, but you need to
make your own cards. M is a great absract tile laying game I wish I
had discovered earlier. Elchfest is surprisingly fun. Guesstures is
not that novel of an idea (speed charades), but the timer device is
awesome! Pig Pong is exhausting. Tabula Rasa was a lot of fun and
very interesting, despite me being unimpressed after reading the
rules.

color=f8f0ff>Prize Table

I got very lucky with the prize table. The basic idea of the
Gathering Prize Table is that all attendees bring at least one (good)
game for the prize table, many bring more, or bring some "ok" games in
addition to one or more good ones. On the final Saturday, prizes are
given out. First, winners of tournaments from the previous year which
occured after the prize table ceremony, followed by tournaments
winners from this year, followed by randomly selected people. Then,
the process repeats, more or less until all the prizes are gone.

I didn't compete in any of the game tournaments this year and my team
didn't win the Treasure Hunt (which was a lot of fun, see below).
This year Alan decided to have a "target tournament", however. The
idea of this tournament is that some some number of people are
"targets". They keep track of all the people they play with. The
winner of the target tournament is the person who plays with the most
targets. I came in as first runner-up in the target tournament (23
out of 28 targets), so I got an early pick off the prizetable, for
which I took Funkenschlag, since I had heard such good things about it
and had just recently been very impressed by one of his previous games
(Frisch Fisch).

My wife was called randomly very early and took Members Only. On my
second pick I got Schocko & Co. In later picks I got a handful of
other games. In the end, I got 3 out of my top 6 picks and was very
lucky.

color=f8f0ff>Non-boardgame stuff

Obviously, thoe point of the Gathering is to spend time with people
and play board games. Further, most of the "spend time with people"
is done by playing board games, however, there is some other stuff
that goes on.

In the "almost boardgames" category was the Treasure Hunt. This is a
puzzle hunt style event usually run by Aaron Weissblum, run this year
by he and Brian Hanechak. The hunt was a blast. Basically, there
were four puzzles to solve, but you had no clues to the puzzles. The
puzzles could be bought with "game bucks", which could be obtained by
solving other puzzles or by playing game shows. Overall, a very fun
hunt.

Other folks went off to an amusement park for a day, and there's also
the photo safari, in which teams take a variety of amusing photos in
an attempt to get the most points. I think some people even went and
played golf.

The other regular activity of the event was eating out. A lot of
people got groceries and occasionally ate at the hotel or in their
rooms, but sometimes you need to get out. There's a strip mall
cluster in Columbus with perhaps as many as two dozen restaurants,
ranging from reasonably nice to very fancy. Ruth's Chris Steakhoue
was yummy, but given the price I've certainly had better steak. The
surprise hit to me was "Red Robin" a very kid friendly burger joint
that was very good and reasonably priced. It's a shame we don't have
these out here.