Blog of Leonid Mamchenkov

In the excitement of move to Flickr, I totally forgot about one thing - bandwidth limitations. Even when I was reminded that they exist, I simply ignored the signs. Even though I have a professional account that allows for 2 GBytes per month, I should have checked the size of my photo gallery before I started the move.

I have uploaded albums from 1995, 1996, 1997, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, and a few from 2004, when my limits were out. I checked the size of my entire photo gallery and was somewhat shocked to find out that it was more than 2 year’s worth of uploads at this rate.

Apparently, there is a thread at Flickr forums where several people ask Flickr to give them a way to upload more. Even if that means paying more. I joined with ‘me too’. Flickr is a nice tool and the more I use the more I like. There are tons of features, and possibly the cleanest user interface out of all webservices out there.

In the light of this limitation however, I’ll have to somewhat review my migration process.

Firstly, I’ll be adding new images to my current gallery, not to Flickr. Hopefully, I’ll be uploading faster than making new pictures. So, eventually I’ll have it all at Flickr.

Secondly, I’ll have to trim my photo gallery a bit. There’s just too much noise, which I don’t care about. Although some people would probably find some pictures pleasurable. I’ll be going through the gallery, deleting bad pictures, and slightly compressing the rest of them. Images that come out of my camera are usually bigger than 3 MBytes. But they are totally uncompressed. A reduction of 10% quality, which is not even noticable can bring the image size down to 1 MByte. Before I didn’t have any space or bandwidth limitations, so I didn’t care. Now, I am very willing to sucrifice 10% of quality for 66% of the size. I am not going to resize pictures to 1024×768 though.

Thirdly, my uploads to Flickr will be in large batches. So, instead of adding a few pictures every day, evenly through a month, I’ll be adding a few thousand during the first few days, until I hit my bandwidht limitation. This way, I’ll save a lot of time, albeit will make it hard to follow for those of you who do. That’s temporary though, so, you can ignore me for the time being.

I guess that’s it.

Maxim is so mobile these days that he already has a few places he is not allowed to go to. Two of the most common ones are the DVD player and the trash bin. The DVD player is a fragile piece of equipment with lots of wires, which unfortunately there is no way to hide. And trash bin is one of those dirty places that no one should touch much, including the small babies.

But it’s a widely known fact that the forbidden stuff is the one we desire the most. Maxim uses every opportunity to get to both DVD player and the trash bin. With the DVD player he was more successful and now he starts to lose interest in it. A bunch of wires is all there is to it.

But the trash bin is the ultimate goal. It is in the kitchen, which he rarely visits anyway. And both Olga and I try our best to really minimize the time he spends with that unsanitary object.

In all of this, my favourite part is Maxim’s reaction to being caught. He knows that he is not allowed to there. And he knows it well. How does he react when he is caught? Well, he has two defences. One of them is to look scared, like he just saw a ghost or a monster. Just for a second you know. Because when he is scared neither Olga, nor I can punish him in any way. He looks too vunerable.

The other defense tactique is to pretend that he is there not for the forbidden stuff. When I catch him near the trash bin he quickly moves away to the side - either to the cooker or the wall. And he pretends to be fascinated by either one of them. This is really hilarious. He is like: “This wall here is so cool! How do they make them like this? I want one in my bedroom… Dad, come, check it out. You won’t believe your eyes…”

He’s so cute when he does it that I almost believe him.