Welcome NASA to the Commons

NASA joins the Commons on Flickr today with three iconic sets spanning the US space agency’s 50+ year history. Their Commons account will feature photos from across the agency’s many locations and centers, chronicling the history of space and lunar missions, and the people and places of the organization.

Gaze upon what used to be at the forefront of American ingenuity and industriousness.

(via Flickr Blog.)

Here's a flickr photoset (not mine) of …

Here’s a flickr photoset (not mine) of the type of pictures taken by the new iPhone 3GS camera.

If I had one of these, I probably wouldn’t take another point-and-shoot camera around with me again. These look great.

Also: my phone envy for one of these things grows daily.

Let's Play Musical Themes

Tonight’s been a game of flipping from one theme to another for me. I have been using Carrington for a while here, but I grew bored with the base look of the thing and wanted something a little more unique.

I worked with one for a while—even edited some old posts in order to fit the theme—but discovered a few problems in the admin side of the theme and unfortunately had to abandon it.

What I landed on is something that interests me greatly. It’s originally designed for a photoblog. The big thing you will notice is that it doesn’t have a traditional front page like most blogs do; it instead has a series of images. Each post on the blog will now have an image uploaded that works with the theme of the post. I’m going to use a combination of images from my own photography (something I intend to continue working on) and Creative Commons-licensed works from flickr like the one that accompanies this post.

I will of course give credit where credit is due for any and all CC-licensed images.

In addition, I’ve taken some steps to simplify here. You’ll notice that the new theme doesn’t support a standard sidebar. I’m OK with this, as I normally find that sidebars tend to get overly cluttered and stick out like sore thumbs. The main page wouldn’t work with them anyway, and if you’re interested in my Delicious links or in my Twitter posts, I’m sure you’ll just find your way over to those services anyway.

I’m also taking a large chunk of posts beyond a certain date, permanently archiving them, and removing them from the site. The past is great, and I will always have a record of those posts and stories, but right now I want to focus more on the present and on what I have going on. Everyone’s entitled to a reset once in a while.

(Photo credit: “Musical Chairs” by flickr user David Maddison.)

I'm Making Things More Difficult for You

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This is just a quick note to inform those of you who follow me that I’m going to be restricting my flickr photostream much more than previously starting tonight. Most of the photos taken will now be set to private, with access to most of them granted to friends and family.

I will still publish a handful of photos of certain events as public images, but I think I’d like to make things a bit more controlled from now on.

If you are a friend and I have “met” you either in real life or through an online contact that I trust, I will certainly grant you access if you send a contact request using flickr.

Note that this change will also affect the photos shown here (which I’ve been thinking about changing anyway).

(Photo credit: “colorful but difficult” by bitterlysweet)

The Markel Family Game Cabinet – April 2009 (Annotated)

Some of you have had conversations with me—especially via Twitter—regarding games of all kinds, so I thought it’d been a while since I’d shared a picture of the game cabinet. I like to do this every once in a while.

You can click on the picture to go to the Flickr page for the photo, which has notes for everything in the cabinet to detail them for you.

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