…just another hippy blog

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Originally uploaded by kozan.

Another note to myself:

Always, always ensure that your tripod’s quick release plate is on the camera you are carrying with you and not on another camera.

Believe me, it is pretty annoying when you get to some location at night, spend 15 minutes framing and spot-metering everything and everywhere and then realize you can’t use your tripod because that damn plate is at home.

Dear Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA, I wish a 42 tons heavy anvil could hit you after you close the cell phone in the middle of the desert, if you don’t stop sending me useless text messages, like “the guy you wanted to call is now available, in case you are too high or too stupid to understand the voice message we have sent you one second ago to tell you the same damn thing“.

Thank you.

Barcode
Originally uploaded by camera_rwanda.

Thank you mobile phone producers, for building wonderful mobile phones that can take pictures, play mp3 files, read out tolstoy’s war and peace in 42 seconds, do a shiatsu massage to your cat and take 2 minutes to display a menu or render a digit after you hit a 2 micron wide button on its keypad.

Thank you telcos like Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA, for increasing the fares in every possible way, after a nation-wide petition has made some smart polititian aware of Italy being the only Country world wide with recharge rates for rechargeable mobile phone cards.
Thank you Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA, for the service you are selling, which has become the worst a phone company might propose to its customers since Meucci (or whoever) being breast-fed by his mother.
Thank you Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA, for being no longer able to hire programmers who can make your system know when a call has been rejected and for sending me a nice SMS telling me that someone has been trying to call me one second ago.
Thank you Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA and friends, for making customers pay for a no-cost best-effort service like SMS. I’m really happy to see that someone paid for a text message to be delivered to me after 24 hours.
Thank you guys (*), I really wish you could end up in the middle of the desert with a 42 mega pixel Wind mobile phone.

And I really wish that you will only be able to receive two billion promotional text messages each minute making you aware that yes, signal reaches that desert.

And I really wish that after you have spent two hours figuring out how to make a call on that phone, you will find a nice female voice, telling you that Wind Telecomunicazioni SpA does not give a fuck about your phone call.

Amen.

(*) Read: CEOs and friends

I have been playing around with Google’s “new” toolbar buttons.

Quite interesting stuff, even though the current version has quite limited features. Google’s so-called toolbar buttons are basically XML files that contain a search engine URL (both GET and POSTS http or https requests are supported), an embedded base54 encoded icon and some other optional stuff, like an RSS feed URL.
Buttons must be hosted on some website and can be added via a special URL:

http://toolbar.google.com/buttons/add?url=http://myhost.com/mybutton.xml

Of course, you can submit your button to a public gallery hosted by google so that other users can find them.
I have written a few buttons to do various searches on flickr (photos, tags, groups, discussions and members). Please check them out at my single-paged google page
I have found that the current version mainly lacks of three interesting features:

1. You cannot add locally stored buttons
2. You cannot have more than one option for the search engines (and its value must be used directly in the URL)
3. You cannot access the option via a context menu - you will have to change it from the google toolbar settings

Nevertheless, it’s a quite interesting feature (even though Firefox’s bookmark shortcuts might come in handier).