Category Archives: technology

Flickr: Now what?

Posted on December 10, 2010 | 1 Comment

I’ve been using Flickr since 2005 or so, when a coworker introduced me to it. Her love for the site was so infectious that she talked me into signing up even though I didn’t have a digital camera, and very few scanned images to share. But since then I’ve acquired several cameras, and a scanner, and built up quite a collection of photos on the site.

Last week I tried to do the same thing I do each year: renew my pro account to keep all those thousands of photos and sets live on the site. Except for the first time, it didn’t work. I got most of the way through the process (go to the order page, go to Paypal, approve the purchase, back to the site) and received an error page. The kind of generic, blank, “Something went wrong, but you can contact customer service if it stays that way” error that I hate inflicting on users. There wasn’t even a link to tell me how to contact customer service.

I waited a couple of days and tried again. Same error. Now Paypal reported I had two payment requests pending with Yahoo, but still no pro account. It seems something went wrong when the payment request was redirected back to Yahoo.

I dug around in the footer links on Flickr and found a link to file a help request. So I explained what happened, sent it off, and waited.

Yahoo customer service replied, asking me to confirm my account and billing information before they can help me. They requested my address and phone number. I explained that I pay through Paypal, and I don’t think that information is on file on my account. They emailed back asking for my date of birth, and provided a link to check what personal details Yahoo has on file. It doesn’t include my DOB.

So I responded, explaining that my DOB isn’t listed there, thus I don’t know whether they have it in the first place, and it’s completely beside the point to ask for this given that I 1) initiated the request from inside my Flickr account while logged in, and 2) need them to investigate a bug in their system, not a problem with my account (as far as I can tell).

Yahoo customer service’s reply to this is to ask for me to provide the answer to a security question, one that I also can’t find a way to confirm I have set. (Surely I’m not the only user who sometimes puts nonsensical answers in those fields.) By this point I felt more than a little frustrated. I did everything by their directions when I tried to renew my account, and now I have to do the work of convincing them to help me (Do you know my date of birth? Good for you! So does anyone with spare time and a search engine!). And meanwhile they wouldn’t acknowledge that there could be a problem with their billing system.

We’ve gone back and forth a few more times on this, with me trying to explain that I think there’s a bug on their end, and them asking for my DOB. Still. I even asked if they could escalate my ticket to someone who could explain why they need personal information I can’t verify they have on file. No luck.

(Personal info, over non-secure email. If verifying that I’m the account holder is really the issue, why not use Flickr’s internal message service?)

At this point, I think maybe I don’t even want a Flickr pro account. Sure, I loved having an easy way to put photos online, and share them with friends, but I don’t know if I want to deal with an asinine “service” system to get it. Flickr stopped being easy to use the second time I tried to renew my account and got that error. I don’t want to spend hours on email trying to get a resolution to this.

I don’t know what I’ll do next, though. I think it’s not worth the time sorting this out—either Yahoo will get a clue and resolve the error, or not. Meanwhile I’ll have to figure out what to do with my photo archives and all the dead links on my blog posts and other pages. I know there are other photo hosting services out there, but I haven’t seen one that wasn’t cluttered and ugly. Flickr always won on simplicity.

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Portland as Digital Timber Town

Posted on September 27, 2010 | Comments Off

I hosted a session at WhereCampPDX this weekend on Portland, technology, and economic development.

I started things off by suggesting a theory: that Portland’s history as a timber town has influenced our approach to economic development, in ways that are no longer useful as we switch from a physical commodity-driven economy to a digital one. I also talked a little about the tendency for investment and customers to be outside of Portland, causing money to flow into and out of the economy, but not move around inside Portland’s tech economy (we do spend our money on other kinds of local goods and services).

Participants helped build a list of things we know about working in timber vs. working in tech, then we talked through what the effects of these things are, and what we might do about it. Here’s what we came up with:

Timber (atoms)
* semi-limited renewable resource
* fungible/tradeable commodity
* global market – externally facing
* hard to obsolete
* no 2.0? (low innovation rate)
* high startup cost/time (have to grow the trees)
* usually organized labor
* doesn’t travel (you can’t take your trees elsewhere)

Tech (bits)
* infinite
* maybe a commodity
* maybe specialized
* global market
* can be an internally or externally facing market
* rapidly changing
* low startup cost
* not much labor organization
* travels well

Side effects (what happens in the local economy as a result?)
* Regional cash flow problems
* Can we grow?
* Needs replanting
* Needs the right culture
* Tech moves internally (inside the local community)
* Cash doesn’t
* We build relationships around the tech-sharing
* But not around the cash transactions
* Business and tech people don’t speak the same language
* Risk aversion: tech is easy to share, cash is hard
* Differences in barriers to entry (are these being addressed?)

Lessons/goals (what do we want to do about this?)
* need structures for investing $$$ in community tech
* business mentoring (another camp?)
* companies should invest in the community’s tech skills
* keep projects open
* share knowledge locally
* more exposure to local products and marketplace
* local hiring marketplace
* expose businesses to local tech assets
* more directories
* programmer fund: let’s pool money to invest
* fund projects based on community value
* bring management from companies into the practitioner community (take your boss to the user group meeting)

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Posted in events, portland, technology

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Open Source, Government, Business, and Portland

Posted on August 20, 2010 | Comments Off

This week I did two pieces on things going on around Portland’s technology sphere. The first was a guest post for Silicon Florist about bringing open source into government:

A number of us recently read the Willamette Week’s coverage of open source and the City of Portland’s engagement with the open source community. Seeing this type of coverage from a mainstream publication was a high watermark of sorts. A step forward. But how big of a step?

I asked Audrey Eschright, Open Source Bridge co-founder, the driving force behind Calagator, and local open source advocate, for her take on it [...]. What she provided wound up being—by her own admission—an accidental manifesto on open source and municipal government.

The other piece is a comic on the cycles of underinvestment reflected in discussions about Portland tech business.

It's all about the money

I’ve been interested in how people often make comments like the ones above in the midst of the same discussions without seeing how they’re connected. If you look at it all together, it makes sense that our economic activities are so externally focused—locally, the money doesn’t move fast enough. It’s all part of the same problem.

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5 Things I’m Thinking About

Posted on August 11, 2010 | Comments Off

Everyone’s doing it, or so I hear.

  1. Community spaces for technology, and how to create and sustain one.
  2. Long-term unemployment stats, and what happens two or five years from now if we’re still at roughly the same level of unemployment and it’s mostly the same people.
  3. What print is good for. What digital is good for. (And how to build more of each.)
  4. Ladybusiness.
  5. Storytelling, and “what happens next?” replacing points and check-ins and scores. Possibly these stories involve dinosaurs or detectives or emergent AI or creepy crawlies from beyond or …?

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Posted in me, projects, technology

Current Practice

Posted on July 28, 2010 | Comments Off

Reflection

Since some folks geek out on this sort of thing:

I’ve been using Twitter exclusively on the iPad this week. It has the advantage that I can’t be distracted by it while I’m working on other things, and the screen is big enough to be comfortable viewing links and pictures. I clip any interesting articles to Instapaper unless I have time to read them right now, which is an improvement over my previous tendency to leave them open in yet another Firefox tab which just gets in the way later. When the iPad gets threaded email this fall, I might see if I can handle mail the same way (Gmail in the iPad browser is nice, but I have more than one account to keep track of).

I’m using Tumblr as a kind of public notebook. Altered photos and screengrabs, snippets of commentary or rant, quotes from something I’m reading. For notes I don’t want to share, I’m using Evernote. Still getting the hang of what sorts of folders are useful, and trying to remind myself to move iPhone photos into there when relevant.

My todo list still lives in The Hit List even though development appears to be completely stalled. I like the interface and how it handles recurring items too much to switch unless forced. Most of the time it doesn’t matter that I can’t sync it with my phone—the only reminder I seem to miss is a result is my twice-a-month contact lens switch, and being a day late isn’t terribly fatal. If I really need to track a errand or grocery list while out and about, I put it in Evernote.

One of my consistent goals with all of this is to have a system that’s so calm and easy to maintain I don’t think about it. When I’m working, I want to minimize distractions and have everything I need easy to access. When I’m reading or browsing information, I want it to be so easy to clip and track I can find the good parts again later. So on and so forth.

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Posted in life, technology

More Thoughts on Tech/Civics Things

Posted on June 17, 2010 | Comments Off

I went to the OpenGovWest meetup last night, which I sort of flubbed by arriving 40 minutes late (I thought the meeting started at 7pm, not 6). But I got there in time for most of the discussion, which ranged from “what does this group want to be doing?” to “why is the city/county RFP process so obtuse?”

A recurring theme was the need for hubs, info centers, central communication points. I said something about needing a telephone tree, which led one of those “this is too simple to work” insights: if the lowest common denominator of government technology usage is email, and we need a contact point for government to talk to the indie tech community, why don’t we give them an email address to cc, and filter or redistribute it on our side? I mean, the PDC sent out notes from the meeting at w+k, and how did they distribute that? Email. How visible is email to people not on the list? Right. But that gap, that’s just tech stuff, filtering and rebroadcasting and we totally know how to do that. So Reid will set up an email alias to use and we’ll start tinkering.

I’m also thinking about creating a tumblr for CivicApps. There’s a communication/visibility problem for the project, because they’re on Twitter, but Twitter posts are transient. They scroll off the screen and cease to exist (in our immediate consciousness). There’s a mailing list now which is great for discussion, and a news page on the site, but it’s all press releases and the link is buried at the bottom of the page. One of the things I like about Tumblr is that it makes it easy to combine content from a variety of sources, and you can configure it so other people can submit posts.

Yeah, why not. I can always delete it if it’s not useful. If you’re working on something CivicApps related you want to see posted/linked, send it to me.

One of the other things I’ve been trying to do it sort out the various needs and pieces of this. There’s the “how does the tech community talk to the government” piece. The “how do we address the business needs of small businesses and startups” piece. A professional development / community-building piece that often comes back to “we want a community collaboration space” and “getting sponsors & volunteers for events”. And some things that stretch outside of Portland or the region, like “connecting our CivicApps and OpenGov activities with the global government transparency effort”. Each one might need different tools, have different people involved.

And now I’m at the end of my lunch break, and the MEX/FRA game is over, so I’ll post this.

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Posted in portland, technology

Notes from the Civic Engagement Meetup

Posted on June 16, 2010 | Comments Off

The meeting was two weeks ago, and while we had a small group I think it went well. I’ve been trying to organize these notes into some sort of coherent narrative, but it’s not working, so I’m just posting what I have in semi-raw form. I edited down a lot of the discussion to focus on what I thought were the key points. Much thanks to Addie for taking the notes I’ve edited and annotated below.

Here’s what I wrote down for follow-up from our discussion:

  • We need metrics (still)
  • Figure out economic impact of open source, community meetups
  • How can we build community structures that can help represent us?
  • PDC is experienced in real estate development, so… how do we make what we need have a structure they can work with?

Continue reading →

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What Needs Aren’t Being Met?

Posted on May 31, 2010 | Comments Off

I went through the answers to two more questions from the first PDC survey to provide a summary of responses. These involved things respondents wanted in order to improve their business’s relationship with Portland, and infrastructure needs that weren’t explicitly covered in a previous question.

The answers seem to reflect a similar sense of disenfranchisement among some respondents to that which was described in answers to the initial survey question. Requests for local government actions make up the largest group, and a large number of others relate to general attitudes and planning approaches.

Please note that not all survey-takers answered these two questions, only those who said they had a less-than-satisfactory Portland relationship (for the first question), and those with infrastructure needs not otherwise noted in previous questions about transportation, work spaces, telecommunications, and so on (for the second).
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How Do We Feel About Tech Business in Portland?

Posted on May 28, 2010 | 1 Comment

At the PDC meeting on Wednesday, I asked for access to the raw survey data they collected. I’m primarily interested in doing qualitative analysis of the free-form responses. Below is my breakdown of answers to the first question (How do you feel about your business’ relationship to the city of Portland?).

To aid the tl;dr crowd, I put my summary and comments at the top, and the breakdown of what sorts of things people said below.
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Posted in portland, technology

Notes and Comments from PDC Software Cluster Meeting #1

Posted on May 27, 2010 | 2 Comments

This is a bit off-the-cuff, since I didn’t take notes during the meeting, and ended up writing down what stuck in my head afterward. I’d appreciate if any other attendees want to leave comments with their own impressions and major topics to point out.
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