retrofocus ramblings.

by the man-in-plastic – j. kiely jr., photographer, pilot, diver and sometimes nerd

Archive for the ‘dog’ tag

Staring into Space.

leave a comment

For some reason I tend to think to post more to this nascent ‘blog when I’m on the road. As if regular life as lived is less ‘blog-worthy. That might be true.
In the last few days I’ve had a raging fistfight with various technological annoyances. First it was with Skype’s business control panel function.
I like Skype. If I actually telephone somebody 9 out of 10 times I’m seated in front of the computer and therefore use Skype. This is great for calling banks and credit card companies or any other large corporation that has linked your phone number to your account. Messes with them big time. It’s especially good for those off the wall calls you get when you run your own business from those snake-oil salespeople that want to discuss your “merchant account” – mind you I know I don’t have a merchant account with these people, but it’s always good to double check in case some moron would be dumb enough to attempt an identity theft or something. Regardless, calling these types of places via Skype always seems to give me a leg up on the conversation. They really don’t know who you are and have, on occasion, sworn up and down that they didn’t call me in the first place. It can be fun. Turning the tables usually is.
However, that doesn’t explain my issue with the service. What I was trying to do is take my existing Skype name (which is the same as my Twitter name) and fold it under a Business Control Panel thingy along with two other Skype names I have launched for my two separate photography avenues. This worked fine until I tried to buy and distribute Skype “credits” from the administrative account, which was not my original account. It would seem if you tie a Skype name to a PayPal account that’s it, the two are linked forever. So I couldn’t use my PayPal account to add credits until I figured out a trick. You CAN have more than one administrator in the Business Control Panel. Eureka! That meant I could make my old account and administrator, buy credits with PayPal and distribute the credits among my 3 accounts in the Control Panel. Okay, now written, it doesn’t sound like such a big deal, but while I was fighting with the Skype and PayPal conundrum it was annoying to no end.
That solved I began fiddling with my domain name collection on GoDaddy and my hosting on FatCow. Back in 1995-1996 all this was so much easier. Would seem now that no matter what I try to do – and I’m trying to forward various domain names to folders on my main domain – good old GoDaddy has the domains as parked. Just some of them, others are working fine. So just some are not forwarding and one doesn’t even seem to be an active domain now if I am to believe OpenDNS. Arrrgh.
That’s what I get for messing with how it was before I guess. And I have followed GoDaddy’s instructions. To forward a domain it has to be on the “parked” nameservers. I did that. Maybe I just have to wait a bit more for the DNS lookups to reset, but – it’s still wicked annoying.

Oh yeah, did I mention that I’m trying to craft a total redesign of my main website? Yes I am. A project that has been ongoing now since June of 2007. Just don’t call me a procrastinator, no, that word is not big enough for me.

Off to do what my 12-year-old Dalmatian does so very well:
the nose of my sleeping Damlatian "Pepper"

Written by j.

February 17th, 2009 at 11:53 pm

Posted in personal,thoughts

Tagged with , , , , , ,

Upper West Side Stroll.

leave a comment

Did a small sort of photo-walk today on the Upper West Side. Walked from Columbus Circle North and crossed Central Park to get to the Guggenheim Museum. Carried my D200 over my shoulder, but the only camera I pulled out all morning was the Canon SD750 happy snapper. Don’t know why, just felt like not looking like a photographer today. Even though I removed the grip from the D200, it’s still fairly big and black and intimidating. The tiny Canon, not so much.
Speaking of things to see I have no idea why I was so fascinated by shoes, boots and feet while I’m walking around. Maybe New Yorkers just wear more snarky footwear. Who knows. I’m normally not much of a foot person at all.

Here’s a picture I grabbed near the Museum of Natural History. LOVE the boots and contrast.

Written by j.

February 1st, 2009 at 5:00 pm