I’m having a difficult time falling asleep tonight.  I’ve had a headache for the past two days.  The ache is located in only one spot in my head, feeling like a bolt stuck there.  Even 800 mg of motrin hasn’t kicked it.

I’ve been working on searching for jobs.  I guess some of the job search techniques or abilities online have changed. Look at //this article.  It describes some new federal guidelines for online job searches and posts.

New federal guidelines meant to standardize how employers track data on the diversity of their job-applicant pool are taking effect starting today for jobs at federal contractors -- and similar rules will kick in later this year at U.S. companies with more than 50 employees. And resumes and search approaches that worked perfectly well before may no longer do the trick.

Have you seen the website //Linkedin?  It’s specialized social networking meant to get all your job connections together.  I’ve been a member for a while and recently found out a friend works there. Cool!  Anyway, you should check out the site, sign up, and post your resume.  After all, a large percentage of jobs are acquired through friends or someone who knows someone.  So get Linkedin!!!

I had an interview today for a tech position.  I was made aware of the position through a friend.  The interview lasted for three hours, talking to four people total.  I think it went well, and we’ll see if the position is a fit for both me and the company.  I’ll probably write more later about it once things have settled.

Ok, I think I’ll surf a while longer then see if I can get some rest.

You might have heard of this site already or not. It’s called //Pandora, created by the Music Genome Project.  What the heck?  To sum up what the //Music Genome Project does, it is a group of people who break down the DNA of a song or musician.  They determine try to “capture the unique and magical musical identity of a song - everything from melody, harmony and rhythm, to instrumentation, orchestration, arrangement, lyrics, and of course the rich world of singing and vocal harmony."  Pandora offers a way to listen to the fruits of their labor.

When you visit Pandora, you will be asked to enter in an artist or a song.  When the information is inputted, a song that exemplifies the artist’s music style will play. After the initial song, similar suggestions from other artists will play.  You can choose to listen to the next song, skip to a following song, and even buy a song you have just listen to.  Suggestions are not based on the old “if you like this artist, you might like this next artist because  similar people listened to it as well”, but is based on the DNA profile of the artist’s catalog.

You can create a profile and save favorite songs, all it takes is an email address.  The service is free, but you can pay as little as $3/month for no advertising.  So try it out and see if you like it.  This is a streaming music service, so you might need to wade through some songs you may not like.  But if you are looking for new music, or just want to have a radio station playing in the background, you may want to give //Pandora a try.

[For more information on Pandora, please see the Podcast //Inside the Net 6: Tim Westerngren of Pandora Media All you need to do is download the Podcast and listen to it on your computer.]

[Also note: I was able to find most artists I searched for on Pandora.  Not all will appear though, as they do have a limited catalog that is growing each day.  So do not be discouraged if you are looking for someone that isn’t currently there.]

Just wanted to post a quick to find some deals on Black Friday.  What is Black Friday? The first day of holiday shopping (the Friday after Thanksgiving) where retailers are in the black from all the sales they make.

So if you plan on hitting the stores, go see

//www.bf2005.com

for the scoop on not only deals but what might actually be in-stock!

I have been trying to find an online solution to display my photos that isn’t reliant on hosting the software myself.  If you go to //http://www.janella.com/photography you will see the photo gallery that is hosted on my site.

The software is provided by //Gallery and is a great piece of open source work.  My problem?  For one thing, I am getting a little time crunched on doing any patches that is required from time to time.  The second thing is I can’t upload the original image (due to lack of disk space).  This requires me to spend time resizing images for the web.  It becomes a pain in the butt after a while.

Looking for a Solution

There are many photo sites to choose from.  Most offer a way to make prints, such as //Ofoto, //Shutterfly, and //Snapfish.  These are very good sites, but they lack the customization I’m seeking.

I took at look at four solutions.  Here is how I rank them and their pros and cons - IMHO.

1.  //Flickr

The lowdown:

A free account gives you 20MB upload limit per month with no limit on storage space, but only 200 most recent photos will appear.  Older photos are not deleted they just don’t appear.

For a paid account it’s $24.95 per year.  This gives you 2GB bandwidth a month for uploading and all your photos appear.  This works out to be about $2.08 for unlimited storage!

My view:

The best of the bunch.  You can’t beat the price for a paid service.  The community, if you are seeking comments on photos you have taken or want to make comments on what you see, is very active.  It can get brutal at times, but overall it’s nice to see people interacting online.  I also like the ability to control permissions on a photo level.  The current knock against Flickr is the incredibly awkward way it handles organizing of sets.  The drag and drop UI for this needs to change and subsets need to be implemented.

1. // Zoto

The lowdown:

New kid on the block getting attention.  Free account gives you 2GB of storage with currently no upload limit. Paid accounts are a little pricey at $44.95 per year, so about $4 a month.  At this price it only gives you currently 5GB of storage.

My view:

The big positive for this service is the ability to create photo galleries easily.  Organization of photos is done by keyword (tags) as Flickr, with the mass tagging of photos a little easier than Flickr.  The big knock against this service, besides the price for a paid account,  is site outages in the last several weeks.  Not sure about leaving my photos there for the long run.

1. //Fotki.com

The lowdown:

Community photo site with easy to use tools for organization.  Photos can be organized by albums and subalbums as well as by date.  For a paid account at $50 per year you receive unlimited storage, FTP access to upload photos, and customization to suit your needs.

My view:

FTP was a very nice feature to have.  I found the password protection scheme awkward though.

1. //Smugmug

My view:

No free accounts here, but free to try for 7 days.  All paid accounts (starting at $29.95 to $99.95 a year) offer unlimited space for photos.  You can even order prints of photos from your gallery, as well as allowing friends and family do the same.

My view:

Easy to use interface for anyone. The albums I created were very attractive.  The big point I didn’t not like was that photo albums that I had password protected or private was searchable through Google for some reason.  I’ve read on Smugmug’s message boards that this is a known issue and they are working to remedy this problem.  If they solved this issue, this would rank as my #2 out of the four services I’ve looked at.

So for now it seems //Flickr, in my opinion, is the place to be.

If you haven’t already, please consider donating to the relief effort for those affected by Hurricane Katrina. You can find a list of online places to donate on the [Network for Good] web site. Every little bit helps.

Ah another me site.  I heard about [43 Things] some time ago, but never really took a deep look at it.  It is a web site where you can list your hopes and dreams in life for all to see.  When you accomplish your listed item, you then check it off the list.  You can then add more.

The site goes hand-and-hand with [43 Places] where you can list the places you want to travel to or where you have traveled before.  On both of these sites you can see who you share the same dreams and aspirations with and share comments and some photos as well.

Check out my still growing list at [http://www.43things.com/person/sithkicker], which of course you can also access later through the [Me Sites] link to the right.

Anyone check out [http://maps.a9.com/], the Amazon map search engine?  If you haven’t, pop on over there and see if you can find where you live.  There may be a photo of your front door!

What?

The thing about A9’s map engine is that it shows street-level photos. Steven says he can see his place on the map, and even a local merchant walking on the street!  I guess a rolling van drives by taking digital images of the street.  So watch out!

You have 30 seconds to spare and Flash installed?  Then watch [this quick version of Pulp Fiction]

Also available:

• [Alien]
• [Jaws]
• [Titanic]

and others.

Ah, another Internet and ME moment.  Found this nifty plug-in/site called [Audioscrobbler].    From their site it states:

Audioscrobbler builds a profile of your musical taste using a plugin for your media player (Winamp, iTunes, XMMS etc..). Plugins send the name of every song you play to the Audioscrobbler server, which updates your musical profile with the new song. Every person with a plugin has their own page on this site which shows their listening statistics. The system automatically matches you to people with a similar music taste, and generates personalised recommendations.

[See my page here]

The cool thing I’m looking for is recommendations of new music and groups. This was one of the main reasons why I liked file sharing, the ability to see what other people listen to who share your musical tastes.  (Of course there’s that nasty legal side of sharing files, but let’s not get into that here.)  The profile does time time to build, requiring about 100+ songs to be listened to before updating. The site can also be slow due to the amount of submissions and songs processed. Give it a shot.

Plug-in available for the following players:

• Winamp
• Windows Media Player 9/10
• iTunes (Windows)
• iTunes (Mac)
• foobar2000
• XMMS/Beep Media Player
• AmaroK
• QCD
• Rhythmbox
• J. River Media Center
• Xbox Media Center
• SlimScrobbler
• Noatun
• AmiScrobbler (MorphOS)

Still, there are plenty of early Peas-heads who remain disgruntled about the  group's leap to the pop world. But go ahead and call them sellouts. Lead lyricist will.i.am doesn't mind. "It's cool. It makes me feel good because that means they really liked our  first record."

I wouldn’t say I’m disgruntled, I just liked their old sound better.  Not sure I’m getting into their new album.  It’s pretty much pop, with a lot of contributing artists (Jack Johnson, Sting, Justin Timberlake…).  It’s can be catchy stuff - which pop is supposed to be right?

For more on how B.E.P. feels about their changing sound, [read this CNN article].

Can Darth Vader read your mind?  Visit [this web site] and challenge a Lord of the Sith. He did guess correctly what I was thinking! Weird.

I think I mentioned a post or two ago that I was starting a new blog.  Yeah, another blog.  This makes a total of three blogs!!!  Well, actually it’s more like two.  There is:

• [weblog] janella.com - The main blog.  I use this to keep family and friends updated on what is going on with life's events.  It also serves as the main method to hear about new photos taken and posted involving those life events.
• [360].yahoo.com - My work blog.  I write here to keep some friends at work informed of what's happening in my life.  It almost mirrors [weblog] janella.com, so if you read this blog you really don't need to visit here...unless you want to see what my coworkers are writing about.  360 is a beta weblog offered by Yahoo!
• [LTF] janella.us - The new blog!  A weblog to chronicle my adventures in photography.  We'll adventures is a strong word.  More like stumbling and fumbling through the learning process.

Having a separate blog has helped me focus my thoughts, and allowed me to write more about the task-at-hand. [weblog] gives me the freedom to write about anything, whereas [LTF] allows me to specifically write about taking photos.  I’m not sure if the writing is composed well, but it is the most writing I have done in some time.  Plus you won’t need to read about it here - and if you want to read about it you can go [there].  I hope you do take some time to read it over, and feel free to make any comments both encouraging and critical.

Who knows, managing three blogs may become cumbersome - it’s not cumbersome at the moment - so it may well change.

Oh well, it’s time to go do something.

Later.