However, j.mp is owned by bit.ly, which has a lot more visibility as a URL-shortening service.  While bit.ly owns j.mp, they are not separate services that happen to have the same owner; rather, they are highly integrated.  A single user account gets you access to both bit.ly and j.mp.  Furthermore, j.mp and bit.ly actually share their database, since http://j.mp/84SxlS and http://bit.ly/84SxlS, for example, both redirect to the same site.  This raises the question of why I would want to use a shortening service like bit.ly when j.mp is actually the same but produces URLs that are 2 characters shorter.  In many ways, j.mp is the best of both worlds.  Because it’s connected to bit.ly, it offers a slew of nice features but it produces the shortest URLs around.

Unfortunately, it’s clear from the bit.ly/j.mp website that bit.ly is interested in promoting bit.ly and not j.mp.  At some point in the past I went to j.mp and grabbed their “Shorten with j.mp” bookmarklet, which I put in my bookmark toolbar so I could easily shorten URLs for use on Twitter.  However, this bookmarklet appears to be gone.  If you go to http://j.mp/pages/tools, it offers a “Shorten with bit.ly” bookmarklet rather than a “Shorten with j.mp” bookmarklet”.  Doesn’t that seem strange?

Fortunately, there is a simple solution: manually edit the bookmarklet.  It turns out that simply changing bit.ly in the “URL” field code to j.mp is sufficient to change this “Shorten with bit.ly” bookmarklet into a “Shorten with j.mp” bookmarklet.  In addition to making the change in the “URL” field, you probably want to change the name of the bookmarklet just so it’s clear that you’re using j.mp rather than bit.ly.

I only really started using Google Reader a few days ago, but I really like it.  I had tried various RSS readers in the past, but never got into them.  However, I really like the fact that I can share articles with other people and add my own commentary.  People can follow the resulting RSS feed from their own RSS reader or they can check out the feed in the sidebar right here on this blog.

So, while I probably won’t be writing full-blown posts every day, you can check my blog to see my tweets and articles I’ve shared through Google Reader.  I hope you enjoy them.

However, the other gripe – that self-referential links are not rewritten to point to their correct location on wordpress.com – still stands. What this means is that all the links I have on my blog to my own previous posts are still wrong. That is, they still point to the old URL of my blog. In order to remedy this, I basically have to go through all my posts one by one and update the links, which will be tedious because wordpress.com uses a different scheme than my old wordpress.org installation did for constructing URLs. Fortunately, I don’t link to old posts in all my blog entries, but I do have quite a few such links. However, now that the picture issue is solved, I’m willing to say that 80% of my problems are over. Over time I’ll go through old posts and update the links, but for now – now that the picture issue has been resolved – I feel that the blog is in a more or less usable state.

• I’m actually happy with the theme (that is, the layout and color scheme)
• I installed a Lightroom plug-in which allows me to export images from Lightroom directly into PixelPost without having to save a temporary file on my local computer.
• I’m starting to understand how to use Lightroom, which should help me to actually use it, which, in turn, will lead to more photos posted.
• Now that I have this set up, I have more motivation to process my backlog of RAW photos, albeit in manageable, postable chunks.

I posted 5 pictures today to kick things off.  I hope I’ll be able to follow through and continue posting with reasonable regularity.

In addition to adding photos, I hope to continue tweaking the site.  I made a number of changes today to the information that’s displayed when you click on “Info & Comments”.  By default, the theme only gives you the date/time the photo was added and the photo description.  I added in all the EXIF data, the categories, and I reordered things a bit. I was surprised at how easy it was, given that I know nothing about PHP or CSS.

Since I found editing the theme to be pretty easy, I’m toying with the idea of installing this add-on, which enables visitors to see where photos were taken on a Google Map.  I was interested in adding GPS coordinates to the rest of the EXIF data.  Unfortunately, PixelPost doesn’t seem to natively support GPS-related EXIF data, so an add-on is necessary.

In any case, I hope you enjoy my new photoblog.

At the very least, the URL will need to change. However, I’d like to stop having to do admin work on the computer, like dealing with upgrading to the latest version of the software or troubleshooting hardware problems. So, ideally, I’d like to migrate all my photos to an online photo sharing site. I’ve been looking at the various options but none has really jumped out as a the logical choice. I have a lot of pictures, so I’m resigned to paying for a “pro account”, as they’re called on many sites. Generally, this amounts to $20-25/year, so it’s no big deal. There are a bunch of criteria that I’m judging the sites on but I won’t get into details now – I’ll save that for a later post.

In the meantime, I’ll focus on one criterion: that a tool exists that would allow me to automatically migrate my existing albums to a new location. I was aware of a sourcforge project called gallery2flickr, which will migrate your Gallery v.2 albums to Flickr. However, it’s nice to have choices and I was afraid that I would be locked into Flickr because it was the only service with a migration tool. However, today, I discovered Migratr, which will convert between any of 10 different photo sites, including Gallery v.2, Flickr, Zooomr, and Picasa Web. This gives me a lot more options.

Unfortunately, as you may have noticed, all these migration tools work with Gallery v.2 while I run Gallery v.1. So, I’ll need to migrate my Gallery v.1 albums to Gallery v.2 albums. I’m not sure how difficult this will be. I’m pretty sure that it will involve at least two steps, though: 1) upgrade from my current Gallery version to the latest version in the v.1 line and then 2) convert that installation into Gallery 2. This could be complicated by the fact that Gallery 2 uses a MySQL database and I’m not sure if I remember the root password for the MySQL server on the machine, which I’ll need in order to create a new user, which, in turn, I’ll need to give Gallery 2 access to the database and the appropriate tables. If things don’t go smoothly, this could turn into a huge pain since I need my MySQL installation for my blog, which, incidentally, is something further that I will need to migrate before too long…

Upon inspection, I discovered that the power supply fan had died.  The computer was still working but the fan in the power supply had given up the ghost.  It wasn’t too surprising, actually, since it had been chirping on and off for probably 2 years.  In fact, I had bought 2 replacement power supplies in July of 2006 just in case the existing power supply would fail – an occurrence that actually took a lot longer than I expected.  In any case, I discovered this problem about 15 minutes before the taxi was supposed to pick me up, so I had to just shut everything down.  After returning late on Monday night, I spent some time on Tuesday trying to get things fixed.  However, things weren’t quite as easy as I expected.

Replacing the power supply was easy since I had replacements on hand.  I also took the opportunity to clean the case out properly since it was full of dust.  I expected that after replacing the power supply and cleaning everything I would just power the machine on and everything would be back to normal.  Unfortunately, the network interface didn’t work.  I was getting some kind of IRQ conflict.  If I brought the interface up, I could ping it for awhile from a different machine and then it would stop responding.  I wasn’t able to figure it out yesterday so I just left it and worked on some other, more pressing things.  I took a look at the issue this morning again and this time, the network interface wasn’t showing up at all.  The IRQ conflicts were gone since the system was no longer seeing the network hardware.  So, I turned off the machine, opened it up, and put in an old ethernet card I had lying around.  This was recognized by the system as eth1 so I made a quick change to /etc/network/interfaces to move all of my previous settings from eth0 to eth1.  I restarted the machine and everything worked!

I think there are two lessons to be learned from this story.  One is that keeping spare computer components around pays off.  I fixed the problem with a spare power supply and ethernet card that I had on hand.  I didn’t need to go to any store or order anything online.  I probably saved myself a bunch of money and I definitely saved myself a bunch of time by hanging on to old stuff.  The second lesson is that this machine may go completely belly up before too long.  When motherboard components (like my ethernet port) start failing, the computer may not be too much longer for this world.  That said, as a 500MHz Pentium III from 1999, I’d say it’s had a good run.

I heard yesterday that the Pirates traded Nady and Marte to the Yankees. This made me upset. I feel like this season the Pirates have a legitimate shot at getting above .500. However, without Nady and Marte, their likelihood of having a winning season is a lot lower. The trading away of talented players for prospects reminded me of a t-shirt I had seen on eBay that said “Pittsburgh Baseball: Rebuilding since 1992″. In the wake of the Nady/Marte trade, I thought that maybe I should buy this shirt. So I went to eBay to see if I could find it. It had been sold by a Pittsburgh-based T-shirt maker for quite a while, so I thought I’d be able to find it. No such luck.

Not able to find it on eBay, I tried to remember what the seller’s name was in order to see if I could find it through some other channel. I finally found that it was “River City Shirts”. So, I decided to see if they had a website. Google had it indexed but it’s no longer online. I found a MySpace page for “River City Shirts” but the account had been deleted. This seemed very strange. Then, I found an entry on auction-safety.org – a complaint against River City Shirts for having sold a shirt and then never delivered the item. From the complaint, I found the seller’s eBay id and I checked out eBay’s page for the seller. It indicated that despite having achieved power seller status and having compiled a ton of positive reviews, this seller is “No longer registered as a user”. In addition, this page featured a number of angry comments from customers claiming to have not received the merchandise they had ordered. Those keeping score at home will note that we now have a defunct website, a deleted MySpace account, a deregistered eBay account, and multiple complaints on multiple sites.

Basically, the entire online presence of River City Shirts has been deleted. This led me to wonder if perhaps the guy running it had died. From the auction-safety.org complaint, I had the guy’s name and address. So, I did a Google search for his name plus the word “obituary”. This search returned 3 hits. Only one pertained to a person from Pittsburgh. It was a report of a wedding that occurred June 22, 2008. It turns out that our River City Shirts proprietor is not dead; rather, he was a groomsman at the wedding. Furthermore, I went to high school with the bride. It took me a while to realize it, though. I looked at her name and thought that it seemed familiar. I seemed to recall her having been a year or two younger than me. I looked at my school district’s alumni database but I couldn’t find her in it, so I started to doubt that my initial inclinations had been correct. However, as I read through the article again, I took note of the names of the bridesmaids. It turns out that I’m sure that some of them went to high school with me. So, I now have no doubt that the bride went to high school with me.

In any case, having found this article about the wedding does nothing to help me figure out what happened to River City Shirts. I still want my “Pittsburgh Baseball: Rebuilding since 1992″ shirt. Maybe I should contact this girl I went to high school with to see if she can hook me up.