ChasingDonguri

There are a few people amongst our readership who use us as their technology advisors.  If you are such a person, this entry might be of interest to you.  If you are interested in our goings and comings, then this may not be so thrilling.

I recently uploaded all our digital pictures to Flickr.com.  You may have noticed that we use Flickr to host our Korea pictures, and you may be wondering why we have put them all there, as if you really wanted to look at that many pictures.

The truth is we did not upload them so you could look at them, but as a means of storage for ourselves.  Unlike sites like Facebook, which compress your photos when you upload them, Flickr saves the actual photo, giant size and all.  For $25 a year, Flickr gives us as much space as we can use (if you were to ask Jordan about this he would say, "it's a good deal").  So we no longer have to backup our photos on our external harddrive.  They are in fact safer on Flickr, since they are about triple backed up on Flickr's servers (and Flickr is owned by Yahoo!) and you can't drop the internet or spill water on it. 

The other main reason we put them on Flickr was to organize them.  Think about how many pictures you have.  Now think about how many pictures you'll have in 20 years.  How will you find that one picture of me eating ice cream in San Francisco?  The answer is: Flickr.  Flickr gives you the best options for organizing and searching your pictures.  There are a few offline programs that give similar options, but these can be frustrating to use because they utilize so much memory that they slow your computer down.  And if your computer crashes, or you get a new one, you might lose all the organization you've done, if not the actual pictures. 

So that's why we use Flickr.  If you want to know how we use Flickr, you can watch this movie.  I made it, and apparently I had a lot to say because it's really long.  I found Flickr tricky to use when I was starting out, and so perhaps explain more than you need to know.  I have made friends with it though, and once you go through the initial work of loading your old pictures, it will take very little work to maintain as long as you add your pictures as you take them. 

Needless to say, we highly recommend this solution if you take more than 100 pictures a year.  Because 100 pictures times 20 years is 2000 pictures.  And who only takes 100 pictures a year?

At least for me, May has been the month of incredible relaxedness (see I even have time to make up words).  It started with preparation for midterms, which meant that I didn't have to teach.  Then we had midterms, which meant I still didn't have to teach.  Then we went on a somewhat wild goose chase in Seoul to get a document from the American Embassy and I missed two days of school.  Then we had a day off for Children's Day.  This week, my first graders were gone for "training," then my second graders left for a trip.  So by Wedensday I had no students to teach.  Today was rough, I had to teach four classes.  But tomorrow is Teacher's Day, so we have no school, and I don't have school on Monday either.  Then my country school is having Sports Day next Friday and Thursday is practice day, so I don't have to teach again.  Then the last week of May is the festival for foreigners, for which I get to miss another two days of school. 

I will now count all the classes I've taught this month...In the last three weeks I have taught 19 classes.  Normally I teach 21 every week.  And May isn't even over.

Other small May benefits have been cropping up too, like getting grape soda for Sports Day and a pile of rice cakes for Teacher's Day.  I have also started digital scrapbooking since I spend hours sitting at my desk staring at my screen.  This, it turns out, is quite fun, so I'm hoping that May turns into a never ending month of happiness.  In fact, I've been having such a good time being a slacker at school I haven't started celebrating the month of my birthday, which I could start celebrating anytime, but I've just been busy celebrating May Slacker Days.

To celebrate Teacher's Day tomorrow we are going "camping" with some friends.  We're going to barbeque and hope it doesn't rain.  We're going to bring the Wii in case.  This is camping Korean style.