08 Thursday Oct 2020
Posted in welcome
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Look at how pretty I used to be. I say this without vanity, more with a bit of wistful sadness because I didn’t even know I was pretty back then. And this was just 20 years ago, aged 43… pics of me at age 20-25 or so make me even sadder. Because it kind of feels like an “opportunity lost” that I spent so much of my life hating on how I looked, never feeling I was pretty enough, always feeling FAT. But you see, I looked just fine! And man, I would kill to have that jawline back again 😉
03 Friday Jul 2020
So I am giving Patreon a try. As I have mentioned here before I’ve had friends who have very generously sent me donations since lockdown. But sometimes it’s awkward for them to ask, and also to receive. I’ve also had a couple of people I don’t know at all, but who have been following my various blogs about Sevilla and Spain, and wanted to send me something in appreciation for all the work I’ve put into them. Which of course is lovely and very much appreciated.
And then I heard about Patreon. Now there are several ways to offer up your creativity here. Some offer services, some online classes, others access to otherwise private online content. And others, I have seen, just promise to keep their content free and accessible to all. I’m in that last category. I mean, I always would anyhow, but it has occurred to me that maybe people like it enough that they may want to sponsor me. This is my page…
I’m still working my way around how this works. I know there’s a fee (8% of whatever I receive) as well as handling fees for receiving money (same as Paypal charges, 3.4% + 0.35€ per transaction), then of course taxes. Anyhow, this is for monthly patrons, which is what their infrastructure is set up for. For one-off or occasional donations it still seems like Paypal is the best option.
So I thought I could just put this out there and see what happens. It’s still early days, so we’ll see how it goes. They asked me to write something about what I was doing/offering so I will copy and paste it below here. Let me know what you think.
24 Friday Jan 2020
Yesterday the magnificent Dolly Parton posted this collage on her social media accounts – it has since gone viral as the #dollypartonchallenge. This is my contribution…
15 Saturday Dec 2018
Posted in food & drink, gastronomy, instagram, sevilla, social media, tapas, tapas bars
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Running three Instagram accounts is a bit challenging at times, especially as I like to put SOMETHING up there every day. Lately I’ve been having fun with the disappearing stories, and will soon put some of them up permanently.
Here are some I did today (what you can’t see is that the little Winnie the Pooh in the middle pic is animated and doing a happy dance along the bar shelf). Click on the image to make it bigger… or you could pop over to the accounts and see the stories while they’re still there…
20 Monday Aug 2018
Posted in blogging, photography, work
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Moving on from Picasa… but where to?? Actually, this change came about in early 2016, which basically meant that there would be no more updates or support for Picasa, but it didn’t affect the existing versions. In fact, Peter downloaded the last version for his new laptop last month and it’s been working fine. That is, until Saturday.
I uploaded some photos from the day out, planning to do some editing and hopefully get a couple of review updates posted (my massive backlog is ALMOST cleared!!), but while the photos were uploaded properly into the file, they didn’t show up on Picasa. I thought it might just be a glitch and so I just shut things down, thinking that things would probably be back to normal after a reboot. But nope.
It occurred to me to reinstall Picasa, but then I thought I might screw up my present Picasa “library” which is showing everything I uploaded before Saturday. I also checked with Peter and his Picasa also wasn’t showing new photos he uploaded, so the possibility of losing everything seemed likely. Damn.
The thing I have always liked about Picasa was its simple editing options, and also that it was easy to scroll through the library that showed all my photo files. It also had a text option, so I could add my watermark, a collage maker, plus I could export the edited photos to other files at smaller sizes, keeping the originals in the original files. Google Photos, the recommended substitute for Picasa has only basic cropping and filter features, so it’s useless for me.
What to do?? I mean, photo editing is a HUGE part of my job, and I’m really stuck if I don’t have some means of doing this. I tried downloading the Windows Live editor, but that one doesn’t appear to be working either. I also tried GIMP and have just spent the last two hours totally frustrated with it, which is the same experience I had with it a few years ago. I’m sure it does wonderful stuff if you know how to do them, but it is not a user-friendly platform at all, and is very “clunky” in terms of finding the uploaded files and then exporting them.
I honestly don’t know what to do next. Any ideas?
casa azahar 