I wanted to go to DC, just to see what was going on. Just so i could say i went there. I’ll be working and probably won’t even be able to watch the inauguration on TV, and i wanted to at least see something and since it’s only a 30 minute drive why not in person?

Even at 2 in the morning there were crowds on the streets of DC. I was surprised to find parking just a few blocks from the mall, and even more surprised i was able to walk right up to the Capitol building. Law enforcement was everywhere (mostly in their cars with the heaters running). So were fences and barricades—the closer to the capital, the more restricted your path. Most streets around the mall were closed to vehicles, but no problem for pedestrians. After only 30 minutes in the sub-freezing temperatures i was near-miserable. I can’t imagine standing on the mall for hours like many plan on doing later today.

I-395 from 7th Street Overpass by miahz, on Flickr

Twittered:

01:40: freezing in DC. cars are being towed. someone could die from cold tomorrow.

01:48: outoftowners pouring out of lenfant metro.

02:07: video screens on mall showing flag from camera on capitol dome.

02:34: crews putting up barricades around federal buildings and monuments. people still walking in.

04:04: just got back from DC just so i could see in person the scene where supposed history will take place, and say "i was there on that day."

Capitol Reflected on Ice by miahz, on Flickr

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Right now PC Inspector File Recovery is scanning for lost files — it says it’ll be done by 12am Friday night. Hopefully i’ll be able to recover everything (important, at least). I poked around with TestDisk probably a little too much for my own good, and should have just started backing it up right away. All of this shouldn’t have been a problem, but i don’t have recent backups on my other external drive.

Normally, i copied files directly from memory cards to my main FireWire drive, did some rough date-based folder organizing, deleted obvious bad shots, then uploaded to Flickr from there. I had an automatic backup going to a second external drive, and i guess you could count Flickr as third backup. But things got unorganized as i borrowed cameras after mine died in January along with trying to work an Apple laptop into the workflow, and then getting a new 10MP camera this summer.

I’ve had my eye on something like NETGEAR’s ReadyNAS Duo (or Time Capsule?) for large, dumb storage of files (photos, videos, etc.). But i also still need a large working drive with a fast interface (eSATA or FireWire), because moving thousands of big files over a network is not fast enough. A NAS would also be great because it can feed media to my Xbox 360, and not have to tax my old Windows machine for streaming videos.

The frustrating thing is that i had just straightened out all my Philippines trip photos from July (they ended up being scattered across several memory cards and my laptop, and with messed up time stamps from different timezones). So we’ll see tomorrow night if i’ll have to do all that again. And now there’s wedding photos that everyone wants to see.

Hopefully i can decide on (and afford) some new hardware, recover and reorganize everything, and get back online quickly. Any suggestions?

Nowadays most sites will let you upload JPG, GIF, and PNG in any shape and usually with a generous file size limit. Then they’ll convert it to their own preferred format and let you crop it if you want (some require a square-shaped image). Very easy.

Here’s what i found out.

On Twitter with a colored background showing through.

Twitter does respect PNG transparency. At least two resized versions (73px and 24px square) are saved on Amazon S3. You can easily change your Twitter picture, but old pictures are not saved to use again. I tried uploading a few different sizes to see if the down-sizing would make it look any worse; there wasn’t any noticeable difference.

Facebook converts uploaded images to JPG format, so does not support transparency. They can be any shape, and are automatically sized down to 500px 604px 720px on the largest side. The transparent area of my image was cleanly converted to white—which looks great in my case, but might not for others. Facebook of course keeps your images in albums and you can make any of your photos your profile picture.

Gravatar, being the only of these services whose sole purpose is to serve icons, does just about everything you’d want. It maintains transparent areas in PNGs, provides a tool to crop to their square shape (80px and 32px), and lets you store more than one image. Gravatar serves icons for WordPress.com, many WordPress-powered sites, Disqus, and probably a bunch of other sites and services.
Update 20080903: Gravatar should now work with a few more image types.

On a MySpace blog page with a background image showing through.

I was surprised that MySpace accepted my PNG image and kept it transparent. MySpace uses a 90px-wide version of your photo for icons throughout the site. MySpace, like Facebook, keeps albums of your images and you can use any of them as your default picture.

On Flickr showing the garbled alpha area.

And now Flickr. You’d think that Flickr the photo site would have buddy icons down. But they practically fail. The problem i had for my new icon is they use JPGs for buddy icons, so no transparent PNGs. In addition, if you do try to use a PNG with alpha transparency, it garbles the transparent area instead of making it solid. Another issue with their icon uploader is that it “intelligently” crops or stretches images to fit the 48px square. Images with large solid areas are cropped off and the remaining image is stretched out to fill the square. I tried uploading a pre-sized 48px square black on white version of my icon, and Flickr cropped and stretched it instead of using it as i designed it.

I haven’t looked into the Google picture options in much detail, but it looks like they get converted to JPGs, and are reduced to 96px. If you upload via Gmail web interface you are forced to crop to a square shape. But using the Google Talk chat client i’ve uploaded non-square images. My PNG icon was converted to a JPG with a white background.

Update 20080901: The Get Satisfaction customer support site accepts and maintains transparency in PNGs. When uploading, the longer sides of an image are automatically cropped to a square shape and saved as 100px and 30px copies.

Notes

This was just a quick sampling of some of the services i use more often; i may update as i encounter more.

I created this new version to be square because a majority of sites expect square images. I was tired of seeing my previous icon cropped down or stretched, or having to manually add white bars top and bottom to make it fill a square.

Obviously, a black icon with a transparent background won’t really be visible on a page with a black or dark background, but i like how it looks on most other pages, so i’m willing to accept that. Internet Explorer 6 does not properly display transparent areas of PNG images, but there’s not really any reason to still be using that browser.

The one thing that consistently varies is the size of the images that sites use. For some it is no issue, but with some designs, especially at smaller sizes, it can drastically change the appearance of an icon. For example, at the full 256 pixels, i think my icon looks great. But once it’s been shrunk down by Flickr to 48 pixels, and then again to 24px by the browser, the icon’s features start to break down.

My photo on Flickr of a flat black murdered-out Beetle i saw in DC is currently in the #5 spot when you Google “murdered out.”

It was at the top of my Flickr stats, and half the links came from Google. So i image searched for “murdered out” figuring it might show up there. But it didn’t. Then i clicked over to the regular Google results page, and was surprised to see it right there on the first page.

The Beetle didn’t have tinted windows as the Urban Dictionary definition explains, but neither did the Harley next to it. Check out the rest of my Murdered Out set on Flickr.

Props to Rob & Big for bringing the term “murdered out” into our lives.

Unfortunately, creativity will be stressed without the freedom and control of a PowerShot.