The Art of Trolling and other Social Media Nasties

Anyone who reads my Twitter feed, see's my Flickr and 500px pages and is my friend or family on Facebook knows that I love photography and that it goes hand in hand with my other love of astronomy.

Anyone who has ever tried to combine the two will also know that IT IS NOT AS EASY AS IT LOOKS.  Hard work, hours at a time and energy are put into both and I share it with like minded people because they understand the process only too well.

So...when I've given permission for use of my photography to anyone, I've done so in the knowledge that those people are trusted with correct usage whether they have paid for the photo or not.

Earlier this year in February 2014 I had a run-in with two major daily UK newspapers that had used a photo which they swiped from another paper that already had my permission.  The result being they agreed to pay costs and damages.  This was settled amicably on both sides.

Last night I was given a heads up by a family member about a local paper that already had my permission to use the same photo (originally correctly credited) that had of yesterday been re-posted on their FB webpage. Unfortunately, the link to the FB page showed a distinctly pixelated image with no credit; once you clicked on the news item it did indeed take you to the local paper's website where the image was correctly displayed.

1. It would have been nice for the local paper to just ask again for it to be used.
2. I will always now question that integrity originally proferred to me by this paper.
3. The resulting reply comments on the paper's FB page under my comment querying the issue are the product of ignorance from a mass audience that refuse to check their heads before opening their mouths because...well it's easy to do so when that person is not in front of you eh?

Now I'm guessing you're all thinking "Crap...whose been having a pop at Twinkle?!" and "Where's the link to this, I wanna dive in?!" well...you have been warned...

Enter to Abandon

Silly isn't it?

Now if this 'item' belonged to any one of them, they would be up in arms and all over it like a rash, but because the author made comment they feel disconnected in some way, so that's alright then we can trash and troll away to our hearts content right?  Wrong.

Facebook has it covered if you are not clappy happy:                                                             Standards

I'm guessing that these type of people don't have much experience in life, have never done any real hard graft, grown or created anything from scratch, never come close to death, stood 200 yards from a 1 ton bomb going off and never had to make their way home through that carnage, never cared for an animal or much less a human and never stood in wonder at nature or the planet we live on.

At the time of blogging this issue isn't really a problem since I'm not feeling harassed...however it could go completely pear-shaped, you just never know.  Interestingly the local paper's webmaster hasn't responded back since the reply last night.

I don't use FB particularly often or extensively for this very reason and I'm only connected to people I know, can trust and are also my family (and believe me, I get hacked off by family too at times!).

Social media is great for debate and comment and really should be used for such as if you had that person standing in front of you..e.g. would you really call that lady a c**t to her face?  Many of us think that is OK on a keyboard but you'd likely get a black eye in reality.

On Twitter I can block those who are downright stupid, arrogant and full of nastiness, it's a simply click and I actually prefer debate on this medium.  However, I generally love all of my followers and the people I follow, it's rare I have to block anyone.  In future I'll just be asking the FB webpage owners to remove any of my stuff or links to it if such a thing is abused.

If you're hoping to see Aurora (the Northern Lights) in the North or South of England tonight or tomorrow as predicted may happen due to the G3 solar storm, my advice is.....get checking the NOAA website, get off your butts, get outside, get away from street lighting, get your eyes accustomed to the dark (30 mins minimum) and get looking for yourselves.   In the words of Paul Newman:

"Stop feeding off of me!"

Today I have earned my wages tri-fold..

I always look forward to Fridays...don't you?  Why, because usually I can slow down the work pace a little.

No such luck today, needed a brain, a heart, courage and distinct yellow brick road instructions.

I have been trying to update one of our software programs, Sage Payroll 19.02.157 for best part of a week without success, each time I kept getting this at the end:

After which, the Sage program did not update to version 20.01.  If you're not familiar with RTI (Real Time Information) this will mean nothing to you suffice to say that due to collaboration on an unprecedented scale with HMRC, without the update I would be unable to a) post our company wages in the new tax year and b) file RTI submissions to HMRC, the latter whip out penalty letters faster than you can access their online services.

Then when I tried again to re-install the update I got a different message asking me where my installation was as it now couldn't locate it (nuts since I had the thing open!).

Now I'll have you know that .Net 4.0 WAS installed, I checked.  I also checked my Windows Updates....hmmm what's this then?  I'm pretty sure I have seen this message from time to time:

And this one..

Uh oh..haven't seen this one before...

In fact, the windows update service WAS running according to the administrator console.  In the middle of all this I have a guy from Sage emailing me back and forth telling me things I already know how to tweak and at the same time failing to properly read my email responses back to him.  Doh!

I must have restored the computer to a previous moment in time about 5 times as one tedious trial and error fix after another failed to work.  The best one was when I tried to uninstall Windows .Net 4 Framework and then re-install it to which I received the message 'cannot complete install : HRESULT 0x80003f3 error'.   Binary, if I say so myself Watson.

Something just wasn't right...

Then I found this beautiful thread which if you click and scroll down to Kumar12337 you'll see a nice simple set of instructions.

COFFEE BREAK ALERT!!

1 hr later after restoring computer back to 8 April and any other shenanigans, re-booting for the umpteenth time, and taking another restore point (just in case) I followed Kumar12337's instructions to the letter.

It worked...except...I ended up with 64 Critical Windows 7 updates that had quite clearly failed to ever update before, despite said machine saying it had.

In the meantime, the boss (hubby) arrives home; yes I know what you're all thinking and yes...he drives me round the bend too, all day and night.

Sparkleupalot:  "Er...would you mind going for a drive?  Take the ol' racing pigeons for a spin up the road for me?"

Twinklespinalot:  "If I must...."                                                           *rubs hands with glee*

Heheh...now I don't have to watch a spinning blue circle for an hour updating Windows 7.

A quick white van run up to Steeple Bumpstead and back with birds in tow and lo and behold the 64 updates have finished. Another couple of re-boots and I was ready to try installing Sage Payroll V20.01 again.

IT WORKED!  SAGE UPDATE INSTALLED WITHOUT A HITCH! KUDOS TO KUMAR!

And now....I'm going to polish off a glass or two of wine, my day is done.

End of a Photography Era?

Late last night on return from my weekly tap dancing session, I logged onto my laptop to get a better view of a friend's excellent photo of the planet Jupiter on the Flickr website, of which I have been a member for nearly 2 years.

Immediately I was struck by the sudden enforced change Yahoo had made whereby the Beta 'Photo Experience,' which up until that point had been optional, had now been foisted on all Flickr members.  It was horrendously messy to say the least.  I could not immediately see anyone's comments on my own photos, leaving me wondering how to respond to people.  Furthermore when I tried to share a photo directly to Twitter social media site via the Flickr share button, it appeared that the ampersand we all use freely to shorten the word 'and' was not in Flickr's dictionary and therefore couldn't handle it.  The resulting protest tweet made me look like a fumbling numpty:

.@Flickr Complaints Dept what were u thinking this eve now want 2 up sticks & leave https://t.co/UN90ntSHrG
— Wendy Clark (@twinklespinalot) March 25, 2014

Like others I took to social media for a good ol' rant, because like it or not, this is what we do on occasions like this, right? I wanted to throw buckets of paint around, chew on my own intestines, smash a thousand plates and worse, I wanted to do this:

Arrrrrgggggh!

'Change' as a way of naming something is defined in the Oxford Dictionary as:

"An act or process through which something becomes different" 

Most people associate change with the adjective 'better', which is defined by the Oxford Dictionary as:

"More desirable, satisfactory or effective"

Arguably one of the most popular photography sharing sites on the internet suddenly overnight became neither desirable, satisfactory or effective; it was disagreeable, unacceptable and feckless.

Take the Flickr group astrometry.net for example which I know many have found most useful in identifying astronomy objects and which I use in some of my own astrophotography efforts.  You might be asking at this point "where have all the machine tags gone that this group made on my photos?".  This morning it took me a lot of help forum searching to work out that scrolling down to the tags section on the new Flickr sidebar and hovering over astrometry's star notes produced a single square annotation on the photograph in question. This completely dumbs down the idea of learning from your own and other's photographs as to exactly what you're looking at if you have to singularly keep hovering over the tags on the right bar to produce individual answers!

Yes...it's Pollux!

From my point of view Flickr was all about a central, clean and easy to use site for showcasing my amateur photography and viewing other members photography progress in a fascinating hobby which has captured my imagination since I first played with an old Russian Zenit EM camera at the age of 12. As my hobby has grown over the years, technology has moved on to the digital age bringing new insights and huge learning curves.  As the internet has grown both technology and information have exploded into our lives to the point where we believe at times that we cannot be without something that connects us to it in a user-friendly manner.  It's what we expect from advances in technology and when it fails to live up to expectations, as users we are capable of upping sticks and looking elsewhere.

Step away, sit back and breathe slowly...you have a choice as to where you put your faith and support in technology and there is more than one road open for the ride today.

The official help forum thread on the new 'Photo Experience' interface says it all and the responses on it makes for some interesting reading, notable feedback so far:

"With each design change, the site gets more and more inconsistent"

"Sorry, I cannot thank you for something I never wanted.."

"You guys don't seem to understand some very basic, simple rules of photography and displaying images. The large size image needs to be framed all the way around. Not just on two sides, or three sides, but ALL FOUR SIDES!! The portraits are clipped on the top and bottom - no framing whatsoever. The landscapes on the right have a very narrow margin, and no margin on the left. This is so basic, I cannot comprehend how anyone would allow this to happen."

It is supposedly faster they say...well speed is what you make of it and getting there quicker doesn't always mean the destination is tourist spot of the month. Besides which if you don't have super-duper 20Gb Broadband or 'BT Infinity' (when it works) then nothing, not even stone tablets thrown by a Guinness World Record Breaker is going to make viewing photographs load any quicker.

I tried to view a solar image on Flickr this morning from one of my favourite photographers, Mr James Lennie, 5 mins had gone by and .....only half the solar image was showing.

For some time and also since the last lot of changes were rolled out on Flickr in 2013, I have been toying with abandoning the site and joining 500px. Although 500px is free to use, the $25 a year 'Plus' service appeals more to me now following copyright mis-use of my photographs by two well-known national newspapers in late February 2014 (that's a good blog for another day folks!).

I need protection and ease of use if I'm to continue sharing my photography, it's taken a long while and a lot of effort to get to where I am with this hobby and I'm very proud of my achievements in this field so far as I know a lot of my friends online are of their own efforts.  To have a large corporation take it's users and affront them in this manner with a confusing hotchpotch of their own ideas on how a social media sharing site should look does not endear me to publishing my work any further with them.

Social media, whether we like it or not is an important tool for the whole world and beyond.  It connects us to like-minded people, provokes debate, provides insight and lets us view the world from wherever we are at that moment.

Imagine for a second you are bound to your home, unable to travel outside those confines for health or personal reasons.  Now imagine your only contact with the outside world is online.  With vast streams of content and access to trillions of places via photography, video and live news the world opens up into your psyche and you now feel a part of that world just by being able to view it.  Before long you are connecting with people and places you never dreamed of.

It's not hard to also imagine how depressing that might end up if you spend all your time trying to figure out the tools and navigation elements to get there from one day to the next.

It will be sad to leave Flickr as I follow a lot of great photographers, but I think letting it be for a while and going elsewhere is the best thing to do.  We've all talked about it before and we've all hung on in the hope no-one tinkers further with it, but that day has come for me and I'm moving on.  I'll check back with my Flickr friends from time to time and I'm sad for people who only yesterday just started following but I'm already in a new pasture.

A change of field definitely should be for the better.

I'll leave you with this view because it was the first thing I saw on 500px most popular and it really did sum up today's thoughts on the Flickr changes:

Sums it all up really today.....Photo “hello and goodbye” by Rune Askeland #500px http://t.co/WoErsdQ8k9
— Wendy Clark (@twinklespinalot) March 26, 2014