I use Flickr to host all of my pictures.  All of them.  More than 6,000 of them are viewable to people I give “family” level access to.  More than 13,500 are public.  I do not generate a lot of traffic, I probably average a few hits a day, but that’s not what I want from my account.  I want a place where I can host an unlimited number of files in a somewhat organized way, and I want most of those files to be available for me to display on other sites.  Sites like Blogger, for instance.  I also want the ability to upload and edit large batches of files at a time.  For the last 2+ years I have been willing to pay a small amount of money for those services.

Prior to buying a Pro account on Flickr I was using Picasa Online.  It did most of what I wanted, but even if I had purchased additional storage capacity I was never going to even come close to being able to host an unlimited number of files.  I was actually posting to 4-5 different Picasa accounts at the same time.

So I moved all of my stuff to Flickr.  I have been very happy with the service.  I haven’t had a single complaint in over two years.  It’s been great.

But is that about to change?

Flickr is owned by Yahoo, and Yahoo is looking like the corporate equivalent of a sloppy mess right now.  Their Chairman fired their CEO over the phone while she was at a conference.  She followed that by going to the press and dropping some eff bombs and referring to the Chairman as a doofus.  They started a relationship with a new company… I think it was a marketing firm, but I’m not sure.  This new company immediately recommended that a number of board members resign, and suggested if they don’t they should be canned.

Until very recently I don’t think I noticed a single new feature being added to the site.  That changed when they brought in Lightbox not too long ago.  I thought that was a waste of space when I first used it on my laptop, but it’s really cool on an iPad.  I’ll give them credit for that.  Still though… Flickr almost seems like an afterthought to Yahoo.

So Yahoo is looking bad, and Flickr seems like a forgotten project…

What am I going to do if Yahoo collapses?  Or cuts Flickr?  Or eliminates the unlimited storage?  Or sells Flickr (or all of Yahoo for that matter) to another company who guts the services?

Who is my back-up plan?

Answer:  No one.  At least not at the moment.  I have most of my account backed up.  Only the most recent sets and a big chunk of iPhone related stuff are missing from my back-up folder.  That’s easy enough to fix, but as for hosting it all in the event of a collapse?  I haven’t a clue.

Should I be worried?

I’m in one of those listen-to-audio-books-while-driving-to-and-from-work phases.  Lately it’s been a string of Stephen King books that I read ages ago and are deserving of a re-read.

Right now it is Insomnia (although it’s hard for me to imagine that I just mentioned having read a book that was published in the 90’s as having been read “ages ago”) and just a few minutes ago Stephen King perfectly described my feelings on the summer of 2011.

I tried to force myself to memorize the exact quote as I was driving, but I already forget most of it.  Let me see how close I can get:

Summer came to an end as it usually does in Maine, almost unnoticed.

 I can’t remember if that’s correct, but that’s the gist of it.  Change the word Maine to Massachusetts and you have this summer summed up perfectly.  Back in June it arrived to great applause and anticipation.  Then I blinked once and the leaves had started turning.

Crud.

This got a hit on Flickr today. It seems fitting to randomly post it for no good reason as the Mrs and I have the R30 Blu-ray on the tube as we speak. She wanted to play World of Warcraft tonight and I agreed if we could have Rush in the background.

Rush seems a fitting band to listen to (in any circumstance whatsoever) while playing Warcraft. Don’t you agree?

Mondays are getting more and more difficult.  I hate Mondays, but so does everyone else so what can you do?  At least I was at my desk by 9:00 today.

Yesterday was a lot of fun.  We had planned to be responsible and do chores and errands and things and be productive and such.  We actually piled into the car and headed to Market Basket to buy food for the week.  Just like a responsible family should.  As I was looking for a parking spot, Jen quietly mentions that there is a store in Salem that sells games and she’d never been there and maybe we should go find a game to play as a family instead of being responsible. 

My response to that was, obviously, screw responsibility!  Let’s go play games!

We didn’t find anything at Myriad Games in Salem.  Everything was a little too grown up for the kids, or way too expensive.  We changed plans and headed to Toys-R-Us.  There we bought a goofy game called Kids Battle the Grown-Ups.  There was a stack of questions for the kids to ask us, and a different stack of questions for us to ask the kids.  It was fun and silly.  We played best out of three and the kids completely smoked us in the first game.  It lasted all of about 4 minutes.  That’s all the time they needed to blow us off the map.  Jen and I regrouped and won the next two.  They were long, dragged out battles complete with numerous lead changes.  Fortunately for my fragile ego, the grown-ups prevailed.

Next we played Parchisi… although it really wasn’t anything like I remember Parchisi being.  A couple of times I found myself wondering if maybe we had the wrong game in the box.  I didn’t complain though, we had fun with it.  Jen won a very long and drawn out match where she out strategized the kids.  She was able to block them while still moving her pieces closer and closer to home.  She played like a master.  I only mentioned her outplaying the kids because I was a non factor.  I kept getting pieces bounced back to the start and I rolled and rolled forever but only rarely was I able to get my pawns onto the board.  I got smoked.

Now we’re back to work.  The weekend is over.  Depression sets in.  We don’t see the kids again until Wednesday.  Maybe on Wednesday we’ll be able to play Payday, the other game we bought at Toys-R-Us.  Maybe I’ll be able to vindicate myself there.

They are about to beat us. Again.

Kids vs Grownups. This game is a battle royale of trivial knowledge.