The Blogger update that keeps on giving

Ah, the Blogger update that keeps on giving. My old posts with photos are rendered into blank boxes. Sections of text are randomly supersized, or there are inexplicable gaps and multiple carriage returns. Or the typography is an odd color. Makes me look like an idiot.

Wiki links are hardest hit. Cleaning it up is not an easy task. I'm tip-toeing through my 2014 posts, HTML and visual landmines! It's taken me hours to clean up the posts, about a quarter of them had HTML warnings, and I have 135 posts. Ironically it was in 2014 when I really began to run afoul of Blogger, with hanging posts, and disappearing posts. Dear Google, Using Blogger is a Painful Experience. 

Bay Area Generations reading 42 at the Bellevue Hotel, Oakland, photos

John Oliver Simon began his worldly travels in 1942, from the red diaper bullpen of New York City, to scribing poem-broadsides to sell on Telegraph Avenue. While at Cal, he was active in the Free Speech Movement; he read with Michael McClure, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch and Kenneth Rexroth. Since 1971, he has taught poetry to kids, with California Poets in the Schools, where he has passed the poetry baton onto his granddaughter. In the 1980s, he began translating poets from Mexico to the farthest corners of Latin America. He picked up an NEA translation fellowship along the way. And the City of Berkeley honored him for his 50-year-contribution to arts and culture, proclaiming January 20, 2015, as "John Oliver Simon Day."  —Maureen Hurley

 Maureen Hurley emerged in 1952 from the ravine that trickles from the bloody green wordstreams of Eire out of the poverty creeks on the backside of Tamalpais where her mother hung out for a thousand years in the No Name Bar with Jack Kerouac and Bob Kaufman. Schooled in her craft with California Poets in the Schools, she has carried her lyre from Chernobyl to Lake Titicaca. She holds an MA in creative writing from San Francisco State and has been awarded eight California Arts Council artist in residence grants. She lives in Oakland.   —John Oliver Simon

Google Photos link

Dear Google, Now Blogger?

The only warning I got that Blogger was being updated. I clicked yes, and Blogger disappeared.

Dear Google,

I see that you've changed Blogger this afternoon—right as I was working on a poem post. I can't say it was an upgrade as I lost all ability to see anything other than your Confidential/ "got it." pop-up windows. Luckily, I had saved my poem in another format. But all my formatting changes were lost.

Your design teams really need to do a better job on Google products—the upgrades are supposed to improve user experience, not frustrate us. I was an early supporter of Google products, and now I'm disgruntled enough to leave Google behind. Your last revamp of Blogger also left me out in the cold for long stretches of time. So now, finally everything's mostly working again, (except the gratuitous extra drafts it saves every time I make a correction) and you had to go and upgrade?

And now Blogger, my entire dashboard and related pages are a blank white field, replete with orange feedback button in lower right corner. I've sent you many of messages today, while trying to get back online to complete my post.

All I get is a blank white page when I try to access Blogger's All Posts, and Create Page, etc. The only thing I can access is the public page. I've tried everything from changing cookies, disabling extensions. dumping, caches, resetting Safari, restarting, and nothing works. The URLs are broken.

I agree, Blogger really does need a revamp, it sure was an ugly interface (what's with all the orange anyway?),  Now, it may be that Blogger no longer supports legacy Macs/Safari. But like with Gmail, it should at least continue to support basic legacy HTML.

Speaking of Gmail, the new iOS Gmail is a warthog of an app. It's cluttered and distracting, What's with all the extraneous red stuff? Are you trying to attract bulls to the proverbial china shop? I can't even do basic functions without emails taking off to the hinterlands. The clincher, the embedded hot links are dead. I can't access URLs. I finally had to delete the app from my iPad, as it deleted some important emails with no way to retrieve them. Steep learning curve by torture? A dungeons and dragons approach to email? Oops! Steep learning curve, I mean, black hole ahead.

I won't even mention what an utter dog's breakfast the new features are. Imagine receiving a password reset, and then not being able to access the URL. Imagine getting an email with a link to reset that password. Now imagine, a Gmail app so screwed up, that you can't access the URL in order to change your password. A weird nanny feature? Yeah, that was me two days ago. And, yes, I have the latest iOS update. I combed the settings, etc., looking for a way to fix the problem. Nada.

Since I was prompted to download the Google Photos app along with my new iOS Gmail app, I was presented with another form of hell, when Google Photos accessed ALL my iOS photos and dumped them into Google Photos. I use my iPad as a diary, I take photos of receipts, checks, etc. I DO NOT want them showing up in my Google Photos folder. I deleted them from Google Photos, only to discover they were also deleted from my iOS photo folder. Luckily, I was able to retrieve all 104 deleted photos.

And now I can no longer use Blogger. What sort of fresh hell establishment are you running over at Google these days?

I dislike Google+, and its attached Google Photos (see previous post) on the Mac, as it's too in your face to be of much use when looking at hundreds of photos at a time.  I am still smarting over the loss of Picasa. I HATE Google Photos, which is a terrible replacement for Picasa. In addition, I lost all my curated notes on my Picasa sites, with no warning. Had I known, I would've copied them. The irony is that some people still have access to their Picasa sites. Bring back Picasa, or fix Google Photos.

So, I'm thinking it's the death knell for you and me, Google, I've downloaded my blog, as it looks like I may need to move it to another platform. Sadly, I think I've had enough of your broken applications.

So, Google, what's next? Please expand your R&D base before trotting out changes that affect our lives. FWIW, I was eventually able to get back onto Blogger, by using a different web browser, but I prefer using Safari to Firefox for my Google applications. It's simple, clean, elegant. Something you should strive for in all your products.

Dear Google, about those 404 errors on Blogspot
Dear Google, Using Google Photos is Painful
Dear Google, Using Blogger is a Painful Experience...

Dear Google, Using Google Photos is Painful

Dear Google,


I use your Picasa desktop app to edit and to upload photos, for years, it worked swimmingly until I was forced to embrace Google Photos. To my horror, when I was transferring photos from one Picasa site to another Google Photos site, in an attempt to consolidate work, I found that all the Picasa app editing did not translate.

My photos look awful in Google Photos.

Now I'm stuck with either using a different desktop app, and the Google Photos online editor. Alas, your editor is not as robust, and it's slow and cumbersome. Did I mention cumbersome? Try using it with a variable DSL speed sometime. Oh, btw, we upgraded to ATT Uverse, much faster, but still boggy at times. Still your glitches persist.

When you have 1000s of photos to reprocess, Google Photos makes editing impossible. No batch edit of albums—Picasa's desktop Auto Contrast and I'm Feeling Lucky were great filters. And the Darken Sky filter was brilliant. Can't do that in Google Photos.

So disappointing. The entire Picasa app and online experience was so much better than the online Google Photos experience. I'm sure I've told you before, I started out loving all Google products, Like The Guy (Kawasaki, who got me into this blogging mess to begin with back in 2007), I was an Google-evangelista, but I've discovered the more you tinker with our online experience, the worse it gets.

Blogger is a case in point. I continue to use it, but most of the time I'm seething. nay, frothing. The revamped Blogger has been a royal pain in the ass to use for years—since its last upgrade, and now I see Google Photos has followed suit. The relatively new Gmail revision is bad enough. At least I can opt out and use the old school version for slow HTML. Bells and whistles are not necessarily a good thing. I avoid Google+ for the same reasons.

There needs to be multiple ways to do things, and there needs to be quick and dirty methods to deal with multiple blog posts, bulk images, etc. It seems you've gone the way of Microsoft—bloatware. It's fine in small quantities, but frustrating on bigger jobs.

And while we're at it, what the hell happened to all my historical album annotations when you forced my Picasa photos over to Google+ Photos? Have you ANY idea, how much work went into that process, and now it's all gone. Poof. Like with my Seamus Heany Memorial photos, I had written a curatorial pieces identifying the readers, etc.—including poets laureate, and the Consul General of Ireland. Had I known, I would've copied the comments.

I want my Picasa web albums site back. I want my album comments back.

The more I use Google Photos the more I HATE Google Photos, and I mourn the elegance and simplicity of Picasa. What were you thinking? And  yet you've let some users keep their Picasa sites, why not me? I know others are still using their Picasa sites, including Robert Lee Haycock.

I want to opt out of Google Photos, as a user, and have access to my Picasa Web Albums again. All five sites. I don't mind that viewers interface with Google Photos, but, as a user, I need something better designed for behind the scenes access. Something like Blogger-All Posts listing. But with thumbnails.

It seems the more you make things better, the worse it gets. You need to use a much wider test market before you roll out some of these design changes. You do use a real test market, right? It's not all in-house?

And while I'm ranting, do you actually ever listen to your constituents? I get it that I'm proverbially biting the hand that cyberfeeds me. Clearly I am ungrateful. But I was once one of your most ardent supporters. Once you were great, now, you're  bloatware. Cumbersome, at best. Get a new design team in, fergawdsakes. And test drive it to a wider audience. Especially to us dyslexics. I'm offering it up, here.

1. Google+ Photos needs to also have an additional thumbnail user contact page style design—like film strips—for overall ease of viewing. Not just this multi-sized format that fills the entire page that the visitor sees. The eye needs places to rest in order to comprehend, not to be bombarded with imagery.  Please take care of the user as well as the visitor. And modular organizing of images, not by exif dates.

2. Each album needs to have a discrete space to include album prose, and not just the space on each photo, but for overall curatorship. People need context as well as visual imagery.

3. On Blogger, you also need another way of organizing posts. It's cumbersome when you have 2K's worth of posts, to navigate. Perhaps a hierarchical decade index as well as a year/month index.

4. Your in-house blogger search engine is not very robust. In fact, it's tetchy. Gawd help us if we add an extra space between words, or misspel (stet) a word. It needs to be more like Google search engine, more boolean in nature. I know you have the skills. I know you can do this. And when we get the results of the blog search, just list the titles, not the entire piece—I'm long-winded, in case you can't tell. It's otherwise impossible to access the older pieces via the in-house blog search. Even with Hot Links enabled—which bogs down the loading of Blogger, BTW.

5. On the Blogger Compose page, an actual date listed up there with the toolbar. The Schedule button is not always visible. And the helpful Schedule And Label slide-out windows are a little too trigger-happy. Sometime I have a cat-and-mouse chase the window to nail it down. Nothing worse than an overly helpful  hide-and-seek window anticipating my every need, only to have it be the wrong need. Sort of like using Autocorrect. And what's with the ghost drafts of blogposts I've already corrected and reposted? Hard to track down and delete.

I'm sure I'll have more suggestions as I continue to use the site...but at least this is a start.

Thank you, I feel better now. So let's get to it, improve Google Photos and Blogger. Or at least keep those legacy pages available for the users.

Yours under the Cranky Sign,
Maureen

Dear Google, Using Blogger is a Painful Experience...

Lughnasa, Edinburgh, 2008 (photos)

In a Close off the Royal Mile, Edinburgh, 2008

Lughnasa. At the top of the volcano, Arthur's Seat (Àrd-thir Suidhe) overlooking Edinburgh, St Margaret's Loch and Leith. I hiked to the summit with a knee brace. It made the distance twice as far, it's only 823 feet but that's from sea level. That purple tinge in the distance is heather.

Arthur's Seat, Edinburgh

  
At the costume store, Edinburgh, with Ellie, Christine Ross's granddaughter.

Telephone box, Edinburgh Castle

At the pub, Royal Mile, with Frances Fischer

Largs, Ayrshire, Scotland (photos)

Largs, Ayrshire

At the Scottish border

At the Scottish border

Caer Bryn Celli Ddu, Anglesey, Wales (photos)

Caer Bryn Celli Ddu, (the mound in the dark grove) was hard to find, it's a few miles south-east of the village of Llandaniel Fab, on the isle of Ynys Môn, (Anglesey, North, Wales) Cymru.

Bryn Celli Ddu is a chambered barrow that marks the summer solstice. It's linked to Maes Howe and Newgrange—that mark the winter solstice).

The mound's stone passage points to the midsummer rising sun. The rays light up a quartz-rich stone at the back of the tomb—like at Newgrange. An outer ring of postholes have been dated to over 6,000 years ago. A Welsh Stonehenge.

Caer Bryn Celli Ddu, (the mound in the dark grove)—a Stonehenge-like chambered barrow with a lightbox similar to that of Newgrange, that marked the summer solstice—making it linked to Maes Howe and Newgrange—that mark the winter solstice), near Llanddaniel Fab, on the isle of Ynys Môn, (Anglesey, North, Wales) Cymru.

The mound's stone passage points to the midsummer rising sun. An outer ring of postholes have been dated to over 6,000 years ago. A Welsh Stonehenge. The rays light up a quartz-rich stone at the back of the tomb.

In the early 5th century, Irish seafarers (OK, pirate) colonized Anglesey & were driven out 470 AD (or so they say), but Gwynedd has had a long history of Irish settlement. And many of those Welsh-Irish seafarers returned to Ireland with Strongbow's "Norman" invasion. Probably our Walsh ancestors.

The mound's stone passage points at the midsummer rising sun. Postholes outside, previously thought to be contemporary with the tomb (c3000BC), have been dated to over 6,000 years old. A row of five postholes in front of the barrow appears to be much older. A Welsh mini Stonehenge. The rays light up a quartz-rich stone at the back of the tomb. More 

Afternoon light striking the menhir inside the passage tomb just after the summer solstice. Not much light so I resorted to B&W. Photo below this one is a flash—it washed out detail, but also revealed the modern red ochre ogham on the cement lintel. Top of stone is also covered in red ochre.

The freestanding menhir inside the barrow is an oddity—there is no other example anywhere. There was a fire pit at the center of the henge (probably about where I'm standing to take this photo), covered by a stone slab with a human ear-bone beneath. (Stirrupbone?) Ear to the ground! Thought to be a re-dedication offering. 

Also found inside the barrow was a stone with wave and spiral designs across its surface—a replica is at east entrance. The much older standing stones were deliberately damaged when the tomb was constructed. Also nearby, there was an ox burial inside a three-sided shelter, with quartz pebbles (pavement?) like Newgrnge, but this is a summer solstice passage grave, not a winter one. The reconstructed mound is one quarter of the size of the original chamber.


©Maureen Hurley 2008

Nota bene: Newgrange, Grianstad inniu, The winter solstice date is normally considered to fall on the 21st of December in the northern hemisphere, however during the winter solstice, the position of the sun remains the same for three days. At Newgrange, the passage and chamber of the 5000-year-old monument are illuminated by the winter solstice sunrise. A shaft of sunlight shines through the roof box over the entrance and penetrates the passage to light up the chamber. The dramatic event lasts for 17 minutes at dawn from the 19th to the 23rd of December.  More




12/2013: After being MIA for years, my lost Scotland/Wales pix showed up on an old hard drive—so thrilled to see them again. I only had the one I posted (above) earlier. Now I have a choice, oh my!

added 2/2017

Jacarandas in bloom (photo)

The Jacarandas in bloom were visible from 10,000 feet in the air! Entire blocks of Long Beach were clouded in purple.

Neil O'Neill at the Queen Mary, Long Beach, CA, May 2008 (photos)

Neil O'Neill at the Queen Mary, Long Beach, CA, May 2008

Maureen Hurley at the Queen Mary, Long Beach, CA, May 2008

Neil O'Neill and Frank McConville, lurid sunset, Alameda Island, Alemeda, CA (photo)

Neil O'Neill and Frank McConville, lurid sunset, Alameda Island, Alemeda, CA

Daffodils for St Daffyd's Day (photos)

 A potted daffodil opened in time for St Daffyd's Day. Backlighting seems to be a more interesting visual approach.

Daffodil (related to narcissus) admiring itself in a mirror.

Some garden flowers and leaves—good subjects to learn digital photography as they didn't squirm or complain too much. I've always inherited really old technology—people's cast off Macs and cameras. In 2006, I got two small KQED SPARK art grants, which allowed me to buy an iMac and 2 cheap digital cameras. That technology upgrade changed my life and it's been a huge exponential learning curve ever since. I spent off moments lurking in my neighbors' flowerbeds or grabbing photos on the fly. 

My little digital Nikons aren't all that great but they do fit into a jeans pocket and half the battle is being ready to catch the light. I find that the older CoolPix L4 4.1 megapixel camera (dropped dozens of times) is much better at focusing while my S200 7.1 MP camera captures more color info.

My $29.95 made-in-China trainer-bra camera, little better than a cell phone, was half-dead after I accidentally watered it in a creek at the 2005 Kate Wolf Festival (it was 114 degrees) in Memdocino Co. I was sad to see it go as it did such a terrffic job in full sunlight. Though I was able to kick start it on the iMac, it was never quite the same.

It was terrible grainy (3.1 MP) to begin with and had a blue color cast but it had a great macro lens. That's what got me into taking photos of flowers. So I kept it for sentimentality's sake until a fellow Freecycler coming to collect books spotted it. Last I heard, it had a new lease on life and was working perfectly.

Here's hoping the technology fairy will soon send a L14 or a D40 Nikon my way as the trusty little L4 CoolPix that I carry into every class I teach (to document student work), is having a harder time focusing these days.

© 2007-2009 Maureen Hurley All works of art and photographs in these albums is © copyright 2009 by Maureen Hurley and may not be used in any endeavor or context.

added 2/2017 from Facebook

• 
  
• The cultivated history of daffodils as we know it 2023

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus! A daffodil for Dewi Sant 2021

• Letter to Gregg Dunnett 2021
• How the Welsh language was really invented 2014
• Daffodils for St Dafyd's Day (photos) 2008
• St. Daffyd's Daffodils 2004

Facebook photo album: Mo's Flower Pix (photos)

Not a milk thistle, a cardoon, a member of the artichoke family. The color is outrageous.



A weed, but a morning glorious one

The light fairly pulsed through the heart of the morning glory, only it was late afternoon.



Morning Glory on the refuse heap.



Hollyhock...related to hibiscus...look at the stamen









I had never really taken photos of flowers before, and so I became fascinated with composition and light. Georgia O'Keefe certainly was an influence but I found myself unable to really focus in tight and crop off parts of flowers (or people's heads for that matter). It was hard to chop off the prettiness of the center of the dahlia in order to focus on the petal structure and raindrops.



One intense cosmos. I never realized how many blooms have blemishes and flaws until I started taking photos of them. The human eye is more forgiving than the camera lens, or should I say, the computer screen—because that's where the flaws show up. I came away from this exercise with a profound respect for still life master photographers and the F 16 school of Edward Weston. I wonder how he and Ansel Adams would've taken to the digital revolution? I was primarily a black and white photographer so color often distracted me. I sometimes turned the jpgs into B&W in order to see what I was doing.



Pansies with cat whisker stripes.



Gazania, African daisy



Foxglove. No foxes didn't wear them. They were called folk's gloves, fairy fingers or fairy hats. We used to put them on our fingers. Digitalis by any other name, used to regulate the heart arhythmia. Very poisonous.



One of the few times the old camera did a good job. Depth of field wasn't its forte. I figured that it was little better than a throw away camera with an ASA of 100.






Then the wind came up right before sunset and it lacerated the poppies.



I had to do a rose cliche, get it out of my system.






Two calla lilies (or Aram lilies) so like dancers. I love the forms. Very Martha Graham



Narcissus. An overcast or a rainy day was too much for the camera, I rarely got anything in focus. I miss my old SLR Pentax K-1000 and being able to focus my good lenses but I don't miss the darkroom chemicals. This was my training ground switching over to digital. I took a lot of photos before I figured out what would work. The digital SLRs were still in their infancy and were pretty lousy.




What's summer without basil? A member of the prolific mint family, some 2000 species and counting.



An urban succulent outside a Berkeley office. I loved the stark contrast of plant and door and wall. The people who worked there wanted to know why I would want to take a picture of a scrawny plant. They couldn't see it with fresh eyes. The pot was merely an outdoor ashtray to them.






Same leaf. The camera couldn't pick up the intense reds and greens next to the black edges of the leaf. I didn't know about photoshopping with layers or jpg deterioration and so the original pristine image is lost. I may try & salvage it at a later date. I was so desperate to capture is extraordinary color that I even scammed the leaf.




When I saw the rays of light streaming through the canna leaf up at the compost heap, I thought I was seeing things. I ran for my camera and was able to get a few shots before the sun moved and all was restored to ordinary light.

Most of these photos were taken in the fall of 2005 and 2006 with my first 3.1 megapixel digital camera that was so bad, it cost a whopping $29. The memory card cost more than the camera. But it had a great close up lens, better than my Nikon, but off color and pixellation was hard to work around. In this fall leaf resting on a black car hood, the graininess works. Very Seraut. See the shafts of sunlight streaming through the leaf as if it was a prism?

Someday I'll get a decent digital camera that can focus on what I actually see. it seems most of my best photos are taken with poor field of focus challenged cameras. The light fairly pulsed through the heart of the morning glory, only it was late afternoon. Unbelievable, the new 7.1 MP Nikon camera iisn't as good as the 5.1 MP Nikon I was using after I watered my cheap made in China camera. Ah well...training wheels.




added 2/2017 Google killed off Picasa, where I had the bulk of my photos stored, and left orphans all over the place. A nightmare for me, as I lost all my album prose, identifying people and places. To add insult to injury the photo albums also lost their creation dates, they were moved to the last edit date of the photo. These are salvaged from Facebook, so I'm saving them here for the prose as well. They're extremely small files. Loaded with artifacts. No use printing them.

Facebook photo album: Mo's Landscape Pix (photos)...