Saturday, May 26, 2007

Pointing at the Past

Because I'm totally insane sometimes in an OCD sort of way, I've spent an hour or two today updating two Musings entries from 2004:

Las Vegas: The Non-Gamblers' Experience
The Sublime and the Ridiculous: LV as a SF/F Destination

Blame John Scalzi and Joe Loong. John Scalzi wrote about people using moblity scooters to get around the Las Vegas Strip, which reminded me how much fun John (Blocher) and I had walking around the place three years ago taking photos. But when I looked at my two postings about it, I saw something Joe warned us about recently: an old AOL You've Got Pictures album was displayed as a Ken Burns style Woohoo slideshow.
I actually hate the old YPG albums (too small and never worked well for me and my dial-up) and love the Ken Burnsy thing. That's not a problem for me at all. I've even put a Ken Burns Woohoo on my church's main web page. But the tiny, grainy photos in that entry, taken three years ago with a Mavica and edited with whatever I had available at the time, are not improved by scrolling lovingly across an extra-large display of the dark, low-res images. So I've deleted one photo that was especially bad, edited full size versions of eight more shots and added them in. And yes, I left it Ken Burns style. Because I don't quite trust you folks to go take a look at the original entry, here is the revised slideshow:
Hmm. It won't display for me in this entry. Stupid dial-up! I'll be interested to know whether it displays for anyone else. It could be a slow connection issue, or it could simply be the way I copied and pasted it in here. (I did get it to display when I loaded the individual entry, so it's probably a connection speed issue. YGP gets impatient with the wait while the Journals product is still loading the other pictures on the page, not to mention the darn ad.)
But all this is a silly thing to do, isn't it? These are extremely obscure journal entries, virtually unknown to the search engines and remembered only by me. When I posted those musings about our Las Vegas trip in May 2004, I only had about two or three readers. Grainy pictures aside, I wrote what I still think is a really good entry about Las Vegas becoming a viable destination for fans of scence fiction and fantasy, but nobody ever saw it or commented. And this entire journal, Musings from Mâvarin, is virtually abandoned now. So why did I bother fixing up a three year old posting in a disused journal? Um, because I could, I think. And three years later, I still hope someone will read it and leave a comment.
Karen

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

The slide show showed up for me. I enjoyed the pictures.
Barbara

Anonymous said...

It shows up fine for me in Firefox / Windoze XP. I'm using a DSL line and it's deadtime in the USA so it loaded almost immediately. I suspect it is just a problem with the dial-up connection, Karen.