winter sun

A beautifully sunny winter's day today; not particularly cold but bright sun streaming through the trees and windows making patterns everywhere.

+1/2 and +2/3 were off into town to get some new shoes (just for +2/3 thankfully) so the boys and I all went off to Ikea to get frames for the various posters, collages and prints hanging about. Which meant a meatball lunch (of course) - +3/3 must have been hungry because he polished the lot off. The remainder of the afternoon was spent mounting and hanging things. 

The last proper day of the holidays. Boo. Any my father's birthday: 3/4s of a century not out! Happy Birthday!

Polaroid, eh? Quite a few less than impressed comments floating about at the moment. I'm sure there are good reasons for the merger and I would guess that funding is a big part of it. Running servers (and paying developers) is an expensive business especially if you have a growing user base and mobile apps. The recent technical changes (afaict) migrated blip off the traditional server model into AWS/EC2 & EBS and I daresay blipfoto has been essentially re-written completely - this should fix the bandwidth issues.

When you migrate one system that has grown organically without written specifications the users will always find the edge cases - and it looks like this is the case. 

But I digress. £25/year to host a photo a day, serve it up to whoever is interested and subsidise free users is not quite enough I guess. It's about 7p/day. So something had to change. There are only really two options: a) change the users more, or b) get someone else to pay for it. 

b) it is.

I'm ambivalent about the changes: I understand the economics and technical reasoning but I guess the small community feel is going to change. Maybe there'll be advertising at some point but I'm pretty adept at ignoring online advertising now. Of course, online advertising doesn't work but that's another discussion. 

Perhaps this means that one of the new member only features will be higher quality direct printing. Which would be awesome. 

Polaroid, as a company, has lost its way badly over the last decade but it looks like they're moving firmly into social territory with effectively go-pro type cameras - I don't mean they're designed for extreme sports; more that they're exploring non-standard form factors and features presumably that are tightly coupled with social sharing. And in this respect blip is a natural fit in that it's a ready made, established community.

So far so good. 

The real concern is that if the merger doesn't work out, would blip be able to continue?

I see Bella is on the polaroid front page! 15 minutes of fame right there...

I need a new word: somewhere between ambivalent and meh. Ammehvalent.

Music for today: Kate Bush and Bach - the Goldberg Variations should always be played on harpsichord imo...