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This is a Grumpy Alikat

Last Tuesday evening on my drive home, I saw a large plume of black smoke on the horizon and lots of fire trucks heading in the general direction of Mt. Wellington. As it happens, Corporate Consumables was engulfed in fire.  Being a geek and having a loose association with the emergency services, I snapped a pic of this smoke plume and twitpic’d it hoping that my firemen friends could give me the skinny on what was happening. I was hoping like hell it wasn’t a friends business premises which was in the same vicinity.

In the next 20 minutes it took me to drive home, it got retweeted a couple of times here and here among others. But you could imagine my horror on getting home, I checked out the NZ Herald website, and my photo was already on there with someone elses name taking credit for the photograph.

I saw red. I saw more than red. I had that red mist that racing drivers talk about. I immediately emailed the NZ Herald telling them that it was my photo and they should be crediting me, not the person who emailed it in. To their credit, they quickly fixed it up and apologized. Nice considering it wasn’t their fault.

The small print in twitpic’s privacy policy states that once it’s on their site, its public. I tracked down the person who uploaded my image, without my permission to the NZ Herald site and he just shrugged me off with the following tweet:

The world of in demand news is a tough game. I crossed the finish line before you

When you submit an image to NZ Herald, you have to check a box confirming the following:

Please tick this box to confirm that the media you are sending us belongs to you, was legally created, is available for use by nzherald.co.nz and other APN publications free of charge now and in the future, and has not been altered in any way that would mislead the public.

It didn’t belong to him to submit in the first place. The photograph, taken rather illegally as I was driving at the time, belonged to me. I may have not wanted this photo published on the NZ Herald website given that I was driving a motor vehicle at the time I took this photo. But now its well and truely in the public domain. But its fraud on his part. He purported to NZ Herald that he was the legal owner and this image was legally created.

I hate to break it to ya sunshine, but you’re not the legal owner and it sure as shit wasn’t legally created.

But theres lessons to take away from this, some of which have been learned the hard way.

I wouldn’t have gotten so angry if they’d asked and appropriate credit was given.

The internet is not anonymous. I was able to track this person down on twitter and have an “exchange” with them. They then changed their user name, but not their real name or location, so I was able to track them down again. Try harder to hide yourself next time. Protecting your tweets just isn’t enough.

Your twitter account is a brand. At the peak of my rant, I was warned that I was damaging my “brand”. Point taken. Thanks Wendy.

From now on, before twitpic’ing something that might go around the world a few times, watermark it.

Watermarking on the iPhone

So from this, and the old adage “theres an app for that” I set about finding an iPhone app to watermark my photos with copyright information before submitting them to twitpic or similar sites. I found one called PhotoMarkr. You put in text you want as a copyright notice and you can move this around, resize it, adjust opacity and even add a large (c) to make your point perfectly clear. Here’s my original photograph, as it appeared in the NZ Herald and the new version, as edited in PhotoMarkr. Not bad for a wee app that cost NZD$4.19

Before PhotoMarkr

After PhotoMarkr

The basics of using this app is you can either use your camera from inside the app or you can load an image from your phone. With one touch of a button, you can add your preset watermark, or adjust to suit. Use your fingers to move, rotate, resize and adjust transparency and then save your image when done. You can tape each object and move them independently of each other, sadly adjusting the transparency adjusts both objects, but that is the only flaw I have found with this app. Here is a couple of screenshots from the app below.

PhotoMarkr Screenshot #1

PhotoMarkr Screenshot #2

Shame there are a few people on the internet who spoil it for the rest really.

Vodafone put on a very nice spread of beer, wine and nibbles. As I am always super organised, I had consumed some sushi at work before driving into the city. But I had some wine. Seriously, whens the last time you got something for free from Vodafone? I had a lovely chat with Hamish. We discussed awesomeness like 14.4k modems and the days where the BBS was better than the internet. It was. Once upon a time, in the early 1990s.

We were moved into a room off the Vodafone foyer. There we were given colored dots and broken up into groups of 5.  But before it all got kicked off, we were introduced to the Data Demons. These five boys/men are located at Vodafone owned stores in the central city and north shore and are experts in all things smart phone related. This is a new concept by Vodafone Retail to have these Data Demons accessible in store, 7 days a week. Not a silly idea in my book. I can think of at least one occasion where I have dished out smartphone advice to a Vodafone retail employee.

Sorry about the angle of the photo, but I’m sure you get the idea. Daniel and his crew of Data Demons did a presentation that in the past, you would have carried around 7kg of “crap” whereas this now fits into an approx 120gm smartphone. You can now have your GPS, Phone, Calendar, Documents, Notes etc in the one device and not spread across many. He showed a few slides of smartphone market growth etc and then told us how the evening would work. We were split up into our coloured dot groups and sent to various corners of the V’Nue suite. He also proved that Data Demons are human and had some issues with his laptop. C’est la vie.

First up for our Green Group was the Blackberry Bold. This told me nothing I didn’t already know about Research in Motion and the Blackberry Bold as a device. I’ve come across Blackberrys and I know people who love and people who hate them. But the gentleman who did this presentation did a very good job and covered everything one would expect in a first meeting with the Blackberry.

We then moved on to the Nokia E71. This was the phone I was going to get before I found out how much I loved the iPhone. Again, a really nice presentation of slides and excellent MS Paint skills for this presenter. For the other people there, I think they got this phone more that the BB Bold. Instead of someone holding up a phone going blah blah, we had slides, and I’m a visual learner. I admit I may have learnt a wee bit about the operational side of this phone.

By the time we got to the Mobile Broadband display, the whole group thing had kind of disintegrated. I learnt that the white/black vodems are different, and well the netbook, I had one of those.

At the end of the evening, with half the people left, they had a draw for the HTC Magic. I was pleased that the guy who won the phone did in honesty. It would have been better going to me, but he had this horrible, bulking winmo phone and the HTC with its static-glass touch thing will change his life.

My highlights of the evening were photographing Paul Brislen’s desk, Hamish explaining the magnetic floors and an old lady announcing that she had only come to get a battery for her trusty Nokia 3320. WTF!?!? But these things happen.

Congratulations to Vodafone on a good evening. Sorry I didn’t learn much, but considering you had the Amway function next door, and congratulations on that too, but you did an excellent job and overall I rate the Data Demons 4.5 out of 5. They’re all nice young men, well spoken and knowledgeable. I would love to chat to them in a store any time about mobile data.

1. Twitter

Fantastic time waster. Brilliant. But I found out how really handy it can be today. I was having some trouble signing up to Vodafone Broadband Lite (more on that further down) and getting no where with customer services. So I twittered a tweet to @vodafoneNZ and the lovely man there asked me for a DM (Direct Message) with my mobile number and within 5 minutes, I was sorted. This is verses the 20 minutes I had ripping my hair out with their customer services desk the old fashioned way.

2. Dandy Warhols

Dear Vodafone, please change your hold music. They were a one hit wonder and 10 minutes of the same song, Bohemian Like You, is too much and drove me near suicidal. Thank you.

3. Vodafone Broadband Lite

I have noticed an increase in my mobile broadband data useage. I am lucky enough to have a nice Nokia 6121, while not the coolest phone, and lacking QWERTY sophistication, it does the few things I want. Lately I have noticed more and more, I rely on Mobile Broadband. Be it accessing my facebook page while I’m at the racetrack, using IRC while travelling to Hamilton (NOT while driving… ), or uploading funny photos to Flickr. Yes. I have become so internet addicted that I can get it all on my mobile.

Now until Vodafone brought along this nifty new plan of 100mb of Data for $10 a month, I was using their casual useage plan of $1 / Day, limited to 10mb. This was all good, but I rarely use 10mb a day, but I use my mobile interwebs most days a month, resulting in bills of around $20/month for mobile data. At least now I have the added bonus of not having to pay for expensive hotel data when on the road as well. Doubly awesome!

So from now until eternity, or whenever I buy a laptop with bluetooth, I will have to ensure I travel with my Nokia Data Cable!

4. Firefox

How I lived so long without this browser, I have no idea. I have a fantastic add on called ‘Yoono‘ which sits on the left hand side of my browser window and updates me with new tweets and facebook happenings like pokes and status changes. I can also use MSN Messenger on it, check and read my gmail and it also gives me my RSS feeds – something I was looking at useing to keep up with the play. I haven’t had a look at any other Firefox addons, but I will soon.

5. Ubuntu on the Acer Laptop

I took the plunge and gave Ubuntu its own 10gb partition on my Vista “powered” laptop. I put powered in quotes as running vista, it is a complete dog. Its very slow and painful and whilst I disable most of the pretty vista features, it was not designed for Vista. But just for booting up for an internet surf, quick internet check, Ubuntu serves me just fine. I’m still attached to MS Office tho. Read No. 6

6. Kudos to Warehouse Stationery

I got a flier in my local paper last week from the Papakura Warehouse Stationery. $49.00 to buy a copy of Microsoft Office Home & Student Edition. Limited to 15 copies only. So I was there before the store opened. I got one of those 15 copies and am now very chuffed to finally own a legit copy of Office. I will save up now to buy a legit copy of Outlook.