Mixed

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I thought it was about time I re-organized my photos since ImageStation went kaput and I lost the album functionality on my homepage (yeah I know, it's been over a year). So I was trying a few online photo services recently.

The first I tried was Flickr; actually I had an old account with them but I never really used it. As a rogers subscriber I was signed up for a pro account too, but that's gone to waste since it's getting reverted to a basic account in July. Anyways, I liked the way that all your photos are put into a pool (or PhotoStream as they call it) and then you can loosely organize them into different sets and collections. But ultimately I decided not to use Flickr because the basic account has some limit where you can only view the most recent 200 photos in the PhotoStream, and I sure wasn't going to pay $25 or whatever it was a year for a full fledged service.

So the search continues. Next I tried to PhotoBucket; actually I only got to reading their service agreement. I think that service is mostly free, and doesn't seem to have a hard limit cap on the number of photos. However, there was some weird clause which says you have to log into the account every 3 months or so, or else something wouldn't work or what not. I decided that was too complicated and didn't even bother creating an account.

Next I tried was Shutterfly. The name sounded familar and a quick google search reveals why; it was the service that took in the old ImageStation users. I had receive a few emails back when ImageStation was shutting down that I should migrate my photos to Shutterfly, which of course I totally ignored. I looked over the features and the terms and conditions and there wasn't anything major I didn't like and so I created an account.

As you can see by the album I posted, Shutterfly is the service I stuck with. The services has a number of interesting features that I'd like to point out but I'll leave that to another post since this post is already getting fairly long. Bye for now.

Update

First of all, a happy father's day to all the dads out there, the old ones, the new ones, the soon to be.

Once again, it's been a while since I updated. Apparently being lazy is in my nature, so I'm not going say anything stupid like "oh I being going to get my act together and update this blog more often, stay tuned, blah blah blah"; it just ain't going to happen.

And so here we are, an update to my blog, once in a blue moon. Where to begin... well, let's start off with some pleasant news, which you can see in the picture below:

Yes, we have a new 10 weeks old Calico kitten at home. Her name's Cora and she's simply adorable. There's a story of how her name came about. My parents and I actually gone through a bunch of names: Callie, Coco, Mimi, Fifi, Cookie, Muffin (my personal favourite), and we could not agree on a name. We debated on that subject for a good several days and as a last resort, we went through 2 rounds of voting to finally "agree" on the name Mimi. Then on the day we went to pick her up at our vet, the staff told us that they had been referring to her as Cora, but because we went thought that whole naming process we decided to stay with the agreed upon name, Mimi. That would have been the end of it, but back home the name Cora keep gnawing at the back of my head; it had a nice ring to it and it just clicked. Finally, we gave in and phoned the vet to change her name back to Cora (while keeping Mimi as her middle name on record).

And now onto some sombre news, which you may already have guessed as to why we got a new cat, and that is that Baby is no longer with us. It's almost a month since it happened. One day she just stopped eating, and she could barely take a step. Her energy level just drop drastically. When we took her to the vet, I had still hoped that it's not as bad as it looks, that maybe there was still something the vet could do, like keeping her overnight to give her nutrients via IV. But the first words he said to us when he walked into the examination room was "I think it's time", and it really hit me then that the moment I've dreaded over the past several months has arrived.


Although we knew she didn't have much time due to the cancer, it was still very tough to let her go, possibly even more so than when Dee died because through baby's death, we are also re-living through those memories of when Dee died--and also because ever since Baby had the surgery on her paw last year, she's become more affectionate towards me (or maybe I was more affectionate towards her because of the cancer). I was a wreck afterwards much longer than when Dee died. I still think about her everyday and missed the way that she always come up to my room and lie down nearby while I worked.

But life goes on as they say, in closing I'd like to say farewell to my beloved cat: I miss you Baby, but I'm happy you are in a better place now, and you won't be alone because Dee is there with you (I can imagine them sitting side by side look down on me, like in that one picture where they were looking out the window). Don't worry about Chumsley, he's the big cat in the house now and he'll have little trouble maker Cora to keep him busy. And I hope you don't mind that Cora seem to have taken a liking to sleeping at your favourite spot under my bed.

Pictures of my cats: http://andrewscats.shutterfly.com/