The Golden Van

Monday, February 15, 2016

Bad News From Google

It didn't help that Google published this news the same day Cheyenne left me forever but at the time I had other preoccupations on my mind watching my poor old dog take the last great journey of her all too short life. Now however as I contemplate my future and hopefully that of a new otherwise unwanted dog I also have to come to terms with the fact that Google seems less and less interested in supporting free blogging. This message from the photo service I use to store my pictures, Picasa. There are two services, Picasa 3 for desktop that I don't use and Picasaweb that I rely on. I have 17 folders more or less full with I would guesstimate some 15,000 photographs which I fondly believed would be stored forever for me by Google.

Moving on from Picasa

Friday, February 12, 2016 10:00 AM

Since the launch of Google Photos, we’ve had a lot of questions around what this means for the future of Picasa. After much thought and consideration, we’ve decided to retire Picasa over the coming months in order to focus entirely on a single photo service in Google Photos. We believe we can create a much better experience by focusing on one service that provides more functionality and works across mobile and desktop, rather than divide our efforts across two different products.

We know for many of you, a great deal of care has gone into managing your photos and videos using Picasa—including the hours you’ve invested and the most precious moments you’ve trusted us with. So we will take some time in order to do this right and provide you with options and easy ways to access your content. We’ve outlined below some of the changes you can expect.

Picasa Web Albums
If you have photos or videos in a Picasa Web Album today, the easiest way to still access, modify and share most of that content is to log in to Google Photos, and all your photos and videos will already be there. Using Google Photos, you can continue to upload and organize your memories, as well as enjoy other great benefits like better ways to search and share your images.

However, for those of you who don’t want to use Google Photos or who still want to be able to view specific content, such as tags, captions or comments, we will be creating a new place for you to access your Picasa Web Albums data. That way, you will still be able to view, download, or delete your Picasa Web Albums, you just won’t be able to create, organize or edit albums (you would now do this in Google Photos).

One thing to make clear is that none of this is happening today—if you have a Picasa Web Album you can keep using it as normal. We’ll start rolling out these changes on May 1, 2016.

Desktop application
As of March 15, 2016, we will no longer be supporting the Picasa desktop application. For those who have already downloaded this—or choose to do so before this date—it will continue to work as it does today, but we will not be developing it further, and there will be no future updates. If you choose to switch to Google Photos, you can continue to upload photos and videos using the desktop uploader at photos.google.com/apps.

Finally for developers, we will also be retiring some functions of the Picasa API. Developers can learn more here.

Again, none of these changes are happening today, and we’ll continue to update you along the way. We apologize for any inconvenience this transition causes, but we want to assure you that we are doing this with the aim of providing the best photos experience possible. Google Photos is a new and smarter product, that offers a better platform for us to build amazing experiences and features for you in the future.

Posted by Anil Sabharwal, Head of Google Photos

So until May 1st all continues as normal for Picasaweb. After that I have no idea nor does anyone else if Picasaweb will work. It might, it might not. Furthermore I don't know how to upload pictures from my phone as I have a Picasaweb centered system that is simple and fast. Google Pictures is supposed to work but these things are done at the whim of Google. I am dreadfully afraid I may lose seven years worth of my diary!

Secondly the blogging platform I use on my iPad is no longer making money for the producers and Blogsy has vanished into the ether and will not be updated for future iOS applications. I have the first and only version on my increasingly cranky generation one mini ipad and I keep the iPad mainly to blog...But Blogsy is set up for Picasaweb. Catch-22.

So now I have some time. I want to think about this but I am pondering setting up my own website and hiring some bright spark to recreate this page on my own site, a move I have resisted for years as Blogger works fine for me and my simple photography and written word diary. Some people think Google, in its headlong rush to compete with established social media is abandoning the platforms that have worked for photographers and bloggers, two endangered species of the Web world we inhabit. I tried Google+ years ago and they had the temerity to mess with my pictures putting snowflakes and stuff in them which made me crazy. I also hated Google Pictures because they don't offer captions and map locations. But clearly I am in a minority. Most people will like google pictures as they are designed to integrate with phones and social media.

Let's face it, blogging is an old art form nowadays. I don't much like the scrolling pace of Facebook, I like looking back over my diary and remembering. Clearly some other people find my meanderings of use when seeking information about the Keys and that's nice. But for me the Diary is the first time in my life I have recorded stuff in this rather traditional way and I like the gentle pace and my own mixture of words and pictures. I find videos boring quite honestly and I like the ability to just look and use words and mix it all up. I like my absence of format, you never know what the page will be about. My blog is an add free personal space on the World Wide Web with no profit motive or persuasive motive or any promises made. It just is.

Despite the above mentioned difficulties I intend to figure out between now and May, pending reassurance from Google that things will stay roughly as they are, how to transfer the content of these pages to a new server, maintain the format and figure out some blogging tool to keep doing precisely what I am doing. I mention this because change is disturbing and when Google makes changes they tend to ripple out to a larger audience. None of this need be of concern.

I do own http://keywestdiary.com so any transition will be practically invisible to readers. The actual website name right now is conchscooter.blogspot.com but I have, thanks to GoDaddy managed to redirect keywestdiary.com to the blogspot website. If I set up my own domain I'll reverse it and hopefully none of you will be any the wiser.

All this to say things may change but I don't plan to go away or stop taking pictures and as you read this I hope to be over at the Key West SPCA seeing if there is a dog that needs a home. Cheyenne left a huge hole in my heart and I can't stand being home without a dog. More perhaps than I can stand not taking pictures of the world around me.

The more things change the more I am determined they shall stay the same. Google be damned.

Key West Dusk

Just a few pictures of the best time of day.

Sunday, February 14, 2016

Cheyenne In New Mexico

Cheyenne used to sit in the car when she first came to our house, determined never to be left behind anymore. Fine we said, this is a traveling dog, just right. In 2010 we drove to California and Cheyenne braved the desert heat to walk around with me while the wife shopped. Always a good time with Cheyenne. I miss her terribly but I have come to understand what a truly magnificent gift she was. She had a rotten start in life owned by a military family from Louisiana who allowed her to get shot with an air gun pellet, who frightened her such that she was afraid to go into the kitchen and got her used to lying on a hard floor without a bed and abandoned her for a younger model. Despite all that at eight she adopted a whole new family and took to the new life without looking back. I often wondered if she thought about her old family or her puppies and the life she left behind. I did my best to make up for lost time in the six years I had her and in the end she gave me the greatest gift of all that I have never had before. She gave me a perfect death done on her terms as she had lived her life with me. And as much as I miss her she liberated me to be ready to get another dog, to start again without fear of guilt, resentment or sorrow. I still cry, I miss her that badly but in the same way she went ahead with what she had to do she gave me the courage to go ahead and be prepared for the next dog in my life. I'm not sure who or what that will be but Cheyenne will be there with me in the next adventure. As much as i want her back I am at peace with the knowledge I can't have her. After today she will be archived and we move on.

La Mesilla

We left Van Horn, Texas not too early in the morning, and faced several more hours of this:

I might rather have been doing this than finding myself struggling to pay attention behind the wheel as we droned through through the abomination of desolation:

A couple of things were working in our favor as we drove to make a dinner deadline with Josh in Tempe, Arizona. They are called Time Zones. Van Horn is just to the eats of the divide between central and Mountain times so five minutes after we left the Motel 6 at nine o'clock, the time suddenly became 8:05 am. Then, because Arizona doesn't observe Summer Time we effectively entered the Pacific Time Zone when we crossed from New Mexico. All this messing with the clocks meant we could dawdle on our way through the deserts. Though we didn't dawdle in the urban nightmare that is El Paso on the Mexican Border.

The border has been tightened up so much we just looked across the meandering Rio Grande river at the slums of Old Mexico from the comfort of our first world freeway. In years past I have driven down to the American side of the river and watched the Mexicans wade the border, but these days it is a no go zone heavily patrolled by federal agents behind the imposing new fence.

Drawing away to the north on I-10 the Interstate took us into southern New Mexico and that state's second largest city. Las Cruces boasts a population of some 85,000 people in a city so bland it has a four lane highway driving through the middle. years ago, looking for downtown we asked a shop clerk where it was. She looked blank and said simply:"Here." So we wrote Las Cruces off as a pit. This time my wife's iPhone indicated killer burritos were to be had at a little store on the main drag into town. We parked the Fusion (Cheyenne, really) safely in the shade and went looking for food in this unlikely place.

Urban Spoon is the wife's favorite application on her iPhone and as i drive and Cheyenne sleeps she is busy working away on the phone. "I think we should try here for lunch," she says confidently. This from a woman who can't read a map, even after 16 years of marriage. In Las Cruces Urban Spoon says eathere, at the Fina Station's Santa Fe Grill...

Four dollars and eighteen cents each and we sit down with a red chili burrito and a green chili burrito and they are delicious.

We order one wrapped in a tortilla and one on a plate and as Jewish marriage law requires, we share. My wife says it's the law so it must be, and she's Jewish. Note the potato cubes, an unusual and perfect addition.

We cause hushed horror at the check out when we ask if we can drink a beer with our lunch so we retreat hastily and open cokes. "A bit too European," I mutter to my giggling wife. The beer we keep for later and yummy it was too.

Lunch among the aspirin. Living as I do in the Florida Keys it had been a while since I had seen a dandelion.

We happen to spot a sign from the car pointing to a historic district and so, with time zones to spare we meander south across the Interstate. We stumble across Old Mexico in New Mexico.

Cheyenne took the lead past the church of San Albino.

The church as it happens, offers refuge to embarrassed women. Embarazada in Spanish actually means pregnant (don't get all serious on me here) and naturally the Catholic influence in this part of the world means pregnancy is actually embarrassing and apparently San Albino wants to save every possible soul as discreetly as possible by sticking up a bi-lingual sign to the effect that if you are PREGNANT we can help.

If you do happen to look Middle Eastern (embarrassed or not) this lot are also here to help- boot you out.

Cheyenne said it was too hot for a tea party thanks.

Mesilla is also known as La Mesilla or Old Mesilla depending on who you ask and has a population of about 2,000 people, far smaller than neighboring Las Cruces. What happened was the city wanted to overcharge the railroad to come through town and when a farmer in Las Cruces offered them free dirt they jumped at the offer and Mesilla got sidelined by history.

Bad for them, great for tourists as the town is the epitome of New Mexican adobe without all the tourist trap overdone bullshit of Taos. Mesilla is lovely, understated and much appreciated by the people who have discovered this lovely little town. I highly recommend a stop if you are cruising Interstate Ten through New Mexico. Cheyenne had a great time too.

Apparently Mesilla was a border town separating Old Mexico from the United States as the Yankees moved west. The exact border was disputed until the Gadsden Purchase settled the border in 1853, putting the city in the US. Then in the Civil war the western Confederates occupied the city and claimed it as the Capital of the Arizona Territory for their side. California Volunteers recaptured it in 1862 and the fighting was effectively over in this part of the world.

These days Mesilla is a town filled with tourist knick knack shoppes, wine tasting, and restaurants. My wife loved poring over the jewelry, rugs, wraps and statues in the stores. One store keeper told us Mesilla is, weirdly enough, a hub for snowbirds who don't mind cold temperatures but want to escape winter snows. This town is hopping apparently in winter. I, who think 50 degrees is cold find it hard to picture people swanning around here in mid winter talking about how lovely the weather is.

Outside this home we see, in addition to the fence, the classic New Mexican decorative ristra which is a string of drying chile peppers. This serves the dual purpose of decorating the home and providing dry pepper pods to spice up cooking during the winter.

Mesilla is much lovelier than I have managed to portray here. I am astonished we never previously discovered it as we sued to practically live on I-10 when we were moving our lives from Santa Cruz to Key West.

The classic Latin American raised sidewalks seen here:

Here we see the shady arcade covering the sidewalks around the plaza.

Courtyards and alleys are a big deal in this town.

The plaza is a good place to take one's ease and imagine one is in Old Mexico.

This shot is for buffetguy and riepe. She liked Cheyenne enough to show off some cleavage. Good dog.

We spent a fair bit of time and money in this store. All the shop owners were friendly and easy going about having the dog in their stores.

Bright sun, mountains, and more miles to cover.

Got to keep moving, though now we had some New Mexican red wine in the trunk, along with peppered nuts, jellies and pepper candy.

Saturday, February 13, 2016

Cheyenne, A Wonderful LIfe

It is a complicated thing trying to explain to a non believer how much pleasure you can get from the company of a dog. Outside of a dog a book is a man's best friend. Inside of a dog it's too dark to read,a quotation attributed to Mark Twain, about sums up how I feel about Cheyenne. She came into my life in December 2009 and even though she was given up to the pound on the grounds of being too old (?) I expect she has a few more good years left in her. I'd be as ready to give her up to the pound as I would be to cut my own heart out. She has traveled across country with us in the car, been all across the South visiting various friends and relations and she has thus suffered mightily at the hands of my wanderlust. Cheyenne exhibits unnatural abilities to make up her own mind, she knows what she wants, and she lets me know in no uncertain terms. When I have been bedridden with the 'flu she has slept with me and when I have been to tired to walk her she has failed signally to show her disappointment. My tribute to my ever patient dog: