My Life - My Travels

That’s right boys and girls. I have not been a good little boy. I guess I know what I’m getting for Christmas. Nothing but a lump of coal. I guess the good people over at HBO don’t take to kindly to people taking full advantage of their high speed cable connection.

I recently spent about a month living down in California and just couldn’t go without a decent cable connection. I did what anyone would do and ordered internet from Charter Communications. Since they are so kind as to not limit how much bandwidth I use (unlike the nice people over at Bend Broadband) I go crazy. Downloading anything and everything I might like. By that I mean all the latest linux distros, watching shows on Hulu, and many other various forms of LEGAL bandwidth consumption. (continue reading…)

I ran across Zoto in quest to find a decent and cheap online backup for my all my photos. I love to take photos and a lot of my photos are in in RAW format, so they can take up a lot of room.

I started reading about Zoto and it seemed like it might fit the bill for all my JPGs and I was ok with that.

Turns out that Zoto wasn’t exactly what I was looking for but it turned out to be pretty cool never the less. Some say a Flickr wanna be but I say so what…who cares?

Zoto allows you to create folders and upload as many photos as you like. Share or make them private. They can handle photos up to 20mb in size and they offer a pretty cool interface. There is a lot of technology that you’ve seen before like a lightbox but they do it well and it looks good.

There is also a simple uploader you can put on you computer and all you have to do is drag and drop the individual photos or a whole folder. I would have liked to seen the folder structure be keep instead of just uploading into a “all photos” folder. It creates a lot of extra work in the name of organization.

All in all I think Zoto is a fair opponent to Flickr if you take into consideration the unlimited storage.

Zoto gets a thumbs up for me if I want to share photos with friends but as photo backup it just doesn’t cut it.

Then again, it’s not trying to be a backup service.

I’ve been reading a lot about bigger web companies laying of 10% or 25% of their staff in both reactive and proactive strategies to lower costs to make up for bad economy. This brings up some interesting questions, one of which tends to make me worry.

Are all these free web services we use everyday going to make a jump to paid services?

Things like Gmail, Pandora, Mint, etc, etc. (continue reading…)