Red Is A Flavor

Most of the cruise lines have always offered discounts to active duty military, but discounts for non-retired veterans was basically limited to Carnival.  Apparently that has changed recently.

Most likely in an effort to increase passengers, a few more have opened their discounts to us military one-termers.  I’ve utilized the discounts offered by Carnival for a couple of cruises and they have saved me a substantial amount of money, especially on weeklong family cruises.

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In most cases, the military discounts only apply to certain sailings, So check with your travel agent.  Anyway, here are the current rules (as of this writing) for military benefits on the bigboy cruise lines.

I highly recommend using VacationToGo.com to book your travel.  Their site is always my first stop for deals, and they will credit you if your cruise price decreases after booking.

Image: ccgd [via Flickr]

Twitter is the hottest thing on the net right now, but it can easily get overwhelming when you follow a large number of users.  Many people, including myself, have utilized Yahoo’s powerful Pipes mashup tool to make feeds and interfaces to help wade through all of the data.

Never heard of Yahoo Pipes?  It is a composition tool to aggregate, manipulate, and mashup content from around the web.  It has a very easy to understand (and memory intensive) user interface, that illustrates the dataflow from module to module.

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Basically, if the data you want can be obtained via RSS, XML, ATOM, etc, you can integrate it into your mashups.  But chances are someone has already built a pipe to do anything you need, as there are thousands of pipes using data from all over the web.  Yahoo allows any piped to be “cloned” as your own, so find something similar to what you need, clone it then tweak it how you see fit.

As far as Twitter goes, here are some of the more interesting ones that have been cloned often.

Tweets Nearby – See the tweets happening near a Twitter user's location.

Friends Name Alphabetical – Helps overcome a simple flaw on twitter, when you have a large number of followers.

Twitter Friend's Favorites – Easy way to see the “favorite tweets” of people you follow.

Local Twitterstars – This pipe returns the most-followed Twitter users from a geographic region.

True Twitter Friends – Shows all twitter’s who you’ve had a conversation with.

Twitter Monitor – A twitter observer. Simply enter a keyword you want to monitor and it will mashup data from terraminds, tweetscan, twemes and summize.

Social Media Firehose – This is a social media search for tracking brand or product mentions on a slew of social media sites, including flickr, twitter, friendfeed, digg etc. It taps into their search APIs directly, so it's much more immediate and comprehensive than say, Google alerts.

On January 1st of this year, I began a project in which the goal was to take and post (to Flickr) one photograph each day. 

I got the idea from PhotoJojo and from Drew Bennett of BenSpark.com.  Unlike others, my goal was not to take more pictures, as I currently take between 15,000 and 20,000 each year.   It was to force creativity into my photography, by establishing a deadline for uniqueness.   My typical images are usually simple or blackmail interesting photos of family or friends. 

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Results of the Project

More often than not, I find that I’m taking pictures at the last minutes of the day, just to meet the requirements of the project.  Sometimes they come out good, but most times they are not.  Taking pictures just for the sake of the deadline makes ends up simply making me work in the same environment over and over.  If you really look at the photos and the days of the week they were taken, you will definitely find a long-exposure/night theme to the weekday images.

Those times when I actually set aside the time to dedicate to capture new and unique images, I usually end up with more than one that I would like to highlight.  Often I find myself wishing I just use a picture the next day.

Another goal I originally had was to center a blog post around each image.  But the restricted environment I end up working in on the weekdays, hardly makes some images worth more than a title and how I shot it.

Basically, the project is not helping me reach my end goals of improving my photography to the extent I wanted.  But it has taught me how to add more variety in my shots and look at the objects around me in different ways.

My New Plan

Rather than a daily posting, I’m committing myself to at least 3-7 original photographs per week, that are worth publishing and sharing.  Each week, most likely on Monday or Tuesday, I will be writing a “summary” post, which will include these images and their details.

This will allow me a little more flexibility to be creative and to focus a little more on those times when I get more than a single image.   Additionally, I can begin to explore other techniques that I would like to dig a little deeper into, like macro, portraits, and HDR.

It may sound like I’m giving up, but I’m not.  I’m refocusing my time to produce better images and to spend a little more time on this blog.