I want to share a secret with you.

One of my guilty pleasures is going through Flickr, looking at the random assortment of pictures you get when you use their ‘explore‘ option.

For people not yet aware of what Flickr is, it is (at it’s simplest) an online service that lets you upload and share photos for free. On top of that though, it is a massive community of users. You can find pictures of anything on Flickr, from holiday snaps to pictures that look so professional you’d expect to see them in a gallery.

In fact, I like it so much, I just shelled out for a Pro Account – as I only ever spend money in extreme circumstances, this might clue you into quite how much I like it. I was going to go for broke and the two year option, but then I had a moment of future-shock. Will they even be around in two years time? Will there be something better on the scene? My gut tells me they will still be around but… I’m no fortune teller. That, and I have no spare cash – the one year option of $24 (roughly £14) was about all I could stretch to.

When I started using Flickr a year or so now, I thought the 200 photos you get on the free account was more than enough – and it is. It’s taken me a year to max it out. What happens when you uploaded your 201st image, is the 1st image goes into hiding etc. It is still there online, but it no longer appears on your ‘photos’ page. I held out from paying till a photoset I really liked disappeared into the ether. That, and with the Pro account you can have as many sets as you want (I’ve had to resort to using tags as jury-rigged sets this past year). Oh, and a 2 GB monthly upload limit.

I’ll stop now 😛 Basically, the free account is perfect for casual use, and enough to let you find out for yourself if you want to spend the money or not. You don’t get nagged to upgrade as some services do. If you haven’t got one, go get a Flickr account today, then share the URL in the comments so we can have a look 🙂

I use Flickr extensively as the online repository for my digital pictures – either quick snaps I have taken to illustrate a moment, or whole collections of memories – and often times what I blog links to Flickr, or what I flickr links back to Bright Meadow. (Thanks, by the way, to Paul for a great definition of the new verb ‘to flickr’). Whilst you can view just my Flickr stream, or read just the blog, you kinda miss out on part of the fun. Both contain facets of my online life, and more and more my ‘online’ life is becoming part of my mainstream life – it’s starting to get now that I’ll refer even work colleagues to Flickr if they want to see my holiday snaps. My friends have long been stopping by Bright Meadow to check I am still in the land of the living (my inability to answer email is getting so far beyond a joke as to become almost legend). I’ve got a mental list of friends who are happy to appear in snaps online and those who aren’t. I’ve got plans for something I’m rolling out in a little while that will tie my use of Bright Meadow and Flickr even closer together.

On top of that, I love the community of users. The ability to comment on people’s work, add notes, favourite them. Get feedback. Make contacts. Join groups. There are groups for the oddest of things – the railways of the Isle of Wight for example.

At least once a week, more when I am bored, I will load up the “Interesting in the past 7 days” page, marking photos I like as ‘favourites‘, downloading some for desktops, then hitting refresh to get the next batch of great images.

It is this ability to ‘favourite’ images that sold me on Flickr. For the longest time I would see images I liked, then resign myself to never be able to find them again (the option of physically bookmarking them just seemed impractical). Then I discovered that if I clicked the little star at the top left of a photo I liked, Flickr would bookmark it for me and I would always be able to find it. Sweet!

It’s also Flickr I have to thank for some truly awesome desktop images – I have about 200 images the Mac rotates through on a daily basis, supplying me with two amazing new desktops each time I start up the computer. A good 70% of these have come from Flickr (the rest are film stills, promo images, and pictures I’ve taken). For those worried about copyright etc, Flickr lets you chose if people can download your images or not, and also lets you set a creative commons license. It’s never going to stop evil people reposting work as their own if they are really desperate too, but a community is all about sharing. And there has been at least once case I’m aware of where mainstream media used a picture off Flickr without permission or attribution to the photographer, and he won his copyright case (I wish I could remember where that link disappeared to :/).

I can think of one other service that’s building itself up to directly take on Flickr (Zooomr, but I can’t tell you more about that because it’s down at the moment due to a DOS attack and upgrade issues. I’ve heard some people praise Zooomr, some people who aren’t such fans. Google, of course, has it’s own attempt, but that doesn’t work with Macs, so 😛 to them.

As I said, I like Flickr, and it’s gonna take a pretty impressive service to make me want to switch. It’s definitely one case where the total is greater than the sum of all its parts – it’s simple and does what it does brilliantly. What more do you need?

Now, if you will excuse me, I am off to plug in the scanner, and make the most of all this new storage space I’ve just got 😀 So many pretty pictures!

Flickr, Zooomr, Google Picassa

I’ve decided that every office should have a man with a good smile. They are just so nice to look at you understand. They don’t have to be single (in fact it helps if they aren’t because then you can ogle in safety). They just have to be… easy on the eye. Makes even the hardest day go that little better.

I’ve also realised that a good smile on a guy is important to me. More important than I gave credit to before. Give me the most ‘handsome’ man in the world and if he doesn’t have a good smile, he does nothing for me.

J had a real sweet smile. I remember this one picture from the start of our relationship – he just had the sweetest smile, seeing it tipped me over the edge from quite liking to really liking.

shanks had a great smile on him too, though his was more on the lines of a cheeky grin – gave the clue to his personality. It wasn’t the kind of smile you relied on to bring you cups of tea and hold your hair back when you’re feeling sick. It was the kind of smile that took you out dancing and didn’t bring you home till the sun was just starting to come up.

And the CC had this wonderful slow, secret smile that started at the corner of his mouth and ended lighting up his entire face. Sometimes I’d just turn around and catch his smile starting as he was looking at me. I was never totally sure what prompted it, but I knew it was a good smile without an ounce of malice behind it. Made my knees go wibbly and my stomach do backflips to see it.

It’s the way a smile can make a fairly average face suddenly full of grace. First time I met Jeff, nearly two years back, he didn’t make much of an impression on me. He kept to himself, didn’t mingle with the rest of us, which was fine – some people don’t like to mix. He just didn’t register on my radar beyond being a fellow course-mate to say ‘hi’ to whilst waiting for class to start. Then one day he decided to join us in the courtyard for a cup of tea between seminars. Someone told a joke and *boom* his face changed, he changed. He was no longer a nonentity to me – he was a guy with a damn cute smile that made me want to know him better. It was goofy. It was thoughtful. It was generous. It was… Jeff.

Matt is another person who had a smile I’d go a long way to see again. Everyone loved Matt. It was impossible not to with his smile.

I used to laugh when I read romance novels where the heroine can tell everything about the hero from his smile. I still do laugh. It is unrealistic – for me at least facial clues are tricky. I hate scenes in movies where there’s lots of ‘eye-acting’ because I know I’m missing things, not getting the full picture. If someone tries to send ‘messages’ with their eyes at me, I fluff it. So much of it is intuition, knowing a person really well, and guessing. How am I to know that the signals I’m getting from someone’s expression are the signals they are trying to send?

I don’t.

But something in me is rigged to respond to smiles. Some smiles don’t work on me. There’s nothing wrong with them, but sometimes it just doesn’t flip the switch to make me let down my defences. It’s a chemistry thing I guess. I might still like you, talk to you, call you friend, but that extra zing will be missing. I can even think of one or two people whose smiles mildly repel me.

Most often though, it will be like with Jeff: I won’t have a preference either way, then someone will smile and it opens my heart. I think his smile is one of the reasons I think David Tennant is such a great Dr Who. A fairly unassuming face. Ordinary even. Then he smiles and… yup. That’s a good smile he’s got going on. If you can get your hands on a copy of the DVD, I do recommend watching Casanova (the Russell T. Davies BBC adaptation, not the Heath Ledger film).

What defines a good smile? I couldn’t say. I just know it when I see it.

Whatever the reason, I’m glad we’ve got our very own Dr Who in the office – I just caught the tail end of his smile today and it made me glad to be at work. I already had him pegged as a decent chap, now I know he is.

People say I have a good smile. I don’t know – it’s just my smile, I’ve always had it. But if it is a good smile? I’m glad. I can’t be the only one out there rigged to like smiles.

Fiendishly complex computer systems hold no fear for me.

So why can’t I get a bloody stapler to work?!

Turns out, I disappointed Moose and Illyna when the CC and I went our separate ways – I just wasn’t bitter enough for them apparently. They were laying in supplies for mammoth anti-men bitch-fests and there was I being all… philosophical about the whole thing. Sorry, I’m just not built that way. In the past, yes, I indulged the dark side a bit. This time around, the circumstances really didn’t warrant it.

Doesn’t mean I didn’t put virtual pen to metaphorical paper and try and put what I was feeling into words though. Enjoy. Don’t enjoy. I wrote it so I might as well share it 🙂

It’s really rather humbling when you realise how easily something as everyday as the ending of a relationship can knock you for six. You like to think you are special, somehow better able to cope than the hoardes, yet when it comes down to it you live out the cliche from Bridget Jones.

*Zap* One conversation, and the brain shuts down. Then revs up into hyper-speed. Then shuts down. A very monotonous cycle and highly depressing for me, my flat mate, all my friends, and you having to read about it. And I’ve had quite enough of being pedestrian, thank you very much. Really time I stopped dwelling on what has gone before, and started to focus on what is to come.

Yeah, yeah, I know. Easier said than done, but long experience has taught me that if I WRITE it, soon enough I will start to believe it. Or at least pretend to believe it, and that’s close enough for now.

I had fun. I loved him. I still do. Whether he was deserving of that love is a topic better reserved for a girly night in with a couple of bottles of wine and lashings of chocolate. Would I change it? Nah. Of course, I’d rather things had gone down differently, but I’m glad I have no real regrets, other than why did I wait so frelling long?

Have I cried? Yes. Will I cry again? Undoubtedly. (Am I crying now as I write this? Trying very hard not to. Tears and PowerBook keyboards really don’t mix, darlings). But I know soon enough I will stop crying and start laughing. He did make me laugh more often than not.

Am I angry at him? Hell yes! If he was within reach I would cheerfully deck him, but coward that he is, he lives in another country, so he’s safe. Distance sucks. Takes all the fun out breaking up. I don’t get to flaunt in front of him all that he is missing. It’s very hard to stage elaborate “take me back, please!” stunts from across 3000 miles of ocean. These are, of course, all good things. Again on the plus side for distance, at least I won’t run into him in the supermarket when wearing laundry-day clothes, or when I’m having a bad hair day.

The most mundane things remind me of him, which is very annoying. Most of the objects around the flat trigger some memory. Think I’ve still got an old football of his lurking behind the sofa somewhere. (I’m saving that for when I’m feeling really down and need to stab something with a carving knife). I’m now also out two rather pretty pieces of jewelry that I won’t be able to wear for months because they were gifts. Damn him for having taste in jewelry! Damn me for being such a sentimental bloody fool.

Would I take him back if he asked? In a heartbeat. The brain says “don’t go there!” but the heart, infuriating organ that it is, says otherwise. But as I seriously doubt he will be asking, I think I’m safe. I even think, somehow, I’m safe from writing the begging email. I have too much pride, and common sense. At least, that’s what I tell myself in the cold rational light of day. When it’s gone 2am and I’m all alone in the big double bed then other thoughts start to creep in… 😉

I blame him, I blame myself. Already I can see where it started to go wrong. At the same time, I can’t see where along the line we should have done things differently to make them not end this way. My bad. His bad. Our bad. At least I wasn’t dumped by SMS this time, and I can be pretty certain he’s not gonna end up engaged to my brother’s ex girlfriend. (Yes, both of those things have genuinely happened to me. This is the soap opera I call my life).

Ah well, we live and learn, right? Then again, I’ve been down this road a time or three before, and I never do seem to learn. Perhaps I need to tattoo on my forehead “long-distance relationships are not for Cas”. Though in my defense it wasn’t long distance when we started.

Damn his sexy collarbones. I expect there will be a good story or five in this somewhere. I always did do my best writing when feeling a little down.

In all I had twenty months of friendship then love, and that I certainly don’t regret. He stood by my side through a pretty rough patch, and for that I will always love him. He made me laugh, he held me when I cried, he shook his head in incomprehension at some of the things I did but supported me anyway. He made me think perhaps I was worthy of being loved. I think I’ll always have a soft spot for the foolish boy. He did the most amazing rendition of the “George of the Jungle” theme. He was my Cute Canadian. He’s gonna be a hard act to follow.