I like flickr. I like it a lot. Molly is posting her pictures from Hungary on flickr.

There is an API to program against, and there is a bunch of data available. From tags to comments to exif headers. Now Ryo Chijiiwa has come up with an application to help plan your bar hopping.

He and a friend, Yitz, searched flickr for the tag 'pub' and then used the exif headers to determine the day of the week that is most popular for pub crawling.

Read about their numbers. I found the link on boing boing.

There is so darned much information out there! And so much of it has so much potential. When I see applications like this it often seems to cement my 'keep everything' mentality. I think keeping date and time stamps is obvious, but there is a lot of data out there that we don't consider, and so we simply chuck it.

The other side of that river is that most data will never be useful. But which is which?

And I only met him twice, that I know of. I only remember one of those visits. We went to his house, probably near medford, or, and I played in the back yard while my mom went in and talked to him. I must have seen more of him, but all I remember is this hulking form in the screen door.

But he was an author. One of his stories paid for my Aunt to be born. And he appears in the isfdb.org database of science fiction writers.

I know this, most recently, because I was reading Kathryn Cramer's discussion of hurricane Katrin, and noticed her link to her books, and figured I'd check it out.

And it pulled up this page, and there was a search form. So I popped in a couple of variations of his name, and damned if Winston didn't have a whole page. And it had his birthplace, Spooner, Wisconsin, and his life span, 1915-1979. And then the shocker: there was an email link, to me. And I remember now having sent in a correction to the page when I first found it quite a while back.

Ain't that amusing?