On Photo Organization And Spaces Blogs

First things first… I wanted to comment on Mike’s post on photo organization:

I disagree with the 5 and 4 star ratings. After reading The DAM Book (DAM = digital asset management) the idea of scaling your star ratings so you have way more 1 star than 2 star ratings, way more 2 than 3, etc. Filling up your ratings with lots of 5 star ratings (especially right away) means you don’t have anywhere to go as you get better. I’ve started giving 1-3 star ratings, where I only have a few (under 20) 3 stars, and those are what I really think is my best work. Eventually I’ll have something that’s a step up from that and then I’ll go into the 4 star ratings. Going into 4 and 5 right away may make you feel good, but doesn’t give any room for the future. YMMV, IMHO, etc.

So why am I quoting myself? Well, two reasons. First is that when I tried to post a comment normally (using Firefox under Mac OS/X) I got the following message:

Completely unhelpful, and unchanging the three or four times I tried over a 5 minute period or so. If something was blowing up I’d expect a service as huge as Spaces would have any errors or issues fixed within seconds. Or maybe it’s a Firefox or OS/X hatin’ bug (tinfoil hat mode engaged).

Ok, so there’s a server error, I can deal with that, it happens, hell, it happened to me when I got an email saying that my MySQL server had stopped for no reason. I’m not a billion dollar company though 🙂

OK, so easy enough, I go to Mike’s profile and clicked “Send a Message” and got the following screen down below.

At first glance you might think that you should put a subject in the subject box, and your message in the message box right? Then hit se… uhm… wait a minute, where’s the send button? Oh, there’s a note at the top saying that this user won’t allow messages and the only option you have is to cancel. WTF? Why is there a) a ‘send a message’ button and b) fields to type in (and I typed in a big long message as well as my comment above before I noticed this.

Now, after typing all this up it looks like even though I was getting “server error” clicking the post button, it was in fact posting a comment each and every time, so poor Mike got about 30 posts of the same comment 🙁 Sorry about that.

Maybe that’s why Mike doesn’t allow people to email him….

Anyway, Spaces, you have bugs, please fix!