Jim Dalrymple.com

I sat there this afternoon looking at my daughters Dell wondering why the hell it had to be so difficult to join a wireless network. A Mac is so easy — turn it on and it finds the network for you. That’s it, nothing else.

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After signing up for my Flickr account and noticing more and more sites with “tag blobs,” I decided to give it a try and see what it would be like on my site. A tag blob is the list of tags in the sidebar, representing all of the keywords I have used for blogs I’ve posted on the site.

The larger keywords are the ones that have been used most often and the smaller ones haven’t been used as much. It was fascinating last night to add tags to stories and watch the blob change keyword importance. (Okay, so my life isn’t that exciting, but it was fun anyway).

So, if you are wondering what I write about the most or if you are interested in a particular subject, just click one of the keywords and you will be shown all of those stories. I’m not finished going through all of the older content yet, but at least it gives an idea of what it will look like.

Everywhere I look these days, it’s Flickr, Flickr, Flickr. Like the saying goes, “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em,” so I did yesterday afternoon. I’m still not convinvced Flickr is any better for me than .Mac, but I’m sure there are a lot of people out there that can give me some opinions and examples on why it’s better.

I uploaded a couple of albums already to test out the interface. Overall, it’s pretty good — there are quite a few options and there is a whole community of people that you can make as contacts. I quickly found several people that I know to add as contacts.

I’m currently using a Flickr plugin for iPhoto, which seems to be the best upload/management interface I’ve found so far. The plugin doesn’t seem to be able to create an album for me, although it did upload pictures just fine if I didn’t choose to create a new album.

Shortly after signing up, a good friend got me upgraded to a Flickr Pro account (Thanks), which gives you a whole lot of extras — mostly lifting restrictions of the free account.

Like I said, I’m not totally convinced yet, but I’m going to give it a try and see what happens.

Blog spam has become a real problem for all of those people that just want to post a few personal thoughts on the Web. For some, it has meant taking comments off their sites altogether. Luckily, the Wordpress community is very active and has a lot of good developers tackling this problem — the latest plugin I’m trying is called Bad Behavior.

Unlike a lot of the other plugins, Bad Behavior doesn’t require any interaction from the person making the post. For instance, you don’t need to require a special code be typed in or otherwise jump through hoops to make a post.

I was using a plugin called Bot Check that required a 5-digit code be typed in and it was very good. I had no trouble with it at all and would certainly recommend anyone having trouble with spam give it a try.

I like to test out all kinds of things server related, so I thought I’d give Bad Behavior a try and see how it works. I had this site up for a few days before I started reciving spam, so I know it’s out there — let’s see how this does.

If you find yourself blocked for some reason, please let me know.

I did some reading over the weekend on what it would take to implement “live searching” on the site. What I mean by that is searching a Web site in a similar way to how Apple has implemented live searching on a Macintosh using Spotlight.

This morning I decided to take the plunge and after toying around off and on today I got it pretty much done. I still have to work on the CSS a bit more, but it’s functional.

It should work on most browsers, although it doesn’t for sure on IE for the Mac — then again who cares. If you use Safari, you even get the rounded corners and drop shdows.

So, to use the live search function just click in the search box and start typing. Results should popup under the search window almost immediately; using your arrow keys (or mouse) scroll down to the story you want and hit enter. If you want to exit out of search, just hit the Escape key on your keyboard.

Wow, if you thought there was no money in online gambling, you would be wrong. An ex-porn business owner, her husband and two others will cash in $1.4 billion and have shares worth an additional $6 billion.

According to the Reuters story, Ruth Parasol and her husband Russell de Leon, both lawyers, are each set to cash in around $370 million and still own a combined stake worth about $2.7 billion.

Anurag Dikshit, group operations director, is the biggest shareholder. He will cash in shares worth about $720 million and still own a 30 percent stake worth over $2.6 billion.

Marketing director Vikrant Bhargava’s remaining 9 percent stake and cash from the IPO should be worth almost $1 billion.

The downside — and there always seems to be a downside — the group could face jail time if the U.S. decides to clamp down on online gambling.

It’s Wednesday night and the Photo Marketing Association trade show is over for another year. The show was much busier than I thought it would be, which is a good sign for the industry. I also took the opportunity to meet up with some old friends and meet a new one — or at least put a face to the email address.

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