Dit is Amsterdam, en dit is mijn fiets.

[ursamajor]

I know, I know, it's the trendiest thing, "Hi, peeps, I haven't updated over here in three months, how are you, have some pictures until I get a chance to actually WRITE MOAR, love, ursamajor." Lather, rinse, repeat three months later. And yet I'm all over Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, and Pinboard. Shock, I've fallen into the trap of living in my smartphone's apps >_>

But I went to Amsterdam last week! So I come bearing photos, and for once, more photos of bikes than food. ;)

(In case the slideshow doesn't show up: Amsterdam 2012.)

*

So yeah, I am slowly transitioning to SmugMug for my photohosting.

As much as Yahoo's ongoing incompetence worries me, I'm still reluctant to pull away from Flickr. It is quieter there now among my friends than in past times (most are now posting to Facebook or Instagram); Yahoo has a track record of defenestrating the services I love; as much as I want Marissa Mayer to sweep in and make it all better, I'm not sure Yahoo's not too far gone. And yet.

I'm going with SmugMug primarily because it's stable. It's got other advantages, like the ability to host long videos, decent privacy and security options (and less of a dark side than Facebook), no sidebar ads (like there will be if/when I let my Flickr pro account expire). But Flickr still has the better photo management tools, even after years of neglect. Its mobile uploading leaves something to be desired, which is why lately I've only been using it as an Instagram backup. But I'm a little bit sad that I'm paying more for what feels like a clunkier organizational experience. Maybe it's just me taking some time to adapt after eight years. But I still have some workflow issues to straighten out:

- Geotagging, and metadata in general. My Amsterdam gallery has 194 pictures, some taken with my iPhone and others taken with my Canon G9. But only 133 pictures show up on the map associated with that gallery. How can I tell easily which photos lack geodata? How can I associate geodata with a given photo? (I do see that one can "edit geography" for an individual photo, but it would be nice to be able to easily tell what photos lack geographic information to begin with.)

- I take and process quite a few pictures with Instagram. I have yet to figure out how to get those pictures to (auto-)archive to SmugMug. Using email from within Instagram won't work (can't set the subject line the way SmugMug needs it for autoposting). I haven't yet found an app that will auto-crosspost from Flickr to SmugMug, either. Camera Awesome, SmugMug's iPhone camera app, will let me send pictures from CA to Instagram, but not the other way around. (Plus, Instagram pictures really feel as though, culturally, they ought to be square, and there isn't a provision for that when exporting from CA to Instagram - the picture shows up with black bars to fill, rather than letting you resize and select a square area.)

- Back on the geotagging side of things - I just want a map to show geodata for all of my pictures, not just gallery-by-gallery. Haven't found this functionality yet; not sure it's there to be found.

- However, it does look like I can pretty easily mass-add keywords for tagging after the fact, or mass-fill with a base caption I can modify as necessary, so it's not all woe.

- And really. I do appreciate that for my pre-existing 4300-odd photos that I'm importing over from Flickr, SmugMug's capturing the geodata I'd invested countless hours into in Flickr.

Teal deer: chaaange, you guys.

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On the other hand, I went to Amsterdam and the first thing I did was go buy my OV-chipkaart so that I could get the tram into town so that I could do the second thing, which was to go rent a bike for the duration of my visit. And on that vector, change to American transport policies cannot possibly come fast enough.

Amsterdam? Is bike heaven. I've been following blogs like Amsterdamize and A View From The Cycle Path for years. And the world they portray is amazing to me - but truly, this was one of those things that one can chatter on about for ages and still not fully get across the experience as a whole.

I rode cheerfully around town for three days sans helmet like every single other person I saw on a bike. I got myself incredibly lost multiple times, and found my way back. I trailed locals because they were more clued in than I was. I rode the wrong way down streets designated as one-way for cars because the bike signs told me I could. At stoplights, I rested my hand on poles meant for bikers to balance on so they didn't have to put a foot down. I gazed up at the rearview mirrors mounted on the car traffic lights, meant to help drivers and bikes see each other so as to prevent right hook deaths, and then when my bike light turned green, I took advantage of the precious seconds given to me to get myself even more prominently in view of the drivers, who respected my right to be there and who gave me reasonable amounts of space when passing me. When there wasn't a segregated cycle path, I shared streets with pedestrians, cars, motorscooters, buses, and trams, and we all paid attention to each other civilly.

And yeah, painted bike lanes in Amsterdam honestly had a similar percent of cars and delivery trucks using them for double-parking as they do in Boston, so I guess even heaven's not perfect. But I learned how to operate rear wheel locks, and how to secure my heavy chain lock to even the most eclectic bike lockup facilities. (About 60% of the time, I locked up to designated bike racks, 30% to the iron railings of canal bridges, and 10% in designated bike parking spaces which had nothing to lock to at all! For those, you lock your rear wheel lock, chain your front wheel to your frame, and run your errand quickly.) I rode my bike down stairs accidentally a couple of times, when I mistook the pedestrian path for the bike path because I was following commuters who did this every day of their lives. (Dutch outdoor stairs tend to be very shallow, as opposed to Dutch indoor stairs which are more like climbing a ladder.) I drooled over every standard feature of a Dutch bike: the fenders to prevent your clothes from getting splashed; the bike skirts to guard against catching your skirt in the spokes of your wheel, or to prevent your young passengers from catching their feet in said spokes; the heavy-duty racks mounted front and back, adorned with large crates to carry lots of stuff, or bare so that your friend can hitch a ride with you. And I almost cried in disbelief and wonder when I followed a moving sidewalk underground at my local train station and found an acre of covered bike parking - FREE for the first 24 hours.

I want to go back so, so badly. (And now Copenhagen's been bumped up my bucket list. At least in terms of transport culture? To quote an astute modern philosopher, "Before you came into my life, I missed you so bad.") And I want Amsterdam bike facilities to come to the US. I'm envious that they've managed to do street sharing so much better than we have.

Comments

[pauamma]

If the continuous-loop towel box is like the ones in FRance, there's no house elf cleaning it inside. It just gets serviced periodically by an industrial laundry. (Remove damp&dirty towel, insert clean&dry one.)

[ursamajor]

Funky! But how do the mechanics work for that? I mean, I'm assuming such a towel would have to be longer than a meter or so, as it was hanging down from said box by maybe half that distance ... and out of curiosity, I kept tugging and the towel kept being dry.

[pauamma]

I would assume something like (ASCII art)

  __    pickup  _
 /(O)<- roller /O\o <- pull rollers
 |    ________/  |
 |   (_________  |
 |    _________) |
 |   (_________  |
 |   __________) |
+|===============|=+
 \               /
  \             /
   \           /
    \         /
     \       /
      \     /
       \   /
        \_/

with a belt to drive the pickup roller from the pull rollers and some interlock on the pull rollers to limit how much you can pull out at a time.

[sammers]

We have towels a bit like that here too - though they're not nearly as common as they used to be. There's definitely an end - sometimes you'd pull down to get a clean bit, and nothing came out, or you'd see the end dangling on the floor.

Cool pics btw...