Melissa dismissed Flickr to Steph the other day, saying she knew nothing about it. I found this very interesting that her generation is so caught up in the latest social media buzz that Flickr could have passed them by.

Yahoo! acquired Flickr from a start-up group in 2005. I was involved with Yahoo! doing mapping stuff so it came into my radar and I signed up as a Pro user (unlimited) and have been hosting my photo collection there for years. Both of my blogs link directly to my photos there.

SmugMug acquired them last year and other than some cosmetic changes, the service is still solid. Stats for Flickr are somewhat secretive but this is what I've uncovered:

 • 75 million registered photographers across 63 countries.

 • 10 billion photos in their database.

 • Millions of photos are uploaded daily.

These are significant numbers!

Sometimes you just want an older person to walk up, put their arm around your shoulder and tell you everything's going to be alright. It sucks when you're the oldest guy around and there's no older arm in sight. The irony is, I'm also now an old guy with an arm, and no shoulders in sight.

I had a good Thanksgiving. At first I thought it would be one of those hunker down events I seem to be having a lot of lately but Steph dropped by with dinner (M/D's fish sandwiches) and we had a nice time. Cleanup was minimal as it all went back into the bag from which it came and I hung out with my two remaining close friends (Piper was there of course). Another one down...

...

I was testing out my new search code in the app today so I typed "oldmanjim" and searched across the billions of Flickr photos and it found just one. This is the only photo in my Flickr collection that has this name in it. The uniqueness of my brand are apparent and the implications are immense.

“To be caught happy in a world of misery is the most despicable of crimes” — Virginia Woolf

I'm an old lonely depressed man. I live in a little place at a curve in Shoal Creek down in southern Tennessee. I am not surrounded by friends and I rarely even speak to anybody here on this dead end street.

I have everything I need to get by comfortably and my days are spent writing code and spoiling my old cat. Some days I feel like I'm making a difference and some days I feel like I'm fading away.

But you know what? I'm really glad to be here and living it!

Earth to Jim! Earth to Jim! The scientists say it's too risky to try, but if you don't, we all die, so there is no choice.

It has to be done! There, I pushed the button and...

...

I see these TV commercials lately where the old guy my age sits in an easy chair surrounded by generations of siblings, exchanging smiling glances with the grand kids and Moma rubs his shoulder while the Lawrence Welk Show plays in the background. Am I rambling?...

...

I was boring deep into the Flickr inerverse today, testing the exploritory powers of my new app when an image landed on my screen so hard it knocked me back in my chair.

Meanwhile, my evening creation:

The kids dropped by this afternoon to enjoy my mellow leafy yard. They were moving too fast for picture taking but I got a few shots. Sometimes the emotion of the shot is more important than the quality. Click the photo below to see them.

And me climbing a small tree here:

If the video fails to load, click Here.

Look how close I landed to one of the genetic melting pots of my DNA. My provider (ancestry.com) has further refined the hot spots where my eighteenth century relatives formed their families. Here's the blurb:

"Palatine Germans, English, Welsh, and Scottish Highlanders escaping economic, political, and religious crises in their homelands headed to the British colonies. Generally poor and often indentured, many found their way into Virginia and the Carolinas. They followed trails through the Appalachian Mountains, settling cheap land and turning the American frontier into an agricultural powerhouse built around cotton and tobacco."

Overview:

Furtherview:

I've taken some moments out of my code crazed days to flesh out a new logo for my project, but it's just too big and complicated, so I'll just share it here.

I have no routine. Every instant of my life is different in some respect from the one that preceded it. As to the creation below I think it sums up the general state of my mind.

Finally, southern Tennessee had it's first snow last night in the 14 months I've been here. Having recently lived and driven a bus for a living at 6500 feet in the Teton Rockies for 12 years, I think I can handle it...

As opposed to this:

Magical vibrations hiding in the dark.

My grand-daughter Shelby drove up from Pensacola to Nashville yesterday and Steph and I had lunch with her today in Smyrna, TN. We met up at the Jeff Kuss Memorial who was the Blue Angel killed in 2016 practicing for the airshow here. Shelby was a good friend of Jeff and his family in Pensacola and she was dating his best friend, another Blue Angel, when this happened. Very sad but his memorial is impressive.

We had a nice lunch and caught up with a lot. Looks like I've got a Thanksgiving invite in Mississippi at our friend Homer's mother's house. I am honored.

Steph was saying the last time she saw Shelby she was in the 5th grade and she's now 27. How can that be? Have I known Steph that long? The answer is yes.

Click the photo below for some more shots.

Compliments of Steph...

...

In the late seventies I landed the biggest IBM systems consulting project of my career with Interocean Steamship of San Francisco. These guys were the leading container management company on the West Coast and they wanted a state of the art computer system. I gave my hand-typed presentation to a room full of suits, wearing a tee-shirt and ragged jeans, and got the contract. A year later they had their system and loved it, and I was rocking and rolling on the IBM gravy train.

Now I sit hunkered down in the cold and dark, still writing code...

...

I'm thinking of joining a local photography club and I need a way to share my work from a tablet so I've created a new domain just for that purpose called Jimazon. It's a work in progress and I'm diving down into code for the first time in months so stay tuned...

...

Cruising through an old hard drive I came across a few photos that captured brief snippets of my time in Idaho. Click the shot below to see them.