Having been up all night, I find myself needing to wait at least two more hours until the post office opens. Someone bought a book from me on Amazon, and it needs to ship.

All told, the Amazon marketplace experiment has been pretty successful for me. I still haven’t been rated by anyone, so either there’s something I don’t understand about that process, or I just haven’t been exceptional enough for people to bother with it.

I’ve profited about 25 bux or so, assuming all the books cost me nothing. Which they didn’t. But I was going to give them away, so as self-delusions go, it’s safe to say I’m coming out ahead on the deal.

Some online stock photography sales sites. If anyone out there in xangaland has experience with any of these sites, or knows of similar ones, please let me hear about it in the comments.

ShutterPoint.com: Seem to have their shit together. They only take 15% of the royalties, but rumor has it no one buys photos there. Also, $9 for six month membership. Community of folks giving each other advice, which is nice, but not worth the bux.

Update: ShutterPoint answered my email, and says that less than three percent of posted photos have sold at least once. Of photos sold, 11% have sold more than 1 time. I have to wonder if that’s normal for a site like that, or if it means that ShutterPoint is not popular with buyers.

PhotoGateway.com: 35% royalty, and a decent attitude, but look at this from their FAQ:

How many images can I / must I have on your site? Unlike a stock agency (which we are not – we are a service for artists to sell their own work), we have no lower limit. To be listed on our site, we require that you have 3 images – this is only for technical reasons so that your portfolio displays correctly. As for a maximum, we have not yet had an issue.

Yes, that’s right… the web site’s pages won’t display properly unless you have three images, so they’ve set the minimum to three. File under ‘shit together: not.’

CanStockPhoto.com: More mom & pop hey-lets-set-up-a-web-site stuff. Not too bad, but their royalty rate is between 33% and 67%, and they only pay out in $100 increments! To read the message boards, one would believe they primarily make sales to web site designers.

OnRequestImages.com: Somewhere between stock photos and assignment shooting is OnRequest. They gather assignments from the client, give the assignment to a few member photographers, choose one photographer’s work over the others to go to the client, and then put everybody’s pix in their stock library and market them. It’s a good way to go, I think, and one that works for everybody. A client with money will immediately see how this works for them, as opposed to simply typing into a search box as on the other stock photo sites, so they’ll want to use this process to get what they need. The downsides (for me, at least) are that you need a professional background to start getting assignments, and most clients will require 8MP minimum resolution on all submissions.

(More added as I come across them.)

Yet another quirky Mac OS X thing: If you hit shift-command-g, you get a dialog asking you for a path to show in the Finder. If you enter, for instance, ~/.brag, you’ll see the contents of that folder, which would normally be hidden from view.

So let’s say you put the window into ‘browser’ mode, which lets you click and drag the .brag folder around. You click on it, and hit command-delete, which sends it to the trash.

But wait! You look at the trash can in the Dock, and it’s empty! How can this be? Easy. Just as the Finder won’t show you directories starting with ., the trash doesn’t think they exist, either.

Use the Terminal, navigate to ~/.Trash (ironically, itself a dotfile), and there’s .brag.

This, my friends, is a bug. If I weren’t a sophisticated power user (aka 33L33T HAKKUR!!1!!), I’d end up never reclaiming the 300 megabytes used for .brag, because I wouldn’t even know it was there.

I’d like to point out that when your hard drive crashes, taking with it all your collected music files, it’s nice to be able to turn to software like brag to fill up your remaining hard drive with more crap than you’ll ever listen to.

Unfortunately, however, my news server limits me to 1gigabyte per month. That doesn’t seem like much, but usenet binaries are posted as text, which means they expand by a third at least during the process. So a 3 megabyte file becomes 4 in bandwidth. I hit 75% of my bandwidth allocation a few months ago.

So, in the interest of sharing the wealth, give the maid the night off for ‘The Maid’s Night Off,’ by the Hudson-Delange Orchestra.

It’s that time of the year again, folks.. That time when Homer’s sleep schedule resets itself.

Right now I feel like I should be asleep, but also like I should be waking up. I call it zombie mode. All those zombies in all those movies are really just insomniacs.

I seldom feel awake. I haven’t remembered a dream in weeks. I can barely even think up anything to say about it.

In case you’re unsure why we went to war with Iraq, here are 21 rationales and who put them forth. The list isn’t exhaustive, either.

Want to know how to play AVI movies on your Mac? Here’s a good walk-through.

Want. I just wish the interchangeable lenses let you set the aperture as well as the focus. I mean, I just want a digital back for an SLR with an aperture priority mode. Is that too much to ask?

Beggars shouldn’t be choosers, however, since it’ll be nice to hang these lenses on the front of it.

And while I’m ogling at Olympus products… Well, whoa! Isn’t THAT cool!

I’m watching my linux box compile Xfree 4.3.0-r7. W00t. After that it’s going to compile about a zillion other things and then eventually get to GIMP 2.0.4. This is the magic of gentoo… You get to watch your software assemble itself.

I’ve been putting a bunch of thought into the problem of cataloging vast quantities of digital photos, and the workflow for efficient and safe backups. As far as the workflow is concerned, there’s this thing, which the author pretensiously calls ‘iOPlan.’ It’s not a bad way to go, but it requires way too many steps. I want the software to do the thinking for the workflow, and not have to keep track of it. As far as cataloging… Well, maybe I’ll spring for the newer iPhoto. Or not. Or something.

Which brings me to this: Photo Tools CM, a Mac OS X contextual menu that lets you do all kinds of nifty things to EXIF/JPEG image files, right from the finder.

In a fit of susceptibility to viral marketing, I started playing this nice little surreal Flash game, called the ‘Grrr Game.’ For the money (that is, free), it’s pretty fun.

But the ad campaign it’s attached to is a Honda diesel Accord, with a redesigned engine that’s quiet. This make me happy, since one of my many desires is to get a diesel car, so I can fuel it with biodiesel. The happy bunny and sunshine imagery of the game fits right in with this vision, so there is symmetry.

Now, if only I could get a Subaru Outback with a diesel engine…

Update: I think my computer is too slow to run the game adequately. I’ll never make it to the BBQ… GRRR!