GlitchNYC

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This amazing giant sunflower is growing in the garden across from the door to our apartment building. It’s at least 10 feet tall and when you look up at it from the street it’s so tall that all you can see is sky behind it and you get this incredible mix of blues, yellows and greens.

A few days back, I got some nice encouragement from my mom. Moms are perennial cheerleaders by their very nature, but this particular compliment on my photos got me thinking that I should collect my best desktop oriented shots and make them easily available to download. They’re already freely available through flickr under the creative commons attribution-shareAlike license, but I wanted to assemble my personal favorites.

Download the wallpapers as a self-extracting zip file.

Just run the file in the directory where you want the photos. The package is also available as a straight zip file

I highly recommend “John’s Background Switcher” which allows you to select specific photos to rotate on your background and even lets you specify a flickr user, tag, or set.

Here’s a preview of what the photo package contains:

I release all of my photos (and just about anything I do, actually) under an open source license in the hopes that people will like what I’ve done and pick it up and use it elsewhere. I got a flickr message today letting me know that WNYC.org was using my picture of the Astoria pool. WNYC is running a story about NYC using pools and large airconditioned spaces as “Cooling Centers” during the heatwave, and decided my photo fit the bill.

I love that they used the photo, and I love that they sent me a note on flickr to let me know they used it. This is a media organization that gets it!

Tax Day, New York City
Originally uploaded by Amit Gupta.

Taxes are due by Midnight tonight - which means that the annual scramble to get them done and postmarked begins around, oh, I don’t know, 10pm?

Luckily, Sara and I finally got ours polished off a few days a go, but college-style procrastination certainly takes hold of few New Yorkers each year.

The giant US post office on 34th and 8th is open till’ midnight, and as you can see in Amit’s photo to the right from last year, it becomes a mob scene of tired New Yorkers, all waiting to turn in their homework.

Considering it took 30 minutes to get an express label from the slowpokes there a week ago, I don’t envy those waiting there tonight, but it does sound a lot like a convention: lots of people doing the same thing you are, standing around and chatting.

Except, instead of Star Wars or Comics, it’s taxes.

(P.S. while you’re having a look at Amit’s photos from last year’s tax melee, be sure to check out his and Kara’s awesome review of tiny and ingenious tripods over on PhotoJojo)

So close!
Originally uploaded by Glitch010101.

I literally just yelled out “son of a poop!” in my office. I got so excited about Tara mentioning Felt Up that I missed 123456. After all that hype!

Our first internet coverage!. Tara (aka miss rogue) is an marketing genius in the new, community based, cluetrain driven sense. She’s the major muscle behind Riya’s successes so far and this is a very very nice compliment indeed.

cartman
Originally uploaded by Luodanli.

Just stumbled upon this photo on flickr and it made me laugh out loud.

Aside from the comedy of hearing Cartman in your head as you read this, consider the chutzpah it takes to tag a freaking tank.

I’ve moved the site over to wordpress, and I’m almost done moving my photos over to gallery.

What that means for all of you is that this site is updated more frequently because it’s easier for me to get it done. It also means that I’m going to be able to pull some cool tricks using the amazing tools and plugins available for both pieces of extablished open source software.

One of those tricks is wordpress + gallery integration. They play very nicely together, and you can see a “random image” pulled from the gallery every time you visit the actual glitchnyc.com, which looks like this:

I think it’s my new favorite feature of the site. It comes up with some awesome shots that I didn’t even know I had in there!

Just a little bit of found art from the subway.