It all started with my first (and last) craigslist Missed Connection.

October 19th, 2006 at 1:11AM
American Psycho on the 48 – m4w

I got on the bus and sat down.
You were reading American Psycho and we talked for a minute or so.
I wish I would have asked you this then:

do you want to be my friend?

eli

I never expected to hear anything back, and then…

October 21st, 2006 at 2:10 PM

I would love to be your friend. I wish we could have talked more.

-a

I was about to SHIT myself! It actually worked! I responded.

October 21st, 2006 at 8:00 PM

are you being serious? this is blowing my mind right now. you better not be fucking with me.

write back

Then she let the cat out of the bag…

October 22nd, 2006 at 4:32 PM

no. i’m not. your brother made me do it. my name is jipp. he and i are assholes.

I should have known better.

Oct 22, 2006 at 5:05 PM

ha ha! well, that’s good to know. be sure to give him a good one to the kidney for me.

There you have it, Nate, in all it’s glory. :)

But even if someone had found the phone and wanted to return it, they’d have no idea how. His phone was password protected (as it should be), so all they’d be able to do is try to guess his password and make an emergency call. That’s it. There would be no way for these hypothetical good samaritans to have any idea who’s phone they’d found and do the good deed.

Why hasn’t Apple addressed this issue?

Well, there is a very simple solution to this problem, and it starts with a piece of scrap paper and a sharpie marker.

The first step is to write your contact info on that scrap piece of paper with that sharpie marker I mentioned a second ago. I’d recommend your name, email address, and a phone number of a friend or family member. Then take a picture of it with your iPhone. Make sure you put the paper down somewhere with good lighting and hold steady when you snap the photo.

Once you’ve got a good photo, you’re ready to set that photo to your lock screen. Tap the button on the bottom left corner.

Tap “Use as Wallpaper”

Zoom and drag the photo around until it looks good and fits on the screen. Make sure that all your contact info is clearly readable and in between the lines, then tap “Set”.

Then tap “Set Lock Screen”

And that’s it! Done and done. The next time you see your lock screen it should look something like this.

Oh, and you should password protect your iPhone. Now.

[Big ups to @brke for helping me simplify this process immensely. Also, I wrote this entire post (including uploading the photos) on my Dell Mini Hackintosh while riding Amtrak Cascades from Seattle to Portland.]

* * *

About 6 months ago Flickr rolled out a new feature allowing current users to sign in with their Google ID. I was pretty excited about the idea of getting rid of an online profile/email address, so I jumped on the bandwagon: I linked my Google ID with Flickr and then promptly deleted my Yahoo ID. I only used it for signing in to Flickr and there was no reason to keep it.

Fast-forward 6 months and here I am, trying to get caught up on my photos, and getting frustrated with the fact that Flickr just can’t seem to “remember me” anymore. I had to sign in to Flickr after every time I closed my browser. Everything worked great with my old Yahoo ID, but for some reason the Google Sign In was having problems with cookies.

So this afternoon I decided I’d had enough. I decided that having a Yahoo ID was worth it if I didn’t have to sign in to Flickr 4 or 5 times a day (I’ve got A LOT of uploading to catch-up on). My first step was to create a new Yahoo ID and they hooked me up with “eliduke [at] rocketmail [dot] com.” Sounds like a pretty sweet email address to me.

Then I went searching for some instructions on how to get my switch on. It had been 6 months since I switched to my Google ID, and I was definitely a little rusty. Luckily, I found this Flickr Help page rather quickly, and on that page I found the following topic:

The subject matter wasn’t exactly what I was looking for, but it certainly applied. And there were instructions right there on how to “unbind” my Google account from Flickr. I followed the steps as directed, removed my Google account, and then clicked the these instructions link.

It was there that I found instructions on how to sign in with Google or Facebook. The first question that you see there is “do you already have a Flickr account?” Yes, I do. So I proceeded. I made sure I was logged out completely and then tried to log back in with my new Yahoo ID, but Flickr thought that I wanted to create a NEW account. No no no. I want to just link my new Yahoo ID with my old Flickr account. I tried a couple more times thinking something was just off a bit, and then I realized that something was a bit more than just a bit off.

Six months ago when I linked my Google ID to Flickr, I deleted my Yahoo ID. Deleted it. Gone. My only connection to Flickr now was Google, and just a few minutes prior I “unbound” that from Flickr as well. I had unintentionally orphaned my Flickr account. It was now floating somewhere in limbo, waiting for its judgement.

And it was right about that moment that I noticed another topic on the Flickr Help page about deleting a Yahoo account.

It was there that I realized the gravity of the situation. By removing my Google account from the equation, my Flickr account no longer had an owner, and, according to Yahoo, if you do that “you will not be able to sign in to your Flickr account … this will delete your Flickr account as well, including all of your photos.”

Fuck.

I immediately wrote Flickr an email pleading for help and then sat around feeling sorry for myself. Later that night I was talking to Robin about in on the phone and she wondered if I still had access to my Flickr account through Safari on my iPhone. Like, was I still logged in there and could I go in and transfer my Flickr account over to my new Yahoo ID. I passed it off as impossible at first because the second my phone tried to use its cookie to access my Flickr account it would certainly get booted off.

Wrong.

There are two strange things going on here, and I’m still not quite sure how this worked. As you can see in the upper right corner, I was “Signed in as elisfanclub”, but just below that it says I was signed in with my “Yahoo ID e18f0f2f…” What? How did that happen?

Maybe Yahoo puts that safety mechanism in place in case someone does exactly what I did. They create a temporary Yahoo ID as a place holder until all the switching and swapping gets worked out. Whatever they do, it worked. I was able to transfer my Flickr account from the temp Yahoo ID to my new one.

Crisis averted. Memories saved.

* * * UPDATE 7.27.11 * * *

Here’s the email I sent Flickr.

Hello Flickr,

I have found myself in a bind and am worried that I won’t be able to recover. Please help me.

A few months ago I switched my flickr login from yahoo over to google and was very happy to be rid of one more profile on the internet. I only used my yahoo account for logging into flickr, so it seemed like a good move.

But recently I was getting annoyed with the fact that flickr would not remember me when logging in with google. I had to login after every time I closed my browser, and I realized that I would gladly have an extra login if I could just stay logged in. I had already deleted my old yahoo email address, so I went over to yahoo and created a new one and then went searching for instructions to switch over to that one.

I found this listing on the help page:

http://www.flickr.com/help/signin/#9538181

It gave me instructions for unbinding my flickr or google
account, which I followed, thinking that I could THEN
connect my new yahoo account. So, I clicked on the link in
Step #2, removed my google account from my flickr account,
and then tried to reconnect with my new yahoo id. But each
time I try logging in with my new yahoo id it tries to
create a NEW flickr account for me.

At this point I started searching around a bit more and then
found this listing on the help page:

http://www.flickr.com/help/signin/#102

And then I got really worried. Since I don’t have any ID
associated with my flickr account anymore, does that mean
it’s totally unrecoverable? Will my photos be deleted? Is
there ANY way around this?

Please help me. I have been an AVID flickr user for almost 5
years now with over 30,000 uploads.

Thank you,

Eli Duke
flickr.com/elisfanclub

And here was their response.

Hello Eli,

Thank you for contacting Flickr Customer Care.

As I understand, you wish to confirm if your “elisfanclub”
Flickr pro account is no longer recoverable including your 30,000 uploads. I am glad to look into this matter for you.

Eli, please know that your “elisfanclub” Flickr pro account is still active, and you may sign in to it at:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/elisfanclub/

You will need to use the Yahoo! ID that you used when you created or merged the account. The Yahoo! ID associated with this account is XXX.

When entering your Yahoo! ID, please enter it exactly as
shown above. If you are having trouble signing in, you can use the “Forgot your ID or password” link on the sign-in page. If you are still unable to access your account, you may need to contact Yahoo! Account Verification for help with your Yahoo! ID. You can do this using the following page:

http://help.yahoo.com/l/us/yahoo/edit/alternate_email/general.html

If you’d like to speak to someone on the phone, the Account
Verification Department can be reached at: 866-850-4303

For users dialing from outside the United States, you can
reach us by calling: 00 + 1 408-349-1572

The Account Verification team is available between 6 a.m.
and 6 p.m. Pacific Time, Monday through Friday. Please be aware that you will be asked for all of your verification information before we can offer assistance.

Moreover, please know that it isn’t possible to switch from
signing in with a Yahoo! ID to a Google account. We appreciate your patience and understanding regarding this matter.

However, if you still need further assistance, please don’t
hesitate to reply to this email with the following additional information:

- Are you still unable to sign in to your “elisfanclub” Flickr pro account?
- A detailed description of the issue you are having
- The exact steps taken that lead up to this event
- The full and exact text of any error messages you received
- The Web address of the page you are seeing the issue on
- Flickr account Web address

Once we have this information, we’ll be more than happy to
help you in whatever way we can.

Thank you again for contacting us. If you have any other
questions, please feel free to reply to this email.

Regards,

Mika
Flickr Customer Care

It certainly does make me feel better knowing that they have an Account Verification Team, but there are definitely parts of that email that make me think they didn’t even read my email.

But, it’s all water under the bridge now.

The only real limit that I’ve encountered is the “maximum possible upload size per file” of only 100MB. It doesn’t happen that often, but it gets in the way every once in a while. Recently I came into some money, so I decided that I should just pay the $60 (for a year) and see if I could actually make the Pro Account worth it.

In the process of upgrading my account, I chose to pay using Paypal. After agreeing to their Terms & Conditions I was redirected over to Paypal, sent them some money, and then redirected back to a “success screen” at MediaFire. But when I went to upload a file larger than 100MB, everything was still as if I only had a free account. I hit back a bunch of times, trying to find the “success” screen and I found this in it’s place:

Paypal sent us back some invalid data! Please contact support@mediafire.com immedaitely [sic] regarding this issue or try to use a credit card. (-144)

I emailed support@mediafire.com asking what was up, but the email was sent back to me saying that there was a failure trying to send it. I was at an impasse. Do I try to contact them through some other means, or do I just submit my payment again but with a credit card? I really did not want to pay them twice.

Just as I was thinking that, I got an email from Paypal saying that I a “recurring payment has been created” with MediaFire. I checked my paypal account and, sure enough, I was charged $59.70 by MediaFire for a Pro Account, but I sure as hell don’t have Pro Account features enabled on my account.

So, I went over to support.mediafire.com and submitted a ticket explaining my situation. It’s been about 24 36 hours and I haven’t heard a single thing back from them. I know that that’s not that long (that), but in this day and age you’d think I would have at least got a “we’re looking into this” message or something. And it’s not like this is hard to fix, just go in and manually flip the “Pro Account” switch.

While I wait for MediaFire to get their shit together, I’m doing the last thing that a brand new paying customer should be doing: looking around to see what the competition has to offer.

anyhoo, when i was back in the states i used twitter almost exclusively with my cellphone, sending updates via text message. since i’ve been down here in Antarctica i’ve been interacting with twitter through a web browser a lot more. as a result i’ve become much more familiar with how their web interface works, but also how it doesn’t work. one area in particular that i was getting frustrated with was the @replies.

[for those of you that don't know, here is an example: if i wanted to reply to a tweet (an individual post on twitter) that my brother posted i would begin my tweet with @n8duke.]

the annoying part about @replies is that you have to type in “@username” each time you want to reply. sometimes the username is long and annoying, sometimes you might misspell it, and then the reply won’t go where it’s supposed to.

i had an idea, so i sent twitter an email:

From: eli
Date: Sun, Jan 27, 2008 at 12:11 AM
Subject: i hope this is alright…
To: Twitter

Twitter,

i emailed you a while ago about an api question. remember me?

well, i have a suggestion to make about twitter, and i didn’t know who else to turn to and i figured that you’d be as good a person as anyone. i imagine that y’all get all kinds of “really good suggestions”, but i truely believe that this is a good one.

so, here goes…

i enjoy @replies just as much as the next guy, but i hate (i know that’s a strong word) having to type the “@username” into the field every time i want to reply. that would be like having to type in someone’s email address every time i wanted to reply to an email. ridiculous, right? we just click “reply”.

why not implement a feature that would allow you to click a tweet-specific indicator (a “reply” link, maybe?) which would automagically insert “@username” in the text box above? you could easily slip that in right after the {star} icon…

or, is this idea like so last week and you already have it in the works?

eli

i got a response back from twitter a few days later saying that they had not heard that idea before and that it would be submitted to the team. then, lo and behold, a few days later i noticed this:

do you see that little arrow after the star icon? that’s me, baby! that’s all me!

anyhoo, about a week ago i noticed a HUGE spike!

i poked around in the referrer section and found that i was getting about 99% of that traffic from stumbleupon.com. i looked into it and found out that a friend of mine from nintendo posted a link to my site on that site. apparently the traffic immediately started flooding in and continued to do so for about 24 hours. i continue to get about 1 or 2 hits a day from there, but nothing significant since. it’s weird how stuff like that happens.

on another nerdy/computer related note, meredith was transferring some video files from my external hard drive to her laptop the other day and was bothered by Apple’s time estimations, like, “about 1 minute.” she said that computers aren’t people and they shouldn’t act like they are. i completely disagree. i love it when computers “say” things like that. a few days later i found another good example of that sort of thing from flickr. i was testing out the new “edit” feature and received the following message after i canceled the edit.

nicely done, flickr. nicely done.

in antarctica news, things are still going really well, but it’s pretty obvious that we (the galley crew) are all getting tired. it’s been well over 4 months for win-fly and just about 3 months for mainbody, and that’s a long time to scrub the same dishes and mop the same floors. we’ve got about a week until xmas (which will be just as crazy as thanksgiving), followed by the cargo ship off-load in the middle of january. soon thereafter people start leaving, and we will probably be on some of the later flights out around the middle of february. i have no doubts that we’ll make it out alive, but we’ll never be the same. ha ha!

also, i just uploaded a new batch of photos.

what would the food be like? would i be able maintain my vegan-ness?

some of my worries subsided the first time i walked into the galley and saw the largest bowl of fresh salad greens i’d ever seen. i couldn’t believe how much salad was available and laughed at the fools who said i couldn’t do it. soon followed fresh baked breads, vegan cookies, and non-dairy whipped cream! but the mother load truly arrived on Thanksgiving.

Jeff, the vegetarian cook, is an awesome guy. he cooks amazing food and about 90% of it is vegan. it’s great. he went above and beyond for Thanksgiving and it really meant a lot to me and the other vegetarians/vegans on station.

sure, i still might eat the occasional bit of “milk solids” found in the chocolate chips or some honey in the granola, but for the most part i’m doing a damn good job.

anyhoo, i thought it was such an amazing coincidence that i decided to leave a comment on their blog, Signal vs. Noise (SVN), describing what happened:

get this. i’m living (and working) in antarctica right now, and i’ve been using campfire to chat with my friends and family back home. i set up a time and people just show up and come and go and we have a great time with it. this crazy downtime just happened to occur at the exact moment i schedule. what are the chances?

the next day i got an email from Matt Linderman at 37signals!!!

hey eli-

just saw your message at signal vs. noise. first off, sorry for the downtime. second off, your use of campfire sounds interesting. would you be up for a mini-case study? (just means answering a few questions.) we’d publish it at our blog. let me know.

-matt

i almost couldn’t believe what was happening. some of you may remember the first time i was featured on SVN and my post about that, but this time it was a much bigger deal. i wrote back, he sent me the questions, and i wrote back with my answers (along with a few screen shots and some links to flickr pics).

the post went live a few days later. enjoy!

Campfire keeps Eli Duke in touch with friends/family while in Antarctica

over the course of this month i have grown to absolutely LOVE this place. i wake up each morning and i’m so glad because it’s just one more beautiful day in paradise. be it sunny or snowy, windy or calm, cold or “warm”, i can always find a way to be in love with where i am and what i’m doing.

i love my job, i love my coworkers, i love my friends, i love my dorm, i love the bands i’m practicing and playing with, i love volunteering in other departments, i love being outside even when it’s crazy, i love taking pictures, i love hiking, i love exploring the station, i love 24 hours of daylight, i love so much about this place that i already know i’ll be coming back soon.

for the past 2 weeks the Today Show has been here at McMurdo as part of their Ends of the Earth broadcast series. i was surprised to find out how small the crew was (only 6 people including Ann Curry), and how much control they had, which was quite a bit.

the morning of the broadcast meredith and i woke up at 2:30am and walked next door to the chalet (head office). on our way over we heard cheering and arrived to see about 100 people already gathered, along with musical equipment (drums, bass, guitar) lightly dusted in snow.

there were 3 members of the crew outside: communication guy, camera guy, and ann curry, that’s it. ann was really funny and communicated very well with the crowd as far as when we should do certain things and for how long. they gave hand signals and made every effort to put the spotlight on us. the band played and we danced and cheered and sang along and i was surprised at how much i got into it. tasha said she saw me on TV!

the first segment of the broadcast was over around 3am and we were told there would be another smaller one at about 4am. i didn’t have to be at work until 11am so i decided to stick around. when 4 o’clock rolled around most people had gone home so there were only about 10 of us. this time i decided to stay out of the crowd and go up next to the camera guy and take pictures.

fast-foward a few days and rumors are floating around that NBC was going to buy drinks for everyone at gallagher’s because they were leaving soon. i had band practice that night, but meredith and i stopped by around 8:30 and found the rumors to be just that. on my way home after band practice the weather had gotten seriously bad and i was loving it. in an effort to prolong my time out and about, i decided to stop by gallagher’s again. it was about 11pm and they were closing soon, but i couldn’t think of anywhere else to go.

when i walked in it looked pretty dead… only about 15 people or so. as i wandered toward the back to get a glass of water i noticed ann curry and the film crew. almost instantly the camera guy (mike) recognized me from the broadcast and said he was impressed by how proactive i was about getting pictures that morning. he loved the shots and then called ann over. they both gave me their email addresses (to send them the link) and mike even said that NBC might buy some of them if i was interested (and they were good enough)!

just then the phone rang at the bar: the weather had turned even more for the worse, it was now officially Condition 1, and we weren’t allowed to leave the bar until it passed. this was so awesome, i was so excited.

along with the phone call warning us of inclement weather, all pagers got the message as well, and i borrowed someone’s pager and took a picture of it. ann liked the picture so much that she insisted on taking one herself, but she needed a little guidance. a few days later she told meredith, “your boyfriend taught me more about manual settings than anyone ever has before.” hilarious.

anyhoo, we continued to hang out that night until the Condition 1 subsided. over the course of the next few days i kept running into the crew and chatting with them. meredith says i’m on a “high-five basis with ann curry.”