Looks like this is 24’s last season

Jeromey Balderrama

The writing has been on the wall, but it seems that in the next few days we’ll learn what has been too evident: that 24 is going to be taken out back.

24-season7 

From Variety:

“24‘s time is almost up. 20th Century Fox TV and Fox appear ready to end the long-running hit after this season, the show’s eighth. Studio and network execs declined comment — but it’s believed that the final decision will be made in the next day or two. Move is not a huge surprise, but still reps the end of an era for Fox.”

I can’t way I’m too terribly surprised.  I was a late-coming onto 24 and didn’t watch my first “live” season until Season 4, but there was a time when my friends and I had “24 Night”, where we planned out evenings around watching this show together.  We were going strong for a few years, but then the abomination that was Season 6 hit, followed by a writers strike that took the show off the air for a year.

The next thing you know, we’re not only not having 24 night together, but many of us aren’t even watching the show the same evening it airs.  Bethany and I just finished the previous week’s episode nearly a week after it aired, this is how low it’s fallen on our totem pole of TV shows.

24, you were a great show, but you fell victim to the same stale, recycled plotline that occurs year after year.  Now it’s become Willie Mayes dropping fly balls in the outfield.  Thanks for the memories 24, but I do think it’s time you’re put out to pasture.

Done with Flickr [What I Use]

Jeromey Balderrama

Well I’m trying to come back from the blogging hiatus that I’ve been on.  It seems that throughout my week all of these “That would be a great blog post” ideas pops into my head. I usually commit that idea to Twitter of simply let it evaporate – I’m trying to make an effort to get these back in the blog.  Thanks for bearing with me.

I got an email the other day telling me that my Flickr Pro account is about to expire and that I need to pay the $25 to renew it yet again.  I’ve been a Flickr Pro user for 4 years, and $100 later I have decided to throw in the towel and push my chips toward Google.

When I became a pro member in 2006, Flickr was one of the hottest sites around. Everyone was posting to Flickr, making it an awesome repository for photos. They released some pretty cool features to keep things interesting (I particularly loved their geo-tagging feature), but over the last couple of years Flickr has been pretty stagnant.  It’s funny because one of my RSS feeds I track is “Flickr News”, and my feed reader was telling me it was a “dinosaur feed” since it hasn’t been updated in so long. 

Along came Picasa. When they released their latest version that enabled the Person-tagging and facial recognition, I was hooked. I migrated my personal collection for 40,000 photos and spent hours tagging faces.  In some ways it became an addictive game: see who Picasa thinks is who, see who has been tagged the most (me with 3,161), see how big your list of faces grows (263 people).  Picasa (Google) was really smart because now I’m seriously invested into their program. Sure I can take my pictures and move onto the next shiny object, but then I would lose all the work I put into getting these faces tagged.

With Google enabling the people tagging into the web albums, the next logical step is to put my photos there. When you look at the storage options and see that 80GB of storage is $5 cheaper than a Flickr Pro account, the choice becomes clearer.

So goodbye Flickr. It has definitely been fun, but I think it’s time to move on.  I’m going to keep my pictures on Flickr and will see about updating what I can with a free account, but I’m putting another one of my eggs into the Google basket. Scary and lemming-like? Yes, but can you blame me?

Below I’ve embedded the first album I’ve uploaded to Picasa, our Valentine’s Day trip to Vegas.  It’s funny because I remember when Flickr wouldn’t allow embedding of slideshows for the longest time.

LITESTIX – The latest in poser drumming

Jeromey Balderrama

I’ve been kicking around putting together a “Drummer Pet Peeves” list, but in lieu of a complete post, here’s a sneak preview of what will definitely be on it: Owners of Vic Firth’s “Lite Stix”.

I admit they look cool, but then you look at the price tag of $130! Normally a good pair of drum sticks (I typically buy the Vic Firth Buddy Rich Signatures) are $7-8.  You could buy 18 pairs of Buddy for the price of one pair of these Lite Stix.  The funny thing is that the type of drummer that would use these and think they’re cool are the same ones that think it’s cool to break a new pair of sticks every time they play. These should be a lot of fun when they split in half.

Just when you thought you’d seen it all.