Benjamin Chodroff

Last Thursday while Meredith and I were at the Gabriel and Dresden concert at Sinergy, I met a photographer who was covering the event. I spoke with him and mentioned that I was a photographer. An email and a phone call later, he offered to have me photograph events with him downtown. Pretty cool?

He and his wife run the site http://www.spotcleveland.com which features photos of downtown Cleveland events and nightlife. Meredith and her friend Marie came down last Saturday to The View night club while I photographed the techno dj’s. It was challenging and fun. We got VIP access and a few free drinks – and a nice set of photos. Not a bad deal. I always hated going to clubs and having nothing to do but drink. This gives my idle hands some entertainment. I also got to meet the managers and some new people. Not a bad gig.

This Friday I’m covering Bad Boy Bill, a techno DJ, at Metropolis. Saturday night I’m going to head back to The View. Although it is not official, Justin Timberlake is supposed to be making an appearance following his concert at Quicken Loan Arena. I’m no huge fan (alright, I will admit his new song is very catchy and tight to the beat), but it should be interesting and some good photos. Am I the creepy camera guy? Maybe, but I’m having fun.

Yep, I want to make a buck off my photos.

I want to stop offering my high resolution pictures for free. I want to watermark the low resolution images and provide the “add to cart” feature, but make users go through a Paypal payment system before they can download the items as a zip. This new paypal payment module will check to see if there is a listed price for the photo in a custom field, otherwise it will charge a standard price – maybe $3.

PHP Gallery2 has a user contributed Paypal Checkout cart – but it is not set up in the way I need it. This module offers the ability to add photos to the checkout cart and purchase them through paypal. Unfortunately, I then have to physically email file to the customer since the module was set up to handle physical prints, rather than digital downloads. I’d rather have the user download the original copies (and perhaps a copy of my fair use license text file) in a zip file. This saves both of us time.

There is a zip download module that is included with the default installation. I just wish someone would insert a license agreement module and paypal payment module in front of the zip download. This paypal payment module could use the Custom Fields module to set custom prices for pictures or, optionally, use a default price if no price is given for the photo.

The other option is to ditch Gallery2. I’m toying with this idea mostly because there are existing open source E-Commerce sites that can do what I am talking about with no modules. The downside is I would have to import the photos into this new system. An upside to that downside is it will force me to narrow the number of photos and create a much easier to browse selection of finer quality photos. A downside to that upside to the downside is that I have no time to do this.

Armed with http://www.wikimapia.com and a new http://skype.com phone account, I have tried to make contact with a few hotels I found in Bangalore. I didn’t have too much luck. It sounded like they could not hear me. I tested Skype by calling my cellphone and that worked well. My only guess is there is either a lengthy delay of audio when calling India, or the connection is getting somewhat garbled. I know when they talked at first it was somewhat garbled on my end. It was close to 23:30 Eastern Standard Time, or 10AM India time, when I tried to call.

I am very impressed with http://wikimapia.com. I would be lost without it. I have used it to locate the IBM facility on Bannerghatta Rd as well as learning all the roads and interests around the area. By filtering by the tag “hotel,” I was able to find 3 hotels within 1-2 miles of work. I looked up the hotels’ phone numbers using http://www.sulekha.com, the Indian Yellow Pages. I wish Google Maps would make India roads searchable. You can view the roads, but searching for them does not work.

I have met a friendly IBM India employee through my blog. Only a day after posting an entry, he commented that he might be able to help me find housing and get situated in India. He mentioned that there are lists of people looking for paying guests at IBM. I would simply live in a hotel for the first few days and contact some of these people to see if I could move in. Some of these arrangements even include food. I would be living with 1-4 other roommates, but this would make my stay very affordable.

It surprises me that Google has not implemented LDAP for gmail. It would be really handy to look up contacts from a company directory without having to leave gmail. Accessing your gmail contacts outside of gmail for use in other programs also might be useful.

This summer my Extreme Blue team submitted ten patent disclosures. Four of them went on to be published, but one of them was selected to be reviewed. The IBM patent process works in the following way:

1. Inventor(s) submits an idea
2. Idea is investigated by a panel of experts
3. Idea is either closed, published, or reviewed
   1. Closed – idea is either public knowledge, not novel, or not in IBM’s business
   2. Published – idea is novel, but either not in IBM’s business or not worth patenting
   3. Review – the idea is sent on to IP lawyers who further research the idea
4. After review, the idea is either closed (likely), published (likely) or filed (rare). If the idea is novel and in IBM’s best interest to patent, the idea is filed for a patent
5. A patent request is submitted and weeks, months, or years later… the idea is either patented or rejected by the patent office

One of our ideas from this summer just made it to the point where they will file the patent! This is very exciting! It would be very cool to have a patent with my name on it. They plan on submitting the patent at the end of April. Given that we have not submitted the idea yet, I cannot say what the patent is about other than it deals with the work we did on our project last summer.