Suck It, Photobucket

I was doing as I normally do when I check email, replying to a few in my inbox, checking the recipe newsletters, reading some sales circulars from Amazon and a local grocery store, then went into the Spam folder to clear it out.

I always scan the subject titles and the addresses just in case something important has been accidentally flagged as junk when I saw one from Photobucket.  At first I thought it was Spam, but it seemed to be from the website, so I opened it to find this:

WE NOTICED THAT YOU HAVE BEEN USING
PHOTOBUCKET FOR 3RD PARTY HOSTING*

*What is 3rd Party Hosting?

Photobucket defines 3rd party hosting as the action of embedding an image or photo onto another website. For example, using the tag to embed or display a JPEG image from your Photobucket account on another website such as a forum, Etsy, eBay auction listings, a blog, etc. is definitively 3rd party hosting.

And some other crap, mainly that they wanted to charge me some insane amount to provide hosting for my graphics.  Now, I use the Blogger albums they provide for any jpegs, but they don't support animations and I use some in posts in here, as well as the day-date calendar and border.  I also use the service for forums that don't supply image hosting for non-paying users like me (read: cheap bastards like me)

I didn't get a notice until this one that they were changing their TOU (terms of use).  Since they had always supplied the code, the HTML to embed images, I always thought it was OK, but apparently it's not now.  My "library" with Photobucket is only 1% full and they used to show a bandwidth meter and it was always set at around 10% or less, so I never worried.  I did keep an eye on it after having a few websites directly link to images and got a warning from Photobucket that I was over the limit, so I made it private and that was the end of the thieving. 

There are lots of people complaining about it online and I don't blame 'em.  Some people relied upon it for their image hosting, esp. people uploading them to Amazon for reviews and people trying to sell things on eBay. Now their entire websites and/or posts are affected and have this placeholder where their photos used to be:

So, if you see that in any older post or on the animations I use for things, then that's the reason. I've already signed up for a new free image hosting service and hope they'll not go the same route as Photobucket...which I predict is going to go out of business soon, because I think - as do many others - that they're in financial trouble and this is one last grab for some quick cash.

Anyway, I'll be doing the changeover soon, hope it works.  If not, I suppose I can live w/out any flashing signs or animated GIFs.  I'm sure the readership of this pathetic excuse for a blog won't suffer any...how could it?  We're only something like the 12,784,987th ranked blog in the world, after all.

Cat v. Chicken

Sorry it's so huge of a file, but I thought it really funny.

Drunk as Cooter Brown

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia:

Cooter Brown, sometimes given as Cootie Brown, is a name used in metaphors and similes for drunkenness, mostly in the southern United States. Cooter Brown supposedly lived on the line which divided the North and South during the American Civil War, making him eligible for military draft by either side. He had family on both sides of the line, so he did not want to fight in the war. He decided to get drunk and stay drunk for the duration of the war so that he would be seen as useless for military purposes and would not be drafted. 

Ever since, colloquial and proverbial ratings of drunkenness have been benchmarked against the legendary drinker: "as drunk as Cooter Brown" or "drunker than Cooter Brown."



There are also other versions of the origin of the phrase.

Funny GIFs

Photobucket has been sending me "You should see these!" types of emails lately; I've used the service for a long time, since MSN Groups, but Blogger lets me add photos using Picassa, so I don't use it much anymore except when I want to put an animated graphic (GIF) into a post. (I guess I "use" it every day because that's where the graphics for the month images at the top of the page are hosted)

I followed a link in the email to see this: Animated_GIFs I would link to the slide show, but there are over 400 graphics and even with my fairly fast connection, the animations wouldn't load fast enough until it was cycling through to the next one. There are some funny ones, worth a look!

(Did you know GIF isn't pronounced "gif" but rather as "jif", with a "J"?  So says the creator of them, but there are people arguing that he's wrong.)