deej!
It's as if you were just posting yesterday...hardly any time has passed since the last installment.
What a delight to see your photos again! I think that all of those flowers were definitely photo-worthy. So, so pretty.
I know that you -- as a fellow flower photo enthusiast -- probably know what I mean when I say that, after a while, one can become "flower jaded" and take them for granted or just not appreciate their beauty. Flowers are such a naturally a beautiful subject for pictures, as we know, but after a while they either all end up looking the same -- or the flowers in question are not particularly well-maintained and so they look a little wilted and drab.
Sometimes I find that I will stumble upon a gorgeous bed of bright flowers and, no matter which angle I use to try to get a halfway decent photo, there is one discolored, mangled or sickly-looking flower in the bunch that ruins the shot. And to crop it out after the fact could throw off the composition of the photo. So I often just pass by pretty flowers at DLR now, unless I can find a good, clean patch of them without any bad ones nearby!
About Photobucket - yes, Photobucket underwent a massive overhaul of their site last year (in fact, it was early last year). Initially they removed many features and much of the functionality, which enraged their users (both the paying and free account users). They took away so many options and changed the layout completely, making it very difficult to find photos, edit, etc. Everything was knocked out of the sequence many of us had saved our photos in, and the various "sort by..." functions were not there!
I'd had my photos in the "Sort by File Name" order and suddenly everything was out of whack, so that trying to find one photo in an album of over 250 photos was like searching for a needle in a haystack.
I have well over 14,000 photos stored in one Photobucket account and several thousand photos in another, so you can imagine that anything that disrupts my ability to locate my photos and do with them what I want will infuriate me.
Many disgruntled Photobucket customers took to the Internet to complain. For a while, the Support staff left a few threads open in the Support section of Photobucket, where we all voiced our annoyance on a daily basis. When the complaints got to be too voluminous (and too angry), Support closed the threads and people continued complaining on the Photobucket Facebook page.
So, while the layout of the website is totally different now -- and there appears to be no way to download an entire album without doing it photo-by-photo -- Photobucket actually
did pay attention to our many rants and complaints, and they re-implemented some features that we need. They truly seemed to be totally clueless about and unaware of how their customers were using their site prior to the massive overhaul! They didn't realize that most of us were doing specific things in specific ways.
One sneaky thing that Photobucket has done, however (because they want people to use up all of their bandwidth and/or storage space so they will have to pay more money), is to take away the ability to actually upload photos at a designated size. For example, in the past layout of Photobucket, if we wanted to upload photos at 640 x 480, for example, the photos could actually be "resized upon upload," so that the photo size that was displayed
and stored was 640 x 480.
Now, of course, clever Photobucket removed that resize-upon-upload feature, but they have an option for the "display size." This means that when you upload new photos, they will be
stored -- whether you like it or not -- at the original, gigantic size that most cameras produce...which uses up more bandwidth and storage space, of course. The photos can not resize upon upload. BUT you can choose to "display" the photos at certain sizes online. This means that the bulk photo uploaders (people who take hundreds or thousands of photos) will either have to resize all of their photos before uploading to Photobucket if they want to store smaller sizes, or they will risk using up a lot of their storage space and have to pay more money. The people who don't take a
lot of photos won't have to worry about it too much.
One final thing -- slaw.
You mentioned the slaw at the Hungry Bear. I have not tried that slaw as of yet, but now I'm curious about it!
I've never been a big slaw person but this past December I ate at Tangaroa Terrace in the DLH for the first time, and I ordered the BBQ chicken sandwich and slaw. This was an interesting sandwich in that the chicken breast was breaded with panko crumbs; the BBQ sauce had a bit of a kick to it (tamarind, I think??); and the slaw was green papaya slaw, if I recall correctly. All of those ingredients together made for an interesting flavor mix.
Are you an old school slaw type of person, or do you think you would enjoy green papaya slaw?