Twenty years ago today I posted my first photo to Flickr. I'd been to Lewisham for the day as part of my Random Borough project and thought you deserved to see 13 of the better pictures in greater-than-microscopic size. For my inaugural upload I picked the ever-photogenic Laban Centre on Deptford Creek in cobalt sunshine, and invited you to take a peek. (more tomorrow - in the meantime you might enjoy my new Flickr photostream with more shots of gorgeous Lewisham) seven-digit ID number. By contrast my latest photos are eleven-digiters, confirming an explosion of digital imagery over the last two decades. Sticking photos online was relatively new back in 2005, hindered by retro-mobile technology and substandard transfer speeds. Today we think nothing of uploading photos and videos for immediate consumption, so much so that the visual has overtaken the written in our digital communication. Flickr - for some reason I'd signed up over a year previously. They were a cute fortnight-old start-up at the time, complete with an occasional inability to spell. Welcome to Flickr, diamond geezer! Please note: ln the initial weeks of the beta period reliability may be sporadic while we optimize the system and new servers. Outage start times and anticipated lengths wiltbe posted to the news page with as much notice as possible. We apologize in advance for any inconvenience thls may cause. Flickr is that it's still going. Twenty years is forever online, plenty long enough for your premise to collapse or for the big company who bought you to let you wither and then pull the plug. In this case Yahoo proved poor masters and eventually got rid, which would have meant oblivion had not a smaller company called SmugMug stepped in. Thus the site is still here, thank God, and so are hundreds of millions of images representing a phenomenal social record. the next one, a Tellytubbyesque landscape from the front of the same building, a total high enough to place it in my Top 200 Most Viewed Flickr photos of all time. Alas this is an increasingly meaningless ranking after a fortnight of statistical blips in October 2022 gifted entirely random photos massive viewing totals. But if I strip out those annoying interlopers these are my Flickr Top Five, my photo-sharing greatest hits. 1) Entrance to nudist beach, Telscombe Cliffs (44,296 views): It's the phrase 'nudist beach' that keeps punters coming back, alas missing the key word 'entrance' (because there's nothing to see here). 2) Met No 1 (26,343 views): In 2013 a 'Learning English' website used my photo of a steam train at Farringdon to illustrate a podcast, and attributed it properly, which has brought a steady stream of visitors ever since. 3) Fatboys Diner (20,527 views): This Fifties trailer alas no longer serves burgers at Trinity Buoy Wharf but my wonky 2008 photo still has traction. I saw its empty silver shell recently from a train, awaiting rebirth. 4) American Embassy, Nine Elms (19,731 views): Very occasionally one of my photos is embraced by Explore, Flickr's global daily Top 500 feature, which loved this photo of Nine Elms' defensive cube. It's rather easier to get into Explore now than it used to be. 5) Shivering Sands sea forts (18,145 views): I got lucky with a level horizon on a rocking boat off Herne Bay, garnering multiple Flickr favourites and a long shelf life as a "go-to" photo for this rusting offshore marvel. eleven photos in my online portfolio have had fewer than 200 views over the years, which if you're on Flickr yourself you'll know is a phenomenal strike rate. They're all from a particularly dull set I uploaded in 2006 so it serves me right. Of the dozen other photos that never mustered 300 views, what barely interested anyone are a trip to Rome, a Paralympic tennis match and a week in San Francisco, which I've never quite understood. I suspect photos of my recent trip to Dover would be in these doldrums had I actually managed to upload them, but I haven't yet which is annoying - an anniversary opportunity lost. Flickr albums where appropriate, especially if I go to a far-flung place and want to make it easy to showcase my visit. Here are my five most-viewed albums ever, and perhaps you can see why they are. 1) Olympic Stadium site (10,406 views): I stood on the same bridge over Marshgate Lane and took a monthly photo of the Olympic Stadium arising, so this is a unique record of inexorable change and rightly my most-viewed album. 2) Metroland Revisited (9,324 views): For John Betjeman's centenary I followed in his documentary footsteps up the Metropolitan line, and it was 2006 so photo quality wasn't great but nostalgia won out. 3) Fleet River (NE branch) (9,255 views): My month-long bloggery down the River Fleet was much shared at the time and brought diamond geezer to a wider audience. I compiled five albums of Fleet photographs, geographically focused, and if I extended this list to a Top 10 the other albums would be 6th, 7th, 8th and 9th. 4) Inside the Gherkin (9,164 views): For Open House 2006 I queued for hours to see London from the top of the Gherkin, and thousands of people have subsequently wanted to know what that view looked like. 5) My Most Interesting Photos (8,481 views): Flickr's algorithm nebulously combines views, comments and favourites to create a ranking by 'Interestingness', which for years had the Maunsell Forts at the top of the list. This album alas no longer automatically updates, otherwise it'd show that my Most Interesting photo is now of icy boats at Richmond Bridge. Early Flickr had some mighty cunning coding under the bonnet, including a naming convention so forward-looking it still works today. My first photo is still www.flickr.com/photos/dgeezer/8919372, my first set of Parisian photos is still www.flickr.com/photos/dgeezer/albums/263401 and (I don't know if this works for you) a list of all the photos I uploaded in 2008 in order of Interestingness is still www.flickr.com/search/?w=36101699310%40N01&s=int&d=taken-20080101-20081231. otherwise have lost when my hard drive died in 2006. But the potential danger works both ways. I've invested hours of my time curating an online portfolio, currently 18852 photos in total, complete with captions, tags and geographical locations. But there's no guarantee whatsoever that Flickr will maintain functionality in the future, or indeed continue to function at all, so all that effort may one day be wiped out. Flickr can survive another decade without something going wrong, be that degeneration of functionality or withdrawal of service. But I said exactly that in 2015, and yet here it is still going strong. I hope you enjoy looking at the photos I stick on there, be that for artistic, geographical or purely inquisitive reasons. And I hope they'll still be there to look at in 2035, even if the things I've taken photographs of are by then long gone.

A ponzi scheme takes place when the schemer uses cash from later investors to pay returns to early investors.  My friend Peter makes the case that when an entrepreneur borrows from their business’s future to pay off present and past obligations, they are operating it like a ponzi scheme. Peter’s framing of the situation resonated […] The post Do you borrow from your future to pay for the present and past? appeared first on Herbert Lui.

Route 129: Lewisham to Gallions Reach Location: London southeast, crossriver Length of bus journey: 9 miles, 70 minutes 129 has been searching for a purpose ever since it was introduced as a stumpy three mile route in 2006. The original idea was to connect the new Millennium Village on the peninsula to the centre of Greenwich, a double decker shuttle which was one of the ten shortest bus routes in London. Planners intended it would one day be extended to new developments on Surrey Canal Road and thence to Peckham, but New Bermondsey Overground station remains a mirage two decades later so that never happened. Jump ahead to 2022 and the 129 was extended instead to Lewisham, this to make up for route 180 being diverted for Crossrail reasons, although that didn't bring a huge rush of punters either. Now it's become one of three cross-river buses in east London, striking out through the Silvertown Tunnel to connect Lewisham to City Airport and Beckton, and we wait to see if this is a link anyone genuinely needs. 129's first stop ought to be outside the Lewisham Centre but it's closed due to 'Urban Realm development works', which according to a poster were supposed to finish last week but evidently haven't. At least it tells you where to go instead. The second stop alas has no poster, just a Countdown screen insisting several 129s are due in the next few minutes when in fact bugger all are coming. Here I meet a flustered old lady trying to get to Canary Wharf with the aid of some scribbled instructions her nephew gave her. Alas her intended chain of buses fails at square one, causing instant confusion, and trying to persuade her to give up waiting and catch the DLR instead falls on deaf ears. displaced 400 much-peeved residents. Then finally we're back on line of route, where I can confirm nobody has bothered to put up a new 129 timetable at the Lewisham Station stop because of TfL's usual uncoordinated backroom inefficiencies. Things have started badly. We've reached the start of the original runty 129 outside the Old Royal Naval College, suddenly with so many more miles to go. Potential passengers are asking the driver if he's going to North Greenwich, because last week that was the key destination on the front of the bus but it's now vanished in favour of a less helpful housing estate in Newham. For a direct bus they really should have taken the 188 which takes a shortcut whereas we're doing the full length of constricted Trafalgar Road before heading north. "Are you going under the tunnel?" asks one keen old lady, and technically the answer's no but the driver helpfully says yes. We exit the bus station novelly by turning right at the roundabout, then right again down a special canyon-like bus lane. Three hi-vis-ed stewards wave us on, just this once. In no time we're turning into the main flow of traffic almost immediately before the tunnel portal, and then we're in. A double decker in a Thames tunnel is a proper novelty for London. We stick to the left lane along with the HGVs while everything else sticks to the right, all proceeding at just under 30mph and all contributing to the Mayoral coffers. It's less straight than I was expecting but not as wonky as the Blackwall Tunnel. As sightseeing trips go it's not especially incredible, although if you stop and think precisely what we're ducking under maybe it is. One final bend and then daylight appears in the distance and then we're out - just under a mile, fractionally under two minutes. The first stop is a good half mile beyond the tunnel outside West Silvertown station, or technically just past. Here the pile-off begins as we lose the passengers who merely wanted to ride through the tunnel, which is the vast majority. The 129 then begins its new life threading through the Newham hinterland, an estuarine strip initially bursting with fresh flats. It can't currently stop at the next bus stop because extensive cycleway works are in progress but 'Thames Barrier' is announced anyway. Nobody is inconvenienced. The announcements then glitch into overdrive and start mentioning future stops, repeated stops and especially Connaught Bridge, perhaps because we're stopping there twice but more likely teething troubles. When Crossrail started in 2022 TfL entirely rejigged bus stopping patterns in this corner of Beckton, mysteriously rerouting the 300 and leaving Royal Albert Way unbussed. The 129 now follows its former path, making sense of the former subtraction as if this were the plan all along. We pass a few parks, a closed city farm and not many houses before lining up on Tollgate Road where potential passengers are far more plentiful. None oblige. One of the remaining enthusiasts in the front seat lifts his sleeve to reveal the bus-related tattoo he just got, and the other is perhaps less impressed than he'd hoped. We've now been going over an hour, and as a blessing the driver doesn't deviate into Beckton bus station but stops outside. I have no interest in riding the 129 back the other way because it's pretty mundane apart from the two magic subterranean minutes in the middle. Let's hope other people find it useful and it doesn't prove a wasted connection.

The story of The Courage to Be Disliked is told mostly in dialogue, between a student and a philosopher. Spoiler alert: While the student starts off opposing the philosopher, hellbent on proving the philosopher and their school of thinking—Adlerian psychology—wrong, he starts to come around.  By the end of the book, the student’s intention has […] The post Why you feel lost, what to do next appeared first on Herbert Lui.

The Silvertown Tunnel opened this morning. comments if(postComments['199122220152314'] != null){document.write(' (' + postComments['199122220152314'] + ')')}else{document.write(' p(0)')}; (I'm only interested if the answer is 'Yes') I have also had the entire top deck to myself, spotted lots of police, timed the journey through (2 minutes) and been charged to ride a 'free' bus. The inside of the tunnel is big and grey, as you might expect.