A little of Burma

My best friend from high school was a girl named San from Burma. Then I had a crush on a very cute Burmese guy–let call him Y. who later became my boyfriend. I didn’t know much about their country and little did I care. Unlike San who was a legal immigrant, Y. came to the US as an international student. He graduated and went to college for one year before he quited to work full time at a video store which he later bought. He said that due to the recent political instability in his country (this is the late 1990s), his father could not operate his businesses anymore. The father had to send Y. all the money and asked if can start a business and support the family.

Political problem. This was the only thing I knew about Burma.

Because Y. did not go to school since his father could no longer send him money, he was not eligible for the student Visa and faced the possibility of having to leave USA. He asked me to come to Rangoon. I never said anything but it was not an option for me at the time. Though not a teenager anymore, I knew nothing about the world, scared of going to strange places and living among strange people. Now I wished I said yes.

If you like movie, check out “Beyond Rangoon.” It’s about an American tourist got trap in the fights between the students and the government during her vacation in Burma. Many years later, it was unfortunate that how little thing changed.

Picasa2 + Flickr = The Best Photo Management and Sharing Package

+

Picasa2 and Flickr are not made for each other; in fact they are the picture-perfect brainchildren of two fierce competitors, Google and Yahoo!.

Picasa2 was designed to work with Picasa Web Albums, a Google web-application with similar purpose as Flickr although the latter is far more superior than PWA. Used alone, these gadgets are superb products, but coupled together, they are a match made in Web 2.0 heaven.

I’ve been using Flickr for years and completely happy with it. However, Flickr only serves the online need and overlooks the offline part of a complete photo management process. Up until yesterday, I have tried and used other desktop applications, Adobe Photoshop, Gimp and Irfanview to manage and edit my photos. These software are best for viewing and editing , but still leave the organizing of the photos to me.

So when I tried out Picasa2 yesterday, I was very pleased. Not only Picasa2 has all the necessary, basic features: cropping, sharpening, tunning and filtering, it has the extra collage
feature which proves to be extremely useful for many topics of my travel blogs. Last but not least, Picasa2 acts as photo library and explorer (think Windows Explorer), automatically searching for and collecting images on the computer.

Picasa2 and Flickr combo brings the best of both world: an easy-to-used and feature packed offline photo management tool plus a kick-ass online photo sharing website.