NASA joins the Commons on Flickr today with three iconic sets spanning the US space agency’s 50+ year history. Their Commons account will feature photos from across the agency’s many locations and centers, chronicling the history of space and lunar missions, and the people and places of the organization.

Gaze upon what used to be at the forefront of American ingenuity and industriousness.

(via Flickr Blog.)

Tonight’s been a game of flipping from one theme to another for me. I have been using Carrington for a while here, but I grew bored with the base look of the thing and wanted something a little more unique.

I worked with one for a while—even edited some old posts in order to fit the theme—but discovered a few problems in the admin side of the theme and unfortunately had to abandon it.

What I landed on is something that interests me greatly. It’s originally designed for a photoblog. The big thing you will notice is that it doesn’t have a traditional front page like most blogs do; it instead has a series of images. Each post on the blog will now have an image uploaded that works with the theme of the post. I’m going to use a combination of images from my own photography (something I intend to continue working on) and Creative Commons-licensed works from flickr like the one that accompanies this post.

I will of course give credit where credit is due for any and all CC-licensed images.

In addition, I’ve taken some steps to simplify here. You’ll notice that the new theme doesn’t support a standard sidebar. I’m OK with this, as I normally find that sidebars tend to get overly cluttered and stick out like sore thumbs. The main page wouldn’t work with them anyway, and if you’re interested in my Delicious links or in my Twitter posts, I’m sure you’ll just find your way over to those services anyway.

I’m also taking a large chunk of posts beyond a certain date, permanently archiving them, and removing them from the site. The past is great, and I will always have a record of those posts and stories, but right now I want to focus more on the present and on what I have going on. Everyone’s entitled to a reset once in a while.

(Photo credit: “Musical Chairs” by flickr user David Maddison.)

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This is just a quick note to inform those of you who follow me that I’m going to be restricting my flickr photostream much more than previously starting tonight. Most of the photos taken will now be set to private, with access to most of them granted to friends and family.

I will still publish a handful of photos of certain events as public images, but I think I’d like to make things a bit more controlled from now on.

If you are a friend and I have “met” you either in real life or through an online contact that I trust, I will certainly grant you access if you send a contact request using flickr.

Note that this change will also affect the photos shown here (which I’ve been thinking about changing anyway).

(Photo credit: “colorful but difficult” by bitterlysweet)

Some of you have had conversations with me—especially via Twitter—regarding games of all kinds, so I thought it’d been a while since I’d shared a picture of the game cabinet. I like to do this every once in a while.

You can click on the picture to go to the Flickr page for the photo, which has notes for everything in the cabinet to detail them for you.

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Hm.

Rather unfortunately, it looks as though my template plans have been thwarted a bit by a bug in WordPress. Pages aren’t supposed to belong to categories or have tags, but all Pages created automatically have their taxonomy set to the default post category.

This has the unfortunate effect of applying that default category style to two of my pages, which is not cool. I have to use the default category for my flickr posts, as the flickr blog post feature doesn’t allow you to select a category in which to dump your posts.

(I hope someone at flickr is paying attention. Giving us control over post categories—like del.icio.us does—would be a welcome addition.)

So in the meantime, you are unfortunately going to have to put up with two of my pages looking a bit like crap. I would go in and change their categories manually, but PairLite doesn’t seem to have an interface available for browsing the database, and I really don’t feel like configuring that right now.

I just recently collated the photos I took while in South Dakota into a flickr photoset for your viewing enjoyment, including some pictures of Wylie Park and its Storybook Land sculpture garden. There are some very interesting pictures in there; I hope you’ll take a look at it.

I’m still adding descriptions, and haven’t caught up yet, so there’s an incomplete story there, but I will eventually get around to posting something for a good number of the pictures. The park was semi-closed post Labor Day, so I was the only one there and managed to get quite a few shots of stuff that would have been more difficult had there been more people present. My timing was good.

There are also some pictures I took while making the drive from Aberdeen to Sioux Falls on Route 12 and Interstate 29, two of which have also been grayscaled and added to my wallpapers photoset.