Shutterfly Fails

So yesterday I posted some pictures of our camping trip last weekend to Shutterfly. As usual, I grabbed the embed code for the album to throw in this blog. If you've seen yesterday's blog, you already know the result:

I have always had trepidation about hosting content externally, that is, not on this website. Ten years ago I just put everything here - photos, videos, documents, whatever! Then came YouTube, which not only could provide faster delivery of videos but also gave me an audience I never had before. Actually I created an account for Cara and uploaded a video of her first. It didn't take me long to realize that instead of a link, I could embed videos in my blog. Clearly this was a step up from the links I had been hitherto providing. Not long after that we started using Google docs at SLAC and then Slideshare came along and there was no need to put any sort of documents on my website because it was so much easier to do it elsewhere. In the process I gave up some control, but I still kept backup copies in case things with one of these companies ever went south. Pictures I still could do better on my own though. So as recently as 2010 I was still building my own albums. But with Cara & both having smartphones the barrage of photos was just to much to handle so I got lazy and started relying on Shutterfly. Fast forward to 2013. Thanks to the revelations of Edward Snowden it now seems that all that externally hosted content is being nicely organized for the US Government to regiment and control our lives. Not that they couldn't have accessed all that information from the public directory of a webserver I might have otherwise put it on... Google organizes all the world's information regardless of its location. But I have given up control of that information, probably to the advantage of my enemies. I have for many years now believed that the world would be a better place today without the US Government. I got wooed back into believing things with the government could be changed for the better by Ron Paul's presidential campaigns, but the complete and utter failure of that effort has only hardened my heart. Obama is far worse than Bush and whoever comes after Obama will be even worse than that. My hope is in the illegal immigrants. With such a large community successfully living in our country without papers and the US Government impotent to impose its will upon them, then outlaws can still flourish and absolute tyranny may yet be averted. I am committed to nonviolence so I will probably not live to see the US Government crumble under its own weight as the Soviet government of Russia once did, but I hope to play a part in nurturing those memes which eventually play a part in its downfall. On the other hand, if the US Government ever starts to round up illegal immigrants en masse then it's time to make for the exits if any are left. All those border patrols agents can point their guns both ways you know. In the mean time I'll just work up a solution for storing a large number of photos locally. Probably organized via the database on my AWS instance. *facepalm*