I used to upload quite a number of photos into my Flickr account whenever I return from a vacation or field trip or just about whenever I felt like it. In fact, I have a Flickr PRO account, which allows me to upload however many photos I’d like to upload and have them all visible in my photostream.

But then, somebody in a government department used one of my turtle pictures without giving me, the photographer, any credit. And that prompted me to change the permission level on most of my photos.

You may say that it was only a picture and that wasn’t a big deal. But if you gave it a little more thought, you would see the rationale behind the existence of the creative common licenses. If you wrote an article and published it on your blog, and I copied and pasted it on my blog, you would call that plagiarism. So why would using my photos be any different?

But anyway, I thought I should not live my life getting worried over this and that all the time. So I have kind of decided to resume my photo-uploading ritual, LOL. Moreover, I guess, if somebody really wanted to steal any photos, there were 1,001 ways in which he could do it.

I now have more than 2,300 photos in my photostream, but to view them all, you will have to be my friend (yeah, this is an attempt to make more friends) :D

The best thing about my job or whatever I am doing is that whenever things get confusing and sarcastic and depressed in the office, I have somewhere else to go to.

A place that I have come to like going to throughout my days as a grad student. A place that nobody goes to on normal days because of the unusually hot weather that we have. A place where I don’t have to see people getting themselves stressed up. A place where I don’t have to worry about being stressed up. A place where I can think. And most importantly, a place where I can breathe.

I am glad I have found such a place in my working life, a place where I can seek solace during the thunderstorm. And I hope you have found yours too :D

One of the main challenges of writing a personal blog is to only write whatever that can be written and not write anything that cannot be written, without compromising what needs to be communicated.

Image credit: Tall Chris.

This, I have not mastered.