Rumble: The Intelligence of a Human Being - Part #3

Probably the subtitle of this blog should be:
'How a 30,000 ton icebreaker turned into a flowerpot'.
Or:
'How our lifes are ruled by machines...'

I keep all my blog pictures on Flickr. I have hundreds of pictures stored there, mostly for my Dutch eBook. Last week something went wrong. I noticed it first when the front page picture of the eBook had turned the Akademik Federov - a huge Antarctic research/cargo vessel into a vase with flowers. Pretty strong trick. I mean it is a 30,000 ton ship!

I logged onto Flickr, and could not believe my eyes. Probably one third of my pictures had been replaced by completely different ones. There were flowers, beach parties, animals,... instead of my expedition pictures from the Antarctic and the Pacific. On the Flickr forum, a stream of complaints started. Everyone had the same problem: 'their pictures were switched with those from others':

• A lady wrote: "I like the new Flickr pictures. On all my self portraits, I seem to have lost 40 pounds, and 30 years. I now have legs reaching up to my armpits!!"
• To which a retired army colonel replied: "Yeah, me too, and I look real cool in a bikini-string set !"
• One guy from Africa complained: "Help, all of my friends have turned into Japanese!"
• A not so funny one was from 'Mister Desperate': "I use my Flickr pictures for my commercial locksmith website, promoting my business. Half of the pictures of door handles and locks we sell, have been replaced by porn pictures! I never had so many hits on my website before, though! I had two new requests to open a business account."
• "The thumbnail of my friends on their wedding day has been replaced with one of a dead pigeon", complained another.
• "There is some naked girl on the roof instead of my bowling record picture", said 'Mr X'
• "Nothing like a picture of a drunken party of strangers in the middle of your holiday thumbnails", claimed one.
• "I am finding pornography over the photos I have shared with numerous members of my Congregation.", sighed a minister.

In the end, FLICKR reset some system, flushed the network cache memory and 'abracadabra' after a couple of hours, I got 'my ice breaker' back. How happy I was...

And that is the weirdest thing, I am thinking now: I should have been angry because of the technical hiccup in a service I pay for. But no, I was in heaven when I got all my pictures back... The power of the machine. It taketh yours and it giveth yours back, when it feels like it! And we, we are grateful! Just as I am always grateful to find all my files back after my laptop's Windows crashes. Ten times a day. "I, Robot!"

PS: I hereby certify this blog is generated by a human being. I... generate.. human being, Krrt..&^^%% being. being. boing... ^%%)(*^££

Please give feedback about my blog through a local poll

Picture with courtesy of AARI.