I finally got the pictures from the Halloween party I went to on Wednesday. It was a pretty low-key affair, with maybe 10 people, half of whom dressed up. I left around 11, and we pretty much watched movies and played games all night, which was fine with me, since I’d just gotten back from a business trip that afternoon.

We had a Queen Bee, a Killer Bee, two comic book characters (The Punisher, and some guy from a thing called Preacher?), a French Maid, and maybe some other people. The important thing, as always, was me:

I’m a Weighted Companion Cube, from the game Portal. As you can see, I reglected to cut arm holes in the thing, which was a very bad idea.

Anyway, the party pictures were taken by someone who did have armholes in their outfit, and posted to Picasa, which I have determined is not as good as Flickr in any way.

Why can’t I middle-click to open images in new tabs? Why is the page layout so goofy and huge, when all I want is the damn image? Why is zooming in/out an operation with only two choices? Why is it utterly impossible to see a photo by itself on the site without downloading the thing? Great, I get a little GMaps click-and-drag thing to pan around the big photos. Why don’t you just show me the whole goddamned thing?

Picasa is a pretty good example of why people need to stop holding Google up like some kind of golden god. They didn’t do distributed storage or computing - Amazon did. Picasa loses, and loses hard, to Flickr. While their maps and search are the best available, a lot of Google’s web apps are just not very good. They had a few hits early on, but they’re a search and Ad sales company at heart. Picasa proves that just because you can build an entire app with fancy Web 2.0 whatnot, it doesn’t mean that you should.