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I went back to the pictures I took in Central Park, and significantly expanded the gallery.

steve :: Mar.31.2007 :: Photography :: 1 Comment »

As I mentioned yesterday, I managed to sort of integrate the Wordpress blogging system with the Obscura photo gallery software.

I had started with trying to write a plugin for Wordpress, but I found it somewhat difficult because I wasn’t really trying to do things quite the way the plugin system seems to be designed.

Eventually I settled on doing things sort of the opposite way, which worked well. If anyone is curious, the details on the implementation are here.

steve :: Mar.31.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »

Digg led me to this amazing picture showing all the known objects in the solar system that are bigger than 200 miles across. I highly recommend giving it a look.

The thumbnail hardly does the image justice.

steve :: Mar.30.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »

After spending way too much time trying to figure out how to plug my galleries into wordpress, I decided to plug wordpress into my galleries. A few bits of procedural code, a half dozen functions, and a fight with mod_rewrite later, my photo galleries are back.

steve :: Mar.30.2007 :: Photography :: No Comments »

Another Midwest thunderstorm tonight. We’ve had a lot these past few weeks. I don’t like riding in the rain (hail incident, etc), so I haven’t been riding the bike to work on days when rain is forecast. Means I’ve only ridden once in the last two weeks.

Late evening rain does create a nice background though.

steve :: Mar.29.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Poking around the interbrew I found another stupid navigator trick. The TomTom Go stores the splash screens for startup and shutdown in the main folder of the SD card. I assume it is the same for the hard drive version.

Since the device mounts as a USB storage device, I created a bitmap of the same size/format as the original splash.bmp that was on the device, backed up the original screen, and dropped the new splash.bmp file in its place. When I next booted the TomTom, the new splash screen showed right up.

Now I need to find some awesome 320×240 images.

Update: I stole an image from Flickr, put the new TomTom logo on it, and set it to my startup screen. Highway + wind turbine FTW.

Image source. Yay creative commons.

steve :: Mar.29.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 4 Comments »

I noticed that the train stations for Denver’s light rail system did not appear to be in the TomTom navigator I picked up, but I had all of the addresses from some previous searching. I quickly figured out how to add points of interest (POI) categories, and then how to add the POIs themselves. Now I have almost all of the rail stations (some of the addresses don’t seem to exist, even in Google) plotted, with their own little light rail category. How neat, if of questionable use.

I then added a category for friends, and I plan to put everyone’s addresses into the thing. It’ll be sweet even though Denver is not easy driving distance from anywhere.

steve :: Mar.27.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 2 Comments »

I don’t even know if anyone bothers with my photo galleries much, but I’m sure you have noticed that they are still broken. I’m sort of stuck on whether to take the time to fix the look as it currently stands, or take this as an opportunity to redo them.

I need to add new photos anyways, and the number of galleries in there currently makes the index page pretty huge. I could go with pagination, cleaning out old pics, or something.

I’ll probably rebuild the CSS for now, at least get it looking less terrible, but after that who knows.

steve :: Mar.27.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

Sam and I met Jason at 75th St Brewery last night to celebrate their re-opening after the Waldo fire that destroyed Kennedy’s and several other businesses. It looked weird, turning off of Wornall onto 75th. The brewery is sort of standalone now, rather than being at one end of a block long set of buildings.

The place looks basically the same, but they took the opportunity of the fire to make a few changes. On the west side of the building there used to be a row of booths, then two long sets of tables along either side of a wall, with benches against the wall and chairs on the other side. Now the entire west side of the restaurant is booths.

The memorabilia that was on the walls is largely gone, and everything looks freshly painted. I think the stuff is gone because it got damaged. Several pieces that were left looked somewhat the worse for wear.

The “party room” or whatever it was called in the back looked more open, and Jason thinks the bar area got extended as well. Also all the people working had on T-shirts referring to the fire, including phrases like “Enjoying the beer? Thank a firefighter” and “Save the Beer!” attributed to an “Anonymous Firefighter”.

They had a section on the wall about the fire, but I didn’t get a chance to take a good look at it. Jason pointed out a sign on the back door (where I typically enter) which said that the brewery had been closed for 34 days.

I’m glad its back, even if I’ll be leaving soon anyways.

steve :: Mar.27.2007 :: Uncategorized :: No Comments »

The recent Ames trip was a success, including Pizza Pit pizza (an old favorite), the London Underground, SG, hanging out at abuck’s, the SGI Indy, a fox, grilling at Moore, clearing trees, and meeting some others for a late lunch.

Grilling was good old times, like when we would arrange something on a whim when everyone was still in Ames. I forgot how nice it is to be able to buy your alcohol and meat and charcoal all in the same place, rather than having to hit up two separate stores. Liquor laws can be annoying.

I also picked up a TomTom One GPS nav unit. I’m hoping it will prove to be useful for an apartment hunting trip and then general life in Denver. I may also be able to use it on work trips instead of messing around with mapquest directions.

steve :: Mar.26.2007 :: Uncategorized :: 1 Comment »