Happy Mother’s day!

So I took a small road trip to Providence Rhode Island. Where I found the South Main Street Park and a War Veterans Memorial.

This panoramic was taken using a plumb-bob (explained in this tutorial). Because I did not use a tripod I got a lot of paraallax issues. You can see them when you look down.

I also took a few other neat photos.

With this new site I decided to consolidate all my hobbies and muses into one place. So I will be posting my photos as blog posts here. To start off with I wanted to place all my older Panoramas here for archive sake.

• My back yard.
  

  

• Jean Lafiette Park in New Orleans.
  

  

• Jean Lafiette Park in New Orleans.
  

  

• Riverwalk Mall in New Orleans.
  

  

I wanted to use my OctoPress blog with my Photography hobby. I loved the Flickr side bar plugin. However I still wanted to place specific photos into my blogs.

For example If I go out and do a day of shooting I really would like to have these photos show up into my post as I talk about what I did. I also wanted to use a different server for storing the images that I have and not Flickr (since I have some photos I don’t want on Flickr)

I developed an OctoPress plugin to handle this. It uses FancyBox as the display method. The integration is a bit involved which is why I am writing this post. BTW, I use FancyBox because it allows the use for displaying media beyond just images which will be important to me when I start posting about my Panoramas.

Download the plugin from this gist.

I wonder how many people are so sick of getting pulled over for going five miles over? I know that when I see a police car on the side of the road I have a moment of pure panic. I hate those moments. Was I too fast? Was I just under the threshold? Is he or she having a bad day? How do I argue myself out of this? Why didn’t I notice them earlier? And why the hell am I getting pulled over when clearly everyone else is going much faster?!!!

I say we should protest this! Yes, drive the speed limit in protest. And here is why:

I had a unique situation were my website (chock-full of photos) was about 100MiB large! Well to access and clone the repository took some time. And watching the counter seemed silly. I was lucky that I had a backup of the repository on an external USB drive. And that’s the key! I simply cloned from the backup and then set the tracking branches to the real network origin.

This saved me a good half hour of downloading. And It provided off line access. Here’s how I did it.

When I saw the final episode of Star Trek The Next Generation (All Good Things…) I didn’t realize how deep down the rabbit hole it would take me.

The episode described a concept they called anti-time. What “antimatter” is to matter; “anti-time” is to time. The antagonist (Q) manipulated the protagonist (Pickard) into creating a space-time event that began in the future and grew bigger the further backwards in time they traveled. The idea was to have Pickard realize that the destructive event was actually his own doing even though in his perspective the catalyst hadn’t happened yet (future timeline).

This got me thinking: what if anti-time was real? And imagine the consequences of manipulating it?

Lately I’ve has some insperation to try my hand at some coding homework. I was introduced to a site called The Codecademy. This site teaches people how to program. They started with JavaScript and recently added HTML and CSS.

Here are a two I enjoyed playing with:

So as an update on what I’ve been doing (considering I haven’t posted in a long time). I’ve been pretty occupied. I planning a wedding and a buying a house all in the same month!

WTF I say I’m a mad man! Yup I am crazy. But that is where my time has been sucked into.

I am still updating SimNotify but recently I created the wedding site. It will hold all the updates about the wedding and the house. If you interested in me check it out. BTW The site was created in Jekyll just like this one and I’m a little proud of it. Unlike this site I made it compatible with iPhones using CSS and JavaScript. The site content is very geeky and quirky. I put in a lot of references to geek culture. Thought it was fun to mention.

Oh and I have also added Atom feed support to this blog.

So I was tasked to run a class on how to run and use a propriatary software. Our class room was all decked out with the latest SmartBoard technology. But that is the only highlight of this convoluted story that will leave you scrating your head in disbalief.

The computer booted up and imediatly started barking about missing network drive //FILES/.../Desktop and my first thought was “Wait WTF? Network drive? No I’m showing a powerpoint Why the fsck would I want a network drive?” This error poped up roughly about every 2 minutes. Very anoyying. Then I was unable to install the propiatary software as I was connected as some network authentication and as the error box was very vocal about there was no network (incidently how did I log on if I had no network?)

Anyway among this and many other issues I gave up and grabbed a laptop which had the software on it. Opps That didn’t work. You see the wonderful folks at HP thought it was wise to put a video card in that could not handle mirrored displays. This was a problem because the software we use will take over a second monitor if one exists. So it’s either the laptop display or an extended display. Either way the students don’t get to see the presenters view on the projector. I also found out that the laptop doesn’t allow the primary display to be anything other then the laptop LCD! sigh.

So I thought hey my Mac has a virtual machine, one monitor output, and the software installed running perfect. Only to find out I forgot the VGA adapter! Damb it!

Final solotion was to hook up a ether net cable between the HP laptop and the Mac. Run the virtual machine in full screen. Setup a temporary network between the machines. Use VNC to view the mac screen and put the VNC viewer on the extended desktop. Phew that was a lot! But it worked and the students could see the software on the projector.

Perhaps convoluted but it worked. I’ll be contacting the IS department to figure out why the presentation machine is bust-icated.

Inginuity at it’s best.