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Stuff that doesn’t fit in any other category

The waiting game…

Macworld logoIf you read any of the Mac Mania blogs, you probably know I got to play around with a digital SLR--the Nikon D40X--during the cruise. Well, after I got home, I decided the time was right for an upgrade from my pocket digital camera. In a case of wonderful timing, Costco happened to have a D40X kit (camera, two lenses, memory card, case) available during our last visit, so I got my birthday present (and Christmas and next year's birthday and...) a bit early this year.

You can read about why I chose to upgrade, including some interesting comparison photographs, in this Macworld blog. I've only had the camera for a few days, but I'm having a blast with it so far, and really looking forward to taking it to WWDC next week--I have a free Sunday in San Francisco, and I hope to take a bunch of pictures.

One of the things I wanted with the camera was a more powerful zoom lens, so I also ordered a 70/300mm telephoto from Amazon. It shipped on Tuesday for a Wednesday delivery, but a recorded phone call early Wednesday reminded me that a signature would be required. So I was basically locked in the house until the lens showed up. And (eventually), it did:

timetable

Yup, nearly 12 hours into the waiting game, the lens showed up! Urgh. Just in time, too, as I was literally backing the car out of the garage to go pick up the girls at day care when the UPS van pulled up! Now that it's here, though, I love it, though I haven't had much time to play with it. Here's a shot of the lens (with the hood as shipped, not in shooting mode!), as well as two pictures I took--both from about 15 feet away, standing on our back porch one evening. (These were handheld shots, too--the lens includes an image stabilizer that seems to work quite well). Click any image for a larger (640x480) version:

Lens  Lens  Lens

Of course, the presence of the large lens meant that the nice Nikon bag that was included in the kit was no longer large enough to carry the gear...guess it's time to find a nice camera kit backpack!



Mac Mania VI / Aperture Aura blogs

Macworld logoI wrote a few weblogs for Macworld during our journey to Alaska last week. Here they all are, in order based on our cruise's destinations:

I had a lot of fun on the cruise, though I felt I didn't have as much to offer the attendees this time (as I couldn't discuss Leopard, which was the original plan). For anyone who might be contemplating one of these, I can say that they are quite a lot of fun, for two reasons. First, it's a great way to get some quality instruction in reasonably small class sizes. There's also a lot of out-of-class contact with the speakers, including dinner each evening. Second, the cruises themselves can be fun. I'd never been on a cruise ship before last fall's Caribbean excursion, so I'm quite new to the whole thing. I think cruises are a great way to see a number of places quickly and relatively inexpensively--which can help determine where you'd like to go back for a longer, more personal stay in the future.
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Home from Alaska…

Macworld logoAs some of you may know, I spent the last week on the Mac Mania VI Geek Cruise, cruising from Seattle to a few spots in Alaska (and one in Canada), and then back to Seattle yesterday morning. (You can read my blog posts about the journey on the MacMania blog page over at Macworld.)

Alaska picThe blog posts contain a few of the images from the trip, but given that I took over 700 pictures, and that our boat's connection speed was slow (and the cost was high), it wasn't feasible to run more than a handful or so in the blogs. I've now looked through the whole batch, and picked 55 that I felt were most interesting, and tossed them into this photo gallery. These are basically unedited images--I haven't done any cropping, color correction, or other such tweaks as of yet. I just thought it'd be fun to share a bit more of the Alaskan and Canadian scenery from the trip--even based on the limited experience one gets from a cruise ship, Alaska really is a most interesting state (this was my first visit of any sort there).

Click the first image to view the larger version of that slide, and you can then use the arrow keys to advance from one large image to the next. (You can also use the Index Page buttons at the bottom of the main screen to just view each of the three index pages.)

If you'd like a full-size version of any of these photos, just let me know the file name, and I'll send you the original (no watermark, either--I just put that there to stop the casual image lifters). My favorite shot is probably the orange sunset, though a couple of the glacier/ice in water shots are interesting as well.

I'm home for a week, then it's off to see what interesting things are revealed in the "feature complete" Leopard beta that Steve will (hopefully) be discussing at WWDC--and maybe we'll even see some cool new hardware, if recent rumors turn out to be true.



Driving lessons from a four-year-old

"Daddy, I've told you before: keep two hands on the steering wheel!"

'You're right; sorry Kylie!'

"If you don't listen to me, we'll have to pull over and let Mommy drive home!"

Or some words very close to those; she told me this during our drive home last night, causing an eruption of laughter from the front seat.



A (messy) parenting lesson learned…

Our daughter Kylie has, on three occasions now, gone to bed perfectly happy and fine, only to wake up vomiting in the middle of the night. By the morning, though, she'd be fine again, and acting like nothing much had happened.

I figured it was something in her food that was triggering the events, but the first two times it happened, there was too much overlap in the meals to figure anything out--she basically ate the identical dinner. When the third incident happened this week, however, I was able to note only two overlaps with the prior meals: on all three occasions, she'd eaten some small cherry tomatoes and some banana with her dinner.

After I related this story to my friend Kirk, he wrote back "yea, tomatoes and bananas don't go together. Acid and starch = boom!" Perhaps this is common knowledge, but I hadn't ever heard this before. I've certainly seen it in action often enough now, however, to believe it. So as much as she likes both, Kylie's days of combining the two are now over!

As an aside, sorry it's been so quiet around here lately. We moved a couple weeks back, and between packing, moving, and unpacking (not even close to done yet), I just haven't had much time to write.



What’s in a name? Nothing major…

Quick--name the four "major" titles on the men's and women's professional tennis circuit. Easy, right? Australian Open, French Open, Wimbledon, and the US Open. OK, do it again for the golfers on the PGA tour. Also easy: The Masters, US Open, The Open Championship (that'd be the British Open to most US fans), and the PGA Championship. Now, quick, name the LPGA's four major championships.

Not so easy, is it? I can name three with relative ease: The LPGA Championship, the US Open, and the British Open (though the British only became a major for the women in 2001). But what about the fourth? It's this week's event, the Kraft Nabisco Championship. I didn't know that until I read about it earlier this week. (I knew there were four, but I had no idea what the fourth was called.)

The history of the LPGA's majors is somewhat convoluted--this article explains it all fairly well. But the bigger question here is, if you take the 12 event names above, can you quickly tell which one doesn't belong? Another easy answer, of course: the Kraft Nabisco Championship. And why doesn't it belong? Because it's the only "major" event that has a sponsor's name (Nabisco is owned by Kraft, so I'll just count that as one sponsor) embedded right there in the event's title.

So what happens in three (or five or whatever) years when the Kraft sponsorship is up, and they decide not to renew? Will the fourth major then become the Ford Explorer Championship or the Wal-Mart Championship or perhaps the 7-11 Championship? Whatever happens, it won't make it easy for the LPGA's fans to remember all four of the majors. To me, and perhaps it's my old-fashioned traditionalist side, major event names shouldn't have a sponsor's name directly attached to the event. Once the TV time starts, sure, all bets are off--I have no issues with "The US Open presented by IBM," for instance, as the tag line used on the air. But not as part of the event's official name--getting noted in the record books every year, and subject to change at the whim of some corporate bean counter (I used to be one of those!) somewhere who nixes the $10 million sponsorship contract.

Come on, LPGA, do the right thing: name your major something non-vendor-dependent, and then sell the TV sponsorship rights for the broadcast. The Tradition, The National, whatever--I really don't care what you name it, just name it such that the fans won't have to remember a new name every time there's sponsorship turnover. That's hardly the way to build mind share with the fans for one of your four major championships.



Ten things to do in the next twenty years

Over the weekend, I was thinking a bit about the next 20 years, and things I'd like to accomplish within that timeframe. Nothing practical like "preparing for retirement" or "funding the girls' college accounts" or even "remembering to mow the lawn weekly." No, it's always more interesting to think of the fun things one might be able to do in the future.

So here's my list, focused on those things I think would be the most fun or most interesting. As with lists of this type, there's a good chance that well over half my list will remain unaccomplished--family, work responsibilities, and economic realities always seem to get in the way of our dreams. However, I will do my best to check off at least some of these items while working within the confines of reality.
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Random header images for WordPress

I've finally migrated my family's site over to the latest version of WordPress, and installed pretty much the same batch of plug-ins and widgets as I use here. However, I wanted something else, too--a randomly-selected image for the header of the site that changes each time the page is loaded, as seen in these four sample pictures:

montage

(The header images are just sections I've snipped out of photos we've taken, with an artsy Photoshop filter of some sort applied.)

I searched the web, and there are a few plug-ins that offer this ability, but they came either too feature-rich, or required some additional JavaScript to work properly. I wanted the most simple, basic, and functional header image rotation solution I could find...so I wrote my own, which required all of two lines of code. I'm posting it here so that (a) I remember how I did it, and (b) in case anyone else wants a simple solution, they'll be able to find it with some help from Google (our family's site is access restricted, so posting it there wouldn't do much good...and it would confuse my relatives, who are used to only seeing pictures of our kids there!)
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My first WordPress plug-in: custom registration

Over the last couple of evenings, I created my first-ever WordPress plug-in, which I wrote to make it easier to customize the WordPress registration (and login) screen. As distributed, the stock version of WordPress uses a really not-very-nice registration screen--it features the WordPress logo (embedded in a background image), and links back to the WordPress site. If you wish to modify the login screen, you have to change some files in the WordPress core--and that means that every time you update, you have to remember to redo those customizations. Far from ideal...

So I took some time to read about creating WordPress plug-ins, then studied up on the available hooks to see if what I wanted to do was possible. The good news is that, as of WordPress 2.1, it was possible--and quite simple (even for my very-limited PHP skills).

After a few error-filled attempts, I wound up with a working plug-in that creates a nicely-customized registration screen, all without changing any core WordPress code--you can see the results on the registration page. (This is roughly what it looked like under WordPress 2.0, but I created that page by modifying the core WordPress files.)

If anyone wants this plug-in, feel free to grab it (36KB download)--there are some basic instructions in the customreg.php file, but I wouldn't describe it as heavily documented. Also, I'm not sure how well it works with the default login screen, as I use the King Login sidebar widget for login in the sidebar. What I'd really like to do is figure out how to display the registration form with the header, sidebar, and footer--but after some basic investigation, I think that project is beyond my skills. So for now, this is officially good enough.



Recent Macworld articles cross-posted

Macworld logoDespite my promise to stay on top of my Macworld postings, I haven't done all that well at doing so. This morning, I posted a small flurry of Macworld stories, covering the last few months' editorial pieces. Since I filed them correctly according to date, you won't see them in the RSS (I don't think?), so here are some links to the Macworld pieces, along with a short synopsis of each article:

  • Feb 28th: Don't leave the Windows open: A real-world example of what can happen to a seemingly reasonably well defended Windows XP Pro installation (as installed under Parallels on my Mac Pro). [robservatory link]
  • Feb 9th: On meaningless hyperlink graphics: I rant about Snap's "Preview Anywhere" technology, which pops-up an (unrequested!) miniature preview icon of the page you'll visit when you click a link. Ugh. [robservatory link]
  • Jan 12th: Ten iPhone suggestions: As cool as I think the iPhone will be, I probably won't be buying one. The Treo I have is so much more than a phone that I can't see losing those capabilities by switching to the iPhone. If Apple were to implement at least the majority of my ten suggestions, though, then I'd switch in a heartbeat! [robservatory link]
  • Jan 3rd: Reading between Apple’s lines: I wrote this piece after Apple's homepage changed to read "The first 30 years were just the beginning" the week before Macworld Expo. In the article, I predicted the contents of the keynote speech. Though nearly everything I wrote turned out to be wrong, I got the iPhone's general concept right, though my comment of though not even Steve can really get away with a one-button phone--can he? turned out to be exactly what he did get away with! [robservatory link]

Just so I can finish with another promise to be broken, I really will try to stay more on top of these posts from now on! :)