December 2003 – Page 2 – Something Odd!

Santa – the true story..

You probably don’t want the kids to see this animation!

Idea: Blog Gallery

Here’s something I sent to the WordPress dev list this morning…

Anyway, this morning after a hectic night taking some 250 photos of a friend’s band at a Christmas party it I was wondering how best to blog the best of them. Here’s what I thought of:
The blog entry will have a number of thumbnails (could be automatically created when the large size images are uploaded), and a space underneath, perhaps filled with the first image.
If a user clicks on one of the images then that image is displayed below the thumbnails via javascript. It’d be handy to have a “display all” button too (“dummy” <IMG src..> tags could load “blank.gif” or something until needed)

The Javascript bit is easy, it’s just changing the image src attribute, the PHP is easy. Making it easy for the potential user could be the most difficult bit. Hmm, that custom fields plugin could be handy!

Photos anyone?

Just spent the last 2 hours taking well over 200 photos of the band ~~“King of Hearts”~~ “Pleasure Dome” playing in Silver Springs. Great party, atmosphere, talent(!!) and I’m wrecked tired! Good thing I had extra batteries for my flash as lighting conditions for photography were as you might expect – difficult and contstantly changing strobes and stage lighting! A tripod was invaluable tonight!
Expect a few of the photos to make it online here in the next few days!

Nice photo gallery site

Hmm, smugmug.com has a nice gallery layout. Hawker’s photo galleries is an example I came across on STF. Drill down into each gallery – thumbnails are printed alongside a larger image. Click on any thumbnail and the page reloads with the large image visible to the right of the thumbnails. Cool.

F828 Problems?

Seems that some members of STF are having problems with their new F828 cameras. 🙁 It appears that not everyone is having those problems, but the camera firmware is user upgradeable so that may fix the problems!

The Iraqi Information Minister?

It looks like the Iraqi Information Minister is still around.

If you love Macs..

My, my! What a shocking review of the Mac! Surely he jests! 🙂

Thunderbird vs Kmail

My first mail client was the old Netscape 4.x mail client. I used that for many years and was very happy with it.
I played around with Balsa, Evolution and other clients but I wasn’t happy with any of them.
Then I tried Kmail, the KDE mail client and I was blown away. It’s been my mail client of choice for the last year and a bit.
Out of curiosity I tried Thunderbird, the new Mozilla based mail client. It’s nice, it’s almost there for me except for:

When I click on a folder I want the newest message to be displayed. There is an option to “Remember last message seen” but it doesn’t seem to work as advertised all the time.
I like to delete messages by hitting “d”. My mouse is in my right hand and I don’t want to move it back to the keyboard to hit “Delete”.
When I’m reading a message I want to press cursor-down to scroll through the message. Pressing that key in Thunderbird goes on to the next message, the next folder, or it can scroll the message, depending on which pane of the window is selected. I should probably hit “n” to go on to the next unread message.

Thunderbird is good, it’s getting much better fast, but it’s got a bit to go yet.

My Life, my thoughts, my actions?

About 10 weeks ago my girlfriend and I broke up. I’m not one for expressing myself in a public forum about my personal life so the matter has remained mostly offline.
On the advice of a very good friend I took to writing my thoughts and feelings down in a place where nobody will see them. Dead tree format’s too insecure so I’ve made a lot of use of Open Office!
Now I’m trying to figure out why writing things down helped so much! Maybe it’s just a coincidence, or perhaps it’s because I can write down what I wouldn’t tell anyone? I think it may be because by writing I need to concentrate. I need to face bare facts, and not have half forgotten conversations over a pint in a pub.
Hehe. I used to think my emotions, feelings and motivations were clear to me as I was “master of my own destiny” but the more I explore and examine the more I realise how little I know about what makes me tick!