It is not very often that I get motivated to roll up my sleeves and fix some things that bother me about this site. Editing the look ("theme") of a WordPress site involves editing a style.css stylesheet and/or any number of .php files. Now, I don't know the first thing about either of these, so that involves a lot of googling, trial-and-error, pulling of hair and gnashing of teeth. But once I get going, I usually discover a lot of new "problems" to fix.

In many ways I was lucky when I first started this blog (and didn't know a thing about WordPress). I immediately disabled the "Visual" mode in the post editor and switched to HTML editing mode. The Visual text editor makes it impossible to align/space everything correctly, and it inserts unnecessary html tags all over the place.

I initially searched for "minimal" when searching for themes for this site. I settled on the ever-so-popular Journalist theme (preview of original). I was fortunate, because this has to be one of the easiest themes to modify. People have modified it and released unofficial versions of it, like Journalist 1.9.9.9 and Journalist 2.1. I have slowly morphed Journalist 1.9.9.9 into what you see now. It's larger, more spread out, and the photo caption boxes are different. I just have to change the title at the top of the page to a banner image and it will hardly be recognizable.

Last night I eventually got everything lined up the way I wanted (it literally comes down to shifting things 2 pixels this way, 1 pixel that way). Then I snooped around and found out how to make a permanent, auto-generated Archives page. Also--remember when I made that "WordPress Plugins Used on this Blog" entry? Well, that took a lot of work to type all that out, insert the links, and format the post. Last night I found a plugin that automatically generates a list/description of plugins, so I made a permanent page here that does the same thing. Pretty cool.

After having nice weather for a few days, we are supposed to have a couple of scorchers this weekend. Wimbledon starts Monday. My fav tournament.

At different parts of my life, I have found out that people just love to give away old things, but only if they know that their old "things" are going to take on a new life.

My parents got me a new turntable when I was maybe 17. Well, saying "turntable" nowadays alludes to a DJ's turntable... this is a record player. Most of the music I was listening to at the time was available on records, and over the next few years I found out that people just love to give away their old records. Stacks and stacks of them. Crates full of LPs, from behind the dress clothes in the closet, or under some boxes in the attic. As long as I showed a genuine interest in these records--which I did--and as long as I would allow them to talk to me about their albums as they looked through them one last time, people had no problem giving me all their LPs.

I mean, you can get LPs at a thrift store for a buck a piece, and there are occasionally some good finds in there, but getting 70 or 100 records all at once... there's nothing like it. And you have all the time in the world to sift through them and listen to whatever you want, in your own home.

Well, once I figured out this small fact of life, I casually brought up listening to records in conversations with my friends' parents. Instantly, I'm in some sort of club. "Oh, you listen to records? You like records? Come upstairs to the closet in the guest room, I'll give you a whole bunch of records." This is how I ended up with about 700 LPs in my collection, most of them free. This is also how I ended up with 4 or 5 repeat copies of some popular albums. Then the record donor would paw through all the records, telling me which ones they liked, or which ones were no good (those were always their sister's albums, or their ex-husband's).

There is something satisfying about music on vinyl. It's just there. I don't have to worry about losing my data or any of that nonsense. Nothing can destroy it except a house fire. The records will even survive a flood and still be playable once given a cursory cleaning. They will still be playable hundreds of years from now, provided anyone has a player for them. Brand new store-bought CDs will last 20 years if they are lucky (even with no scratches).

Jaime got a new laptop in January and I inherited her old one. I did a lot of tinkering around with it, and eventually it could do everything that I needed it to do, just like a brand new laptop. Like old vinyl records, a lot of old computers still work.

Now, my main computer is irreplaceable and no amount of tinkering or OS installations will replace the sheer power of it. Being able to manage/modify my library of [over] 20,000 photos with Lightroom was unheard of 10 years ago.

BUT, running Windows 7 should not require a supercomputer. I can understand that a lot of modern software (especially games) will inherently require a more powerful computer, but booting up into Windows really should not require an increasing amount of computer power. The technology has increased so quickly that no one is focusing on making their software work correctly. There is so much extra processing power and RAM in modern computers that programmers figure no one will notice if their software is full of memory leaks and requires half of your CPU's power for simple calculations. It has gotten to the point where cell phones have a 1GHz processor in them and there are still mysterious delays when trying to do something simple like navigate the menu system.

Anyhow, this has made me a magnet for old computers recently. People love it if you tell them that you can make an old computer run a few modern programs and perform well on the internet. My father brought me four kind-of-mostly-working computers last week, Steve has some stuff for me, and Eric got an old Pentium III from his boss that he gave me today. So far I have breathed life into the best computer that I received, a Pentium IV with 256megs of RAM (I spent 20 bucks and upgraded it to 512mb RAM). I gave it back to my Dad when he drove through town a few days ago. Now I have this Pentium III with only 64mb of RAM and I'm trying to find something to run on it. I may just use DOS on it.

Anyone got any old computers that work? First I'd have to get rid of these current ones (and prove to my wife that I'm not a hoarder), but I'm open to some old computers that are just sitting around.

Tennis is back but I don't really care this time around. I think I'm sick of all the weather delays and timezone difference issues. I got two tickets to the final match of the Legg Mason Tennis Classic coming this August. I had a good time at last year's matches even though the heat was quite bad in early August. I'm excited to be going again. Going to the Men's finals ensures that you'll see at least one "famous" player in person.

In many ways, babies and dogs go hand-in-hand. For instance, I gave Stephen about ¼ of a leftover biscuit in his highchair this morning. He just mashed it up and made a huge mess. I'm not sure how much he even ate. With one swipe of a clean cloth, a hundred little crumbs fell to the floor. The floor was clean within ten seconds.

I think I have the new/old laptop set up pretty well by now. Didn't take long, once I received my replacement CD drive.

WordPress is now seven years old, and it is growing faster than ever. This tiny blog post is a good recap of the accomplishments of WordPress, most of them happening in recent times. This free software now manages over 20 million of the world's websites.

WordPress (the software used to manage this blog) has changed the way I think about computers and software. The more I learned about WordPress, the more I couldn't believe it was free. That prompted me to try a version of linux (a free alternative to Microsoft Windows), and has eventually landed me here, where I only use free or legally purchased software on all my computers. To be honest, once you learn your way around linux, it takes less effort to operate free software than it does to steal commercially-available software for Windows through means of warez.

I just took the dogs out literally minutes before it started raining out of nowhere. Gotta love it.

Since I began this post this morning (when I said I didn't care about Tennis), Robin Soderling has ended Roger Federer's streak of 23 consecutive appearances in the semifinals of major tournaments. One of the greatest streaks alive in sports, and I saw it end on live tv. To put the streak in perspective, it's like Tiger Woods finishing in the top 4 of every Major Golf Tournament for six straight years. It's equivalent to the same team making it to the "final four" of the NCAA basketball tournament for 23 years in a row. Robin Soderling is now the only player in history to have beaten both Nadal and Federer at the French Open.

Well, I inherited Jaime's old laptop in January. I spent a little over a hundred bucks upgrading/repairing it (keep in mind that I don't have a job.. so any money that I spend makes me feel a little bit guilty).

Well, last night, after having a laptop of my own for an entire four months, I spilled wine on it. The whole living room was dark except for the glow of the laptop because I was the last one up. I ran to get a paper towel, and I as soon as the paper towel made one swipe across the keyboard, *pop* goes the laptop. Boom. Pow. Bam. Miniature explosion sound and the whole thing went dead. I opened the laptop up all the way to 180 degrees and laid it on the carpet upside down over night. That is probably what I should have done while the computer was still operational.

There is still a tiny bit of hope that it will turn on, but the rational side of me knows that something in the motherboard blew up and the computer is inoperable. For good. I had gotten so used to hanging out in the living room with the laptop. I basically never made trips downstairs except to edit photos.

I am doing endless reconfigures/reformats/repartitionings/reinstalls on my desktop PC. Trying to get my linux and windows installs just right. The curse of being a nerd. I won't get into the hairy details at this point (hopefully ever), but i'm using virtualbox to sort of emulate a PC within a PC. And on this emulated (guest) PC I installed Windows XP. Hopefully, this means I can run Windows programs from within Linux. This way I can run the Windows programs that I need without rebooting my system.

Other than wasting all my free time with computer nonsense, I have been trying to get back on a roll with this blog. Needless to say, it's hard to maintain a web page when you don't have a computer.

I have recently done our grocery shopping at night after Stephen is sleeping. It cuts down on the time Jaime and I can spend together, but it also cuts down on the amount of time I spend at the grocery store. The place is empty at 8:30pm on a week night (of course).

I have also been spending/wasting about 30-60 minutes per day playing liero. I have a permanent server set up called "classic liero" if anyone ever wants to play. I have all the settings and weapons perfectly trimmed to get rid of boring moments and redundant or unfair weapons.

I grew up on the demoscene, though I never participated. When I was 13 years old, I would dial in to a BBS that had ftp capability so I could download demos and songs off hornet.org. In its most basic form, a "demo" is an executable file that shows off the graphics/programming/music talents of a group of people that form a "demogroup". It can be any visual effects/themes imaginable, synced to music. Demos have been around for over 20 years on all platforms of computers. About a week ago, I was curious to see if the demoscene was still alive, and it is still alive and well (mostly in the EU, just like when I was a kid).

Demos were always "cutting edge" as far as technology was concerned. People were programming 3d effects in their demos well before computer games were using 3d textures and shadowing effects. The average user could not run the current day's demos when they were first released due to not owning the most current model of CPU/graphics card. Nowadays, the visual effects/animation world has completely caught up to the demoscene as far as visual effects go. Special effects producers can now do all the things that programmers could do. This has really made the demoscene less relevant, in my opinion.

One thing that continues to be fresh about the demoscene, though, is the file-size limitations. There are categories for 64k, 4k, and 1kb filesizes. This places a limit on the total size of the demo (including textures, music, graphics, and coding). For instance, this demo has a file size of 1k:

That entire video, including the song, is generated on a PC from a .exe that is 1024 bytes (smaller than the size of this post). These days, it's all about exploiting tricks in people's graphics cards. Even though it has a very small file size, it has very steep system requirements to run this file. There are even competitions who can make the best PC Game at different file sizes. All downloads are free and can be found at pouet.net.

Some more demos with small file sizes:

4k - Elevated by RGBA and TBC (2009)
4k - nasa by Still(2010)
128bytes - spongy by TBC (2009)
32bytes - matisse by orbitaldecay (2010)
1k - Tracie by TBC (2007)
4k - Sincere by TBC (2008)

A[nother] body was found in the pond by our house. The cops came and roped off the entire pond while about 150 people watched them extract the body. It was an adult black male that had been drinking down by the pond the night before. Right after we moved here, a child drowned in that same pond. Also, someone in the house across from us killed themselves about 2 years ago when Steve was out smoking on the front steps. Lots of death around here, but surprisingly none of it is due to citizen-on-citizen gun violence.

It is impossible to not be a fan of Kevin Durant's at this point. He's nice, extremely skilled, super young, and he shut down Kobe. As a side note, the NBA all-star game has only featured a classic H.O.R.S.E. game for the past two years, and Kevin Durant has won them both.

I have only been using Linux for two months and I'm already strategizing how I can get by without Windows at all. I absolutely must have Windows to run Adobe Lightroom, Jeskola Buzz, and Adobe Audition. That's it. I'm looking into Virtualbox to install Windows XP as a virtual machine within Linux.

Stephen finally got his last incisor. He now has six teeth, the four front ones in the top and the two front ones in the bottom. He is a little more interested in walking every day. Should be soon, he takes 7-10 steps now before falling.

Hope everyone has a good Friday..

Well, I slapped the new motherboard in my box and my desktop PC booted up. I am a money pit. It was acting a bit strangely, so I backed up My C: and reformatted.

My data is in tact. I can now continue my endless listening of Ben Folds. Every couple of years, I remember how much I like Ben Folds. I love how he's not afraid to attempt any style. He's not afraid to put a cheesy french horn part in the chorus for a "musical theater" feel or distort the bass for a "rock" feel. He also, while being a good singer, does everything wrong as a vocalist (meaning he just sings like a normal guy). Bastard, Landed, Jesusland... all off the same album.

Hopefully I can get my stuff organized and start posting photos and videos again soon. Very soon.

Happy birthday, Mom!

Well, I headed downstairs to finish editing a photo of Davis (that my wife took) and post it, and my computer was frozen. As of now, completely dead. I haven't had much time to troubleshoot, but I did unplug all hard drives, dvd drives, and one of my memory sticks. Still nothing. Won't even boot to BIOS.

So the endless stream of photos is suspended indefinitely.

I was on such a roll yesterday. I accomplished so many nerdy things that I never thought I'd have the ability to accomplish.

First, I exported all my old livejournal entries and converted them to WordPress posts. This was all handled within WordPress and was all automated. There are some minor issues pertaining to formatting and some other things, but I'm all done! My old pictures (2005-2008) can be seen in the lj category: here. There are pictures from my wedding/honeymoon, new hampshire, all kinds of good stuff. It even imported all the old comments. Pretty happy about that.

It's interesting for me to see that, in many ways, I had no idea how to edit/optimize photos back in 2005-06, but I still managed to post a lot of good shots. I think that's because my original Nikon "coolpix" e5700 was able to do so many things on its own. Excellent macro support, RAW support, and a movable screen with live view made it a perfect "starter" camera. I often wonder what would have happened to my interest in photography if I had gotten a different camera at the time. I definitely miss being able to shoot in macro mode.

After that I spent quite a bit of time trying to understand style.css sheets and how all the different .php files come together to make all my pages/categories on this blog. I have a very simple layout on here, so I think I may have actually learned how it all works. I changed the sidebar on the right, gave it a grey background and got rid of the dividing line between the main section (here) and the sidebar (over to the right). I also took forever to make that custom search bar with no "search" button to click, and made a few pics for my "about me" section. A few steps in the right direction. Now I just need a banner at the top, and a few other things. This is easier than I thought. I've been so scared to edit anything (last time I learned anything about HTML, style sheets were not in use, and now they determine the entire look of your site) that I've avoided it all, maybe a bit too much.

Then, since I was on a roll, I looked up ways to make Ubuntu faster and ended up editing 4 config files (blindly trusting some people's blog posts and forum responses I found via Google). Still up and running in Linux, so I didn't break anything... I don't think. I'm starting to drink the Linux cool aid a little bit. It breaks down to two basic things for me. First, you are immune to everything Windows isn't. Shady website? Might have viruses? No big deal, I'm immune to all viruses in Linux. Second, if you care enough, you can make Linux do anything you want. For instance, when I receive an instant message (AIM service), my computer reads my messages aloud to me. It took a lot of work, but I hooked my AIM client through the "accessibility" text-to-speech synthesizer. In Linux, you have unfettered access to even the most sensitive files, so you can always fix whatever is wrong. If you care enough.

I started off trying to learn how to modify this crap so I can get my wife's blog (in the works) going, and in the process of learning how to do a few things, I took a 6-8hr detour and worked on my own site all day.