MikeBrum.com

I built the Lego 8294 Excavator set and took a series of photos to make a time lapse.

While the video isn’t the greatest thing ever (I haven’t really done this before today!), I wanted to share it. I figure this is the only way I’ll learn.

Enjoy!

Nothing major to report. Just lots of little things.

Today’s Wednesday, so I picked up some comics on the way home. It was a good day for some titles that I’m a fan of – Deadpool, Farscape, Hellboy and Army of Darkness. I’m going to need to get a new box to hold comics and another set of dividers soon. Space is getting tight and things are starting to get disorganized – which irks me to no end. Some aspects of my life can be blissfully disorganized, while I get super ADD if others are not. I don’t claim to understand it, I just deal with it.

The past week or so has been Lego-centric. I’ve made a few small purchases for specific pieces that I need for a project that I’m visualizing. I think I’m going to be building a set tomorrow or Friday night (that’s exactly how cool I am) and then start putting specing out what I need for the other work in progress. I think I need a second container for parts. My current one is almost at capacity and I have more things that need to be sorted. Meh.

I ordered some candy through Amazon and I’m waiting on its arrival. It was supposed to show up on Tuesday but didn’t due to the snow we got. Then it was supposed to show up today but apparently requires a signature- even though another package was delivered without one. Luckily I can work from home tomorrow morning and wait for it to show up. It’s just a pain in the ass. At least I’ll have a bunch of candy!

The only other bit of news is that I’ve signed up for a course at NESOP. It’s a creative lighting course, which I’m excited about. Most of the things that I enjoy shooting require external lighting to do well – so anything that helps me in that area is beneficial! There’s also an “advanced” lighting course (meant to be taken after the one I signed up for) which is definitely an option pending how this one goes and what the specific course material will be. Bridges to cross though.

Since I’m working tomorrow evening, I’m forcing myself to stay up a bit later tonight so I can get up a bit later and thus be prepared for the later end time tomorrow. My sleep schedule has been pretty messed up since vacation and I can’t afford to be a zombie while working on production systems in the evenings. Gotta get my sleep scheduled shifted back to where it should be. Hopefully something can get sorted out in the next week or two. This is getting old real fast.

That’s more or less it. Like I said, nothing big. Staying busy, but still not doing a whole lot. Strange how that works out.

Here’s some topside shots from our Bahamas trip.

The thumbnails don’t reflect the actual composition of the images, so click through if you’re interested!

If you look up, you’ll see a new link: Photo Galleries.

I wrote some code to leverage the existing gallery engine that I’m using and display a nice listing of the galleries that I have to show. I’m running the exec-php plugin to allow me to actually embed code in my posts and pages, which increases WordPress’s versatility exponentially in my opinion. I used it a while back while running my old D&D Blog, but haven’t really had need to dabble with it for quite some time. I wanted to find a “simple solution” for a gallery display and I think this is it.

I had to make a minor code change to a NextGEN Gallery module in the end, but it was amazingly trivial. While I’ve been working on this for about 4 hours, it was also while chatting, browsing and watching The Big Lebowski – so I definitely didn’t have my head buried in code the whole time. The biggest issue was tracking down the NextGEN Gallery issue, which turned out to be the addition of just two lines of code. I still want to add some error handling/sanity test code to the gallery wrapper, but it’s ready to go as-is.

Definitely feeling good about finally having a nice gallery browser. I’m sure I’ll extend it over time.

In 2008 we went to Grand Cayman for about a week and a half to do some diving.

Due to some technical issues, the underwater shots really didn’t turn out, but I got a handful of good topside shots that I’ve posted.

They’ve been added to the regular galleries and you can check out the site here:

More site news – for those that care.

1. Added new Contact page
2. Added new About page
3. Minor change to code so that when a page has comments disabled, it will not output the “Comments are closed.” message – because it’s simply ugly and unnecessary
4. Minor change to code to properly respect user-defined page order in the header

That’s about it. Nothing too special, just bringing everything together.

I think the theme that I chose was written a few versions ago and doesn’t have support for a lot of the newer features. It’s not a huge problem for me (for instance, I don’t need threaded comments), but I just have to wonder at what point maintaining the theme will outweigh the value of finding one that’s written for the current version of WordPress.

I haven’t reached that point yet – but that’s probably because I’ve been able to fix all the problems I’ve encountered thus far. We’ll see if I get to a point where that’s not the case.

I’m currently at the dealership getting some minor work done on my Jeep. The heater dial only works when it’s in the “high” mode and I get a small amount of weird feedback when in 4WD. The first is likely a really quick fix. The second, not so sure. We’ll see. I’m also getting the usual oil/filter/fluid change as well – which is just standard maintenance.

Today was an early day waking up at 6 so I could get up and “beat the rush”. I was also up early yesterday, though for no real reason. I didn’t sleep well and when Corinne’s alarm went off, I was already partially awake and there wasn’t any way I was going to get back up – so I just woke up and started working from home. Given that I was up early for our entire vacation, it looks like I’m going to have to break myself back to a later schedule.

I’m obviously online now and logged into work. I’ve already done a few small tasks and will be working until my car’s done and then head home and finish off the day. Better than having to take a weekend or personal time.

On Monday night I gave all of my underwater photo equipment a once-over. I did some repacking of the hardcase that it all lives in and made sure everything has a home. I also consolidated all of the paperwork I have for it and got that all stored. I probably won’t be touching it again for another few months, so I’m glad it’s in a good state while it’s stored.

That’s really been what the last few days have been like – just taking care of the mundane and getting back into the routine.

Not horrible, but not amazingly fun either.

I’m absolutely amazed with the number of aspiring web indexes/search engines there are. I’m equally amazed at how many of them compare themselves to Google in some fashion. As mentioned below, I’ve been paying more attention to my access logs and the number of spiders/crawlers/bots/whatever you want to call them is crazy.

The only tip I have is that if you want to compete in that market, do something unique. Trying to out-Google Google isn’t going to work. Having a million-billion sites indexed doesn’t help you if your search results suck or take forever to be returned. Impress me with some meaningful content-aware app that knows what I’m looking for even before I do… and do it without being bigbrother creepy.

Anyway, I got a response from the “bandwidth thief” below… who turned out to at least have a good sense of humor about the whole thing. I still find the whole episode hilarious. I’m so lucky that I can amuse myself!

In the site news category (something that I’m sure most people don’t give a rat’s ass about), I’ve added a “top 10 pages viewed” feature to the sidebar. I had to do some minor hacking to get the output to play nice with my theme, but it wasn’t too difficult. I could turn on a per-page counter but would think that that’s a bit cheesy and obnoxious. At least it’s out of the way over there and you choose to ignore it. Naturally, it’s not retroactive and counting starts as of installation earlier this evening.

That’s the long and short. Not a ton going on. Just trying to get back into work mode.

I think I’m going to go buy some candy on Amazon.

The internet isn’t new. There is a certain etiquette that most people should be aware of by this stage of the game. One thing not to do is to hot-link to content on another person’s site.

Why shouldn’t you do this?

First because it’s not your stuff. It’s like borrowing someone’s car without telling them. Even if they’re a good friend, they probably won’t find that the coolest thing ever.

Second because you’re effectively stealing that person’s bandwidth. You’re making their server do all the work for your page. That’s just not cool either.

I’ve been paying more attention to my server logs than I was before and noticed someone pointing to a file that didn’t exist anymore due to the site redesign. Knowing a bit about mod_rewrite, I threw up a little rule to display a complete different image than the one that they were expecting. If you’re curious what the result is, have a look at http://klareto.blogspot.com/. As of the time of this post, it’s worth a quick laugh.

So please… don’t steal my stuff.

I finished editing the last of the images on the flight home and uploaded and tagged them shortly after getting in and settled.

You can check them out by clicking on the image below.

Enjoy!