Another Opinion Among Many

Actually, its http://www.whereswilly.com.  From the site: “Do you ever wonder where that paper money in your pocket has been, or where it will go next? This is the place to find out.”

I got a $20 bill out of the ATM (to pay a bill with - boo!) that had this URL on it, so I checked it out.  There’s a companion site, http://wheresgeorge.com, which may have been created first.  Its a neat concept.  I’ve registered so that I can get updates as to where this bill has gone to after it  parts ways with me.  We’ll see if it sits in a vault, like it apparently has before I got it.  Who knows which internet savvy person will notice the message on the bill next!

I was checking out some of the images from the various webcams in the city and around the province to see how yucky the roads looked after our latest storm (which got the kiddies a day off school) and I saw this pretty image from the camera at City Hall.  It often looks like this in the dark hours, but I’ve never taken a capture.  I just think its a surreal look that needs to be shared.  Hence:

I’m not sure if RT Cunningham cause this or not, but I’ve been a bit more keen to music videos on YouTube.  I have rediscovered a few gems from “America’s Got Talent” winner Bianca Ryan.  Damn, that girl’s got pipes!

Damn! She’s 11 years old! What’s she goung to be capable of at 20?

I’ve been playing around with Granular Linux for the last week, and I must say that I kind of like it. I’m not sure if its going to replace the standard PCLOS install that I’ve been using or not. I decided to use a capture application called recordMyDesktop and convert the resulting ogg theora file to mpeg with FFmpeg, so that I could upload it to YouTube for all to see what its like running a full screen video capture while running Beryl on KDE. I just set the effects to random and let it go. Check it out:

The URL to the video is here if you don’t see the video embedded. I used these tools on my Pentium 3 machine with 512MB RAM. It has an Radeon 9550 256MB video card and a slow hard drive controller. Most of the time, these captures are done on really fast machines. I thought that it’d be neat to see a few of the neat things that you can do with Beryl.

Actually, Beryl runs quite smoothly and rotating the cube of desktops is pretty slick. The KBFX menu was a neato add on that the Live CD had and anybody can enable it, but the normal Mandriva way of doing the menu comes out first on the hard drive install. Trying to capture a full screen raw video did push this machine a bit too hard, though.

I would never go for this size on my own as we don’t have a pan large enough for it, but a 16 inch “rising crust” frozen pizza was given to me. Turns out it was just cheese, and our meat-lover friends didn’t want it. By the time I got it home, it was more than 1/2 thawed, so we decided that pizza was on the menu for lunch. We have an apartment sized stove, which is 24″ wide on the exterior. This means that, at most, you have 18″ to work with in the oven.

What I ended up doing is putting the pizza directly on the rack, which I don’t usually like to do, as I prefer a less crunchy crispy crust. But, from experience (vast experience) in making pizzas from scratch, I employed a technique that I use on my home made pies. The trick is to cook your pizza nearly all the way and, with what you think is about 2 minutes left, turn your oven on to broil, hence using only the top element (for electric ovens - pulling the pie out and putting it underneath in the broiling drawer, if you’re lucky and have a gas stove). What this accomplishes is that golden brown “spotting” on the cheese that is a sure sign of a delicious pizza (or lasagne). The crust wasn’t too bad for a prepared product.

So, I’ve been all over the computer this weekend. I downloaded the ISO image of the Vector Linux 5.8 SOHO edition to play with. I’ll be doing a review of it later, after I get to try it out a bit. This is the first time that I installed Vector after two others, so its was a good test of a new situation for me. There was a bump or two but, otherwise, it went well. Wait until you see the screen shots. I had to modify the configuration file for the bootloader to boot the other operating systems, which is a bit disappointing, but I anticipated that. It was yet another distro that didn’t recognize my Envision monitor properly (none of them do) but at least there was a message after configuration that stated I may have to adjust things. That was nice.

I’ve also put in a few refinements to the new theme. I hope that you like them. Notice that my middle section (former sidebar) has a slightly different layout. I’ve slid the blogroll (the entire one this time) to the bottom of the section and replaced the side column with tags, so that finding things by subject is easier. That has actually led me to think about another caveat of using the Wordpress loop this way, that I will have to resolve. It involves the use of the if is_whatever() and else conditional tags.

You may also notice that the Links page is fleshed out a bit and seems a bit more complete.  I’ve tried to add descriptions to all the sites that I have linked to.  I had a bit of an issue with my database a while back and lost all my categories for the photo album, so I’ve been working on getting that back in order again as well.  Bear with me on that one.

And, to thicken the plot, I’m also doing this on one of the latest nightly builds of Wordpress 2.3 (still alpha), which seems to be working alright, except for one small thing that I have to test some more.  I haven’t seen any new tag functionality over UTW, but there are some other neat things that I like.  By the way, did anybody who upgraded to 2.2 notice that plugins that cause problems will be automatically deactivated instead of borking your whole site until you FTP in and remove or rename the offender.  Its getting better.   There’s been talk about an upgrader.  We’ll see how that goes.

So, I’ve actually gotten around to it. If you’ve been visiting on and off over the last few days, you may have caught a glimpse of this new theme as I tested it out with this blog. I’ve been working on and off on it for a few weeks now and its ready for public consumption, I think.

There are a few other things I’d like to refine on it, but this is the way that its going go look going forward. Its a tad different than anything that I’ve done before and some of the structure hasn’t been seen often at all. You’ll notice that there’s no traditional sidebar on the side. I’ve moved it below the first post and the treat from the past. I’m moving some of the clutter from the front page to its own page, such as my blogroll. I’ve kept it trimmed for a long time, although my bookmark list is looooong! So, I will get to work adding to it so that the links page is fleshed out. Once I learn how, I’ll probably change the template for that page (and maybe the archives page as well) to a two column design, like newspaper columns. That way the list of links (and older posts) will be lined up in nice neat lines to be viewed with pleasure.

I was originally going to try coding this one from scratch, which is why I didn’t have anything up months ago. If you want to know the inspiration for this theme, you should visit the site of J David Macor, who is the theme author that ported Deliciously Blue from Glossy Blue. I replaced the icons with the excellent free Drunky Love ones by Kevin Wetzels. I’ve left footer links so that you can go and visit their sites for yourself. This theme is sponsored by no one.

You’ll notice that this theme doesn’t look much like the original any more, either by color and artwork, or by design. But, if you dig into the code, you’ll see that I’ve left much of the code intact (even the css naming, which I will eventually clean up). Expect a tag cloud at one point or another and perhaps something in a big block at the bottom, once I figure out whether I want anything down there.

Tell me what you think. I really like how this has turned out - especially the double wordpress loop. I hope that you do too, as I have wanted to free myself of the sidebar for a while. If you see that something is missing, please let me know. If you have browser weirdness, let me know, especially if you use IE6 or IE7, as I haven’t done much testing with IE6 and I’ve resisted IE7 so far on my Windows computer.

Well, its late here (at least for the time I got up yesterday morning) and my eyes are barely still open, so I’m off to bed. Comments are still unmoderated locally. I’m just relying on Akismet and SSP, so you should have no trouble commenting and seeing the results immediately.

By the way, I’ve used the colors in the picture that you see above as my palette for the theme. Those leaves were plucked off a tree on the way to Caleb’s school.