Well I got some bad news and some good news about some of our appliances today. Bad news, our main fridge may be having problems. Good news, I fixed the dishwasher – for real this time. I’ve also learned quite a bit about coffee the past few days and as normal I’m getting a little obsessive about my new interest. Continue reading →
19
Mar 08
Test of Gallery integration
I may be a huge Smugmug fan, but I also do a lot of sites powered by Gallery so here are a few photos of my wedding included using wp-gallery-remote to very easily post them from My parents old website:
{wp-gallery-remote: gallery=1; rootalbum=3596; showalbumtitle=true; showsubalbums=true; showimagesheader=true; imagefilter=include:3597,3601,3604,3613,3618,3997,4007,4009,7615,7635,7639,7641,7647,10390;}
A+ for ease of posting, the easiest way I’ve seen yet to get images into a blog post. But I only give it a C for display. Something went kind of funky with some of the thumbs, and I’m not a big fan of the scroll to see them all. But I can probably tweak it to do something I prefer.
Now if I can just find or make a plugin that works like this for Smugmug I’ll be set!
18
Mar 08
Joys of digital
(NOTE: I got lightbox working. Click on one of the photos in this post to check it out.)
One of the interesting aspects of digital photography for me is the way that suddenly the camera make a much bigger difference in the photo than it did previously. This is of course because the camera now also does the job of the film. With film cameras it was relatively simple to swap rolls of film to get increased speed ratings or different color balances and response curves giving wildly different results for the same “photo”. Yes, much of that can be mimicked through processing and at the hands of a skilled artist can be quite convincing. But there are still physical limits that could be changed or pushed with film that are fixed and solid with digital. This was even worse when all cameras created JPG’s or TIF’s so you were stuck with the artifacts of each cameras own software shortcomings.
Thankfully RAW files bring back a lot of the flexibility of film that was missing. And in many ways give even more flexibility since now you can choose your “film” after you shoot instead of before, not to mention being able to change your mind on the fly.
Which tasty Challa would you rather have:
Read on for the differences
Continue reading →
16
Mar 08
Starting to settle
I believe all of the Blogger links are now directing here properly. Most of the theme matches, though I still have some fixes to do. Lightbox isn’t quite working automatically for my images, but I suspect I’ll have it going soon. And the new domain name doesn’t seem to be working properly yet. Once I get that figured out the worst thing is the 2 or 3 people who’ve posted on here will have to re-register since I can’t automagically recognize their google accounts anymore.
I did turn on OpenID which lets you use an existing Yahoo account, but it’s kind of involved and confusing to setup through Yahoo. Google is apparently testing OpenID in a beta version of Blogger but for now it’s not quite an option for those accounts. So to leave feedback you’ll have to quickly register on here it looks like 🙁
16
Mar 08
Excuse the dust
I’m giving up on blogger. It’s not that Blogger is bad, just that I much prefer the hack and expand ability of WordPress. As I start to focus in on what I want to do with my personal site when I finally redo it a flexible blog seems more and more important. So I setup a new WordPress blog on my site and am working on redirecting all my traffic to it. So things may be a bit bumpy while some things sort out. Read on for all the details: Continue reading →
14
Mar 08
New Carport Tarp
Last sunday while we were recovering from the previous nights party, Amy and I remembered about the Yuma Bargain Warehouse and decided to go see if we could find a new tarp for the carport. I had guestimated that it would be a 20′ x 20′ tarp…and after measuring the tattered rempains of the original that was looking about right. At the warehouse we found a good selection of tarps, of course the one we liked best (green mesh) they were out of in 20′ x 20′. But they had black mesh, heavy duty white and silver in that size. The black mesh was tempting…but being a mesh we weren’t sure if it would give as much shade as we wanted – and it was over double the cost of a silver or white tarp. The silver we didn’t like the looks of so at $37 the white tarp won out. We also picked up 2 – $2 bundles of nylon rope and headed home. Last night we finally put the tarp up, took a little over 30 minutes. Continue reading →
07
Mar 08
So the winds are gone…
Well, the winds are gone…and so is half of our carport tarp. As I mentioned in my last post the high winds on sunday really did a number on our carport. Here are some better photos of the destruction in action:
Continue reading →
05
Mar 08
Overbrew! brewverflow?
Overbrew! brewverflow?
Posting form my phone is a little annoying – but it’s better than nothing. The text above was all I sent – but I had to remove 3 paragraphs of drivel that Verizon felt they needed to add. And of course being a phone it’s hard to enter much of a message.
The cause for such spur the moment updating however is our critical capacity on homebrew. The Yuma Brewers have been busy this year even if we haven’t been updating our old blog! Matt’s fridge is at capacity – plus J has some kegs at his house in his new converted freezer. Mark found us a pile of new kegs and Rich just got a used fridge for $10. And don’t forget my own cooler project.
Matts freezer/fridge above is holding 7 kegs and a 20lb CO2 bottle, we could move the CO2 out to make room for one more keg…but he’s basically at capacity. We did finish one of those last Wednesday, and one will be coming over here tomorrow for my birthday party. Thanks to Tommy we’ll also be tapping tomorrows beer with Nitrogen which will be an exciting experiment. But we’ve got more waiting to go into kegs so it’s a good thing more homes for them are becoming available!
02
Mar 08
Wind sucks today
Better photos to follow later but I wanted to test posting from my phone. As the title says the wind here sucks today. The front half of our carport tarp has been destroyed…it’s actually gotten worse since I snapped this photo and is now torn all the way to the very top – right through the double stitched anti-rip sections 🙁
I kind of knew it was going to happen. I was never very happy with the choice of material the previous owner used for the carport, he claims it was UV rated but it’s only a few years old and already it’s badly faded and I could tell it was getting weak. In fact just yesterday I was looking at some tears that had started around the grommets in it so I knew it wouldn’t be lasting forever.
I’d like to go out and take it down before it gets any worse…but with 45MPH gusts predicted (Though I think they’re bigger based on how much our trees are swaying!) I don’t think it would be a wise idea for me to go outside and play with a large sail in high winds on top of a ladder. Since it’s a total loss at this point anyway I’ll just let the wind have it’s way and start thinking about how to deal with it.
I’d love to make something that could be rolled back for occasions where we want some sun…or when the wind gets like this 😀 But for now I’m just hoping we can find something we can afford as a replacement. I’m hoping my old boss Gwyn at Racecraft can help me get some vinyl impregnated awning fabric like she uses and help me sew it up to be the right size. Going to have to make some phone calls this week it looks like!