The Tao of Walking Ridge

I’ve been very happy with my WordPress blog, and continue to be impressed by its flexibility.  One thing I missed from my old static website was the Flash menus I’d created.  They added a bit of flair, and were fun.  Well, thanks to the Kimili Flash embed plugin for WordPress, I was quickly able to adapt the flash menus for blog website and embed them into pages.  The links of the graphical menu can either be categories or tags or other pages with graphic panels.  This creates an interesting way to explore the website, in parallel to the the sidebar navigation.

The Kimili plugin adds an icon to the post editor in my edition of WordPress (2.5) and worked flawlessly.  The Kimili plugin is a great way to add Flash animation to your WordPress blog.

If only there was Flash animation software for Linux…..

Take it easy.  But take it.

-Woodie Guthrie

I read Chuck Klosterman’s “Killing Yourself to Live”.  It is a fantastic read.  Chuck writes in a unique and entertaining style.  After finishing his book, this thought came into my head, in a style inspired by Chuck’s writing:

My life is an expression of geo-diversity. My office is in Miami, my kitchen is in Orlando, my bedroom is in Key West, my girlfriend lives on another planet. This other planet is yet to be discovered due to the whole Hubble Telescope debacle. Since NASA is a part of the government, I hold the government responsible. I believe the government is in need of real change, which is why I support Barack Obama.

Karaoke - kareeokee:

An activity wherein people typically consume alcohol prior to ascending a stage in front of a crowd to sing into a microphone which is inexplicably connected to an audio amplifier, forcing all present to listen. This, in turn, inspires those forced to listen to take the stage and seek sonic revenge. This, in turn, inspires all involved to consume more alcohol

You always get a warning shot across the bow.  Unfortunately, it sometimes arrives after the torpedo.

Wordpress does a great job of managing discussion. The ability to moderate comments before they are posted to the web is a great way to allow others to post material, but still keep control of your site (or blog’s) content. Unfortunately, spammers unleash bots to create links to their site (do these even accomplish anything anymore?). This creates a daily task of deleting spam comments. At first the ambiguous comments fooled me, but when they bots were foolish enough to post the same comment 5 times, I deleted them all.

But now more.  Since installing SpamBam, a WordPress plugin, I’ve stopped receiving comment spam.  The SpamBam plugin uses a clever way to determine if it is a person or a bot leaving spam.  I had tries some captchta plugins, but couldn’t get them to work.  (Captcha is the wiggly letters you must read and enter into a box to verify you are a person).  SpamBam works in the background, and is transparent.  Score one victory for the bloggers.

To see, I created some simple code to form a radial button group of two buttons. If this works within the post, then PHP code should execute just fine.  Well, I got a definite sort of.  I pasted into the HTML view, then saved. This displayed a bit corrupt. But if I switched to “visual” it basically worked. A couple extra characters were created that I was able to edit. Conclusion: Some simple PHP commands should be possible to implement in posts, even for the PHP novice.

My Pentax Optio S7 captures photos from under my kite that are high enough resolution to allow some cropping, and still have crisp photos.

I just picked up a Pentax Optio S7 on eBay and it is able to grab some really sharp photos flying under my kite.  I put the camera in sport mode, and trigger it with an IR interval trigger.

This round building in Port Huron on the Black River created great shading in black and white.  A bit of luck were the ducks swimming by.  I did not notice them when I clicked the shutter.  Photographed with a Mamiya C220, Plus-X pan.