This week went by so quickly. I feel like I just got out of the SF & DGD show last Saturday. Been really busy at work as usual. I haven't been doing much consulting at all lately. I might have an appointment on Monday, but who knows, depends on whether or not I feel like it I guess. I've been sick, I think I caught it from a certain someone, blech! Oh well, I think I am actually starting to feel better, it feels like it's just in my head now. Nothing that some medicine and tea can't fix.

I've got a bunch of new games, so I've got to update the master list. I am thinking about just ex-ing off a bunch that I know I will never touch again. I played some Crisis Core this morning, was fun. I really do like that game, I actually might boot it back up once I finish this entry. So emilie is going to be gone for pretty much all of the next week which means I'll be alone here at the apartment all week! I don't know if I'll be able to figure out what to do!

I almost bought the WALL-E DVD today, but then I figured if I am actually going to buy a movie that it might as well as be on Blu-ray. Especially a movie like that.

Been talking to this guy (raf ) who does a bunch of Scribbld's CSS, he's really cool. He became friends with morgan  and then I met him through her. Definitely a geek genius! Poor Morgan has been going through a lot lately, but I won't go into to much detail, I'll let her tell her own story if she wishes.

I'm really enjoying this backlit keyboard, I'm sitting here with music playing on AppleTV in the dark working on various computer projects and I can see my keyboard perfectly fine. I think it would be really cool to pull it apart and replace the white lights with red or something, might even make it better on the eyes in the dark.

A lot of kids (okay 3 but in like the span of 2 weeks) having been dying at the University, it's definitely a little sketchy and it sucks. I don't/didn't know of any of them personally. Also my friends boyfriends brother died this past week so that was definitely not fun. I believe he was a grade above me in high school, I didn't really know him, or was friends with him, but it's pretty close to me...not sure I have much else to say about that subject.

I played some Resistance this afternoon. Definitely a fun game and it's just got a really good amount of difficulty to it, where I can stand it and it's not too easy and not too hard. Really well done, I definitely want to get the 2nd game.

I am really digging the NXE. Morgan and I share an account so it kind of sucks we can't have 2 avatars/characters, but that's understandable, you're not really supposed to be sharing an account, but considering I log in every other week or something it made sense for us haha That and she had been working on a game back when we first got Xbox and she didn't create her own account or forgot to log into the one she created so now she doesn't want to loose those gamer points she accumulated haha. Go figure...now my character is some blonde haired chick...

I haven't really talked to makkintosshu or Keith in a few weeks, it kind of sucks, but it just goes to show you how crazy busy we all are. I haven't even played GoW2 with either of them, suck!

Tonight, I think Emilie and I are going to watch The Dark Knight and maybe WALL-E...maybe some BECK too. It's rather cold here, it started snowing like crazy today! Anyways, I think I'll jump into Crisis Core and attempt to figure out why PSP doesn't support WPA2 as an 802.11x encryption protocol...grrr....! 

Wow, I feel like I've not written in here in forever...

Last night I went to see Senses Fail w/ Dance Gavin Dance and Sky Eats Airplane and some other band...it was amazing. I've really got to buy another Canon point and shoot. My poor SD200 is pretty much useless...I might see if there's anything Clifford can do too it, maybe replace the flash or something.

Today I spent some time working on some site-wide CSS, although I didn't get much done. Tomorrow I am planning on getting the search box on the navigation strip working better. I think we might post some site contests for layouts (both of site and my journal) and give out free Paid Accounts to those that are worthy...I'll post more about that as we figure out some more details.

Damn, never finished this entry...oh well :P

morgan although broken wristed has worked very hard with me on updating the Scribbld code base to the latest version (as of yesterday). One new thing i really like is that it automagically snags the latest song from your Last.fm account and plug it into the update page and also the update page (rich text editor) now works in Safari 3/Webkit. I am very very happy with that. It only took us about 45 minutes to an hour to upgrade everything which was really nice.

I beat GoW2 over the weekend. It was a tremendously amazing game. I have a feeling I might play through it another time because I didn't do it with makkintosshu or Keith. I haven't really heard much from either of those guys lately.

Wrath of the Lich King comes out this week. I am excited, although I don't know why since our Warcraft server won't be updated for some time.

I've setup my new MacBook and I am thinking about returning it already because the color is absolutely horrible. I never thought I would be one to bitch about color issues but this is absolutely horrible. I might have to run through the calibration thing again...The whole display looks all washed out, the colors are sucky. My old black MacBook was much better then this. I do enjoy the backlit keyboard though. It also feels really nice when you're typing on it though.

So today, not much happened minus the database maintenance and code upgrade. I'll be heading to the barn in a bit. One of the horses/boarders that had been there for like 8 years left this weekend. Sucky! I might go riding today...depends on how I feel.

Hrmm, I just played with the brightness on the MacBook, colors are a bit better now...

Ah, well, I'm out!

More busy excuses coming...I barely have time to use Twitter let alone Scribbld. I got my hands on LittleBigPlanet a couple days earlier then the scheduled release so emilie, morgan and I have been playing a bunch of it. I also grabbed the players guide today since I was up in Burlington with my car. I had to go up there to put in my hours since I forgot my time codes. Oops...

Everything else has been really good. Helped Morgan with some of the CSS and design of her new blog:

http://www.tehgeekgirl.com

I suggest giving it a quick peek, it's got lots of fun things in it!

I'm really digging Secret and Whisper, I really cannot stop listening to them. I think we're addicted!

Got to head to the barn in a little bit, then I think I might have to pick Emilie up from work but I am not sure haha.

I just finished watching Harmful Insect, awesome movie, really messed up, but I liked it a lot.

I just finished cleaning up the kitty poo area, their food area, the dishes and I also cleaned out our "relaxing waterfall thingy". I think I am done for now, hopefully emilie can do the rest tonight or tomorrow. I will probably end up vacuuming. I had an easy consulting appointment this morning at Canus, just a erase a hard drive and then they had some permissions issues I quickly fixed with one command :P

morgan sent me the new Rise Against album and it's pretty damn good. I can't stop listening to the new Anberlin either.

So I've got to work on Macintosh-Admin a little bit, I hope my cards come soon. Just checked on the UPS website -- doesn't look they're coming until the 7th, oh well, shipping was free. I've just got to remember to send them out to my vet, Mark and a couple to my dentist.

I also need to work on TheMangosResource and get some more content posted up there.

I'm still in works on getting a full time job at the University. It's looking very good though. I am having mixed thoughts about it all, as much as I love consulting, but I also like the benefits and being able to take classes for free and all (can anyone says tons of Japanese classes and equine classes?!). I'll probably follow through with it.

Hrmm, not much else to say at the moment, I am looking to get back into World of Warcraft, not sure if I'll go official or not. We do have our own server (anyone can use it!)...so we'll see.

Have a nice day kids!!

As usual, I've been incredibly busy...and when i do have a moment the last thing on my mind is updating Scribbld, so I must apologize to my poor site! I've been working on getting a full time job although I am starting to have second thoughts about it, mostly because I love and enjoy consulting far to much to give it up entirely...so either the people who want to hire me full time need to pay me at least what I would be making consulting or it's just not going to happen...half of me wants it to happen, half doesn't. I mean taking classes for free, benefits are all amazing, but does that compare to the freedom I have when I consult? It's very hard.

Been trying to do as much horse stuff as I can whenever I've got a free moment. I really need to get better about that and not spend so much time on the computers, it's terrible.

morgan and I have been working on a new World of Warcraft server which is now up and running. You can visit this site for more information. I've not had time to re-create my character, hopefully emilie isn't to mad that we wiped the database -- I know she had a few characters setup and we did have our Blood elves.

There's some idiot on #lobby now...

Keith and I are still trying to get paid by YellowSteel, it's really a pain in the ass...I am thinking we're definitely going to re-work how we setup consulting jobs...a lesson learned.

I've got the new Underoath album, I can't stop listening to that, the new Anberlin and The Academy Is...albums. They're absolutely amazing.

raf I added you as a friend :) Morgan says you've got some pretty elite skills.

Not much else to write about at the moment.

Been pretty busy with consulting and all. If it's not going out to places then I am usually at home working on emails and returning phone calls or consulting over the phone.

*** Auto-save has saved me!! ***

Ok, so anyways...I've also picked up another stall at the barn so that gets me 1 hour total and that means about $120 per month of board I don't have to pay so that's really nice, especially with all my other expenses right now. I did cancel my Netflix account. I told myself I would once I had an empty queue and that finally happened. I've pretty much killed anything I was subscribed to minus Anime Insider (because I already paid for it) and our Internet services.

Had to run to the animal hospital this morning because that weird video issue had resurfaced. I basically told them it was most likely a hardware issue and that they needed to bring it into the repair shop so they could properly diagnose it and order parts and have them replaced. It's definitely going to cost them though, possibly $500-$600. Ouch.

I've not been working on any websites as of late. I still have 2 websites to check into their own repositories. I did remove like over a gigabyte of media from the repositories. There's no sense in keeping it in multiple places...I guess for backup purposes but since it's just a repository, I'll let it be that and not a backup.

Keith and I are going to see Hellboy II on Friday, so that should be awesome. On Tuesday we hit up our Gamestops and picked up our copies of Unreal Tournament III. We'd pretty much been talking about that game since the summer of 2004 and we're just getting it now (actually I've had the PC version since it came out). Anyways, we pretty much played from 12pm till 10pm. We took a good dinner break but we pretty much played all that time. It's definitely a lot fun fun, we did versus, campaign and we finished up with a few online matches. Definitely an awesome game, although I almost prefer it more on the PC, it seems to run fasters, probably because you're using a mouse and keyboard. That's not to say the 360 version is slow, cause it's not...I also played a couple rounds of COD4 with makkintosshu, good times.

So, here's some not so great news. Just last year, Starbucks was opening about 7 stores a day, now they're closing ~500-600 of these stores...I'd definitely have to say either people are fed up with them, or the economy is really going downhill. It could even be a combination of both, but to have a company that was opening that many stores a day 1 year ago, to now, where they're up and closing 500 of them, not good.

The original mommy kitty at the barn is pregnant again...the barn is turning into kitty mania. I love kitties though. The horses are doing well. I snagged the leg straps off my dilapidated winter blanket and I'll use those for my new fly sheet. Nippet's blood tests came back and he's coggins free, which is awesome. I love him. I just need to copper tox his feet for a bit, they're getting a little messed up, so when I get paid which should hopefully be soon I'm ordering a big thing of fly spray refill and some copper tox. Other then that everything is great.

I ordered a bunch of new airsoft gear:

1 Coyote Brown MOLLE vest
1 Multicam Jacket
1 Multicam Pants
1 Small Med Kit
1 MICH TC-2001 Helmet
1 multicam helmet cover
1 multicam hat
1 Coyote Brown Hydration Pack
2 Multicam name tapes
1 multicam American flag reversed
2 Coyote brown name tapes
1 G&G Fan kit for goggles
1 Sanyo 9.6v battery
1 big to small battery cable

A lot of it is coming tomorrow so I am excited about that. It'll be like Christmas in July :)

I managed to get my hands on the latest 2.0 firmware for the iPhone and I've been installing a bunch of apps! I've got the Facebook app, Twitterific, Apple Remote, Things and I am thinking about getting Cro Mag Rally. I remember I used to play Cro Mag Rally with my friend instead of going to class in middle school. So much fun. It would be awesome if they had network play on the iPhone/iPod touch version. Currently I don't see how Things syncs with the desktop version so I will assume it doesn't but it MUST. I have a feeling they'll get it working, just not right away in this version. As far as I know Things is still in beta so they've got some time to get it just right (not that it's not amazing right now, because it definitely is)! The Apple Remote application is pretty much the first application I wanted about 1 week after the iPhone came out....er actually I wrote it about 3 months BEFORE the iPhone even came out! See the article here. Ha HA!

Umm, so that's about all for right now...I've got to go research some servers and I really want to play Bad Company. Good day all!

Well, it sure has been a crazy couple of days. On Wednesday, emilie had to go in for some emergency surgery. Fortunately it went well and everything is okay. I ended up going to the hospital around 9:30pm that night. When I got there she was in the OR so I pretty much waited around for a couple hours. I did get to read some of my Game Informer magazine from....last year...haha I am SOOOO behind on my magazines. I have a couple Macworlds from 2005 lol. Finally, they got her situated in a nice room and I spent the night. Around 10pm or so, Scribbld crapped out. Rather someone unplugged the power strip the modem sits on so access to everything died. But it was about 3am and I was to tired to log into the Tumblr site and post an update so I am sorry about that!

I pretty much got no sleep cause I was sleeping in this chair and it just wasn't the greatest. On Thursday we hung out and waited for the doctors and stuff and finally got the leave around 1-2pm. We pretty much just came home. Went for a little walk so she could pick up some pain drugs, she also got a nice little puzzle (alright 750 little itty bitty pieces) and then just relaxed. I believe I took a nap, AND then around 6pm, I finally got someone to turn the power strip back on. So yeah, sorry!!

I've been making a lot of critters in Spore, I also made this little YouTube clone site so I could upload my own videos. Check it out! What a pain in the butt to get working. After making symbolic links to the video encoder applications in Linux, I found the settings panel where I could have simply have changed the paths lol Oh well, it works pretty well and I am pretty happy with the software. I just need to make a new for it and a new logo... I also uploaded some images. I am definitely quite happy with the Creature Creator, for $10, you definitely cannot go wrong! I do kind of wish there was more parts, I know there's a lot, but I want more!!

Today Emilie and I went to breakfast at this wonderful little, er maybe big diner right by the hospital. Then after that I dropped her off to get her car. She had to run into work quickly to setup her schedule for next week. Probably half-days. I'm just doing some emails, forums, Scribbld stuff now...I think I may go watch some TV or something, I've got a consulting call to do.

I hope everyone has a lovely day and a lovely weekend. I'll be down in Massachusetts at two OPs, one at Ghost Town and one HUGE (400+ people), Tears of the Sun at TOLCOM. Hopefully I don't get shot too many times!

For the longest time, I've always wanted a website, that contained a blog, a photo gallery and maybe some simple message boards. The answer might be a CMS based system, but I feel that is really to large and really to featured for what I had in mind. After ages of trying out hundreds of software packages I think I have something that's going to work for me. This article here is going to explain the process of getting 3 pieces of software to work (hopefully) together. Those are:

WordPress

ZenPhoto

bbPress

So let's begin the journey of this project, shall we?!

Day 1: Well I am sure if you could really call this day 1 as I've been using WordPress for a while. I had installed bbPress once before, but was turned off the instant I saw the homepage of it. It's SOOO BLAND and I have no experience in CSS and styling at all. So today I installed it again and actually read some documentation on how to style it an all. I ended up using the CSS style from this K2 theme. I think that'll prove benificial in the end because I do want it all integrated. I plan to actually re-install bbPress to my ASO server so integrating these will be easier.

I just found out about ZenPhoto yesterday and I spent quite some time just playing with it and installing it several places. Currently it sits on a local Gentoo Linux box.

I think I will leave it there and see if I can just PHP include it since my photos take up a lot of space that I don't have on the ASO server but have on my Gentoo box. I will probably also style that to match K2 and this layout so everything look the same (again hopefully).

So basically...I will do bbPress first. I will then style that with CSS code. I will use the K2 style.css as a base and work off that. Getting that and WordPress integrated is my first objective. Please note, I know no CSS and no PHP. This is going to be one heck of a project.

-- Later in the day... --

Alright, I have got bbPress installed on the ASO server and that seems to be working. I actually dropped the K2 style sheet and just started working off the ZenPhoto.org/support/ stylesheet. It was easier and "less bloated". I say that because the K2 stylesheet was made for WordPress and has many more definitions that I don't need. Of course figure out which ones I do and don't need would take to long and I like to cheat a little.

So bbPress is working a-ok. I then tried to include the K2 header and I got some error about wp_title() not working so I removed the actual call to that in header.php for the K2 theme and just wrote it in manually. That did fix that error. But now you have the bbPress AND the K2 headers calling 2 different stylesheets...that didn't work out so well. So I remove the K2 header include from the bbPress header.

I then continued to edit the stylesheet and change things around a little. I up'd the H2 to 2em and I changed some of the widths and stuff so when I eventually get it into the K2 layout it will work.

Then I worked on ZenEdit itself. I added a TON OF PHOTOS, so feel free to check them out and leave some comments :) I am trying to get the Gravatar hack working. I signed up for an account on ZenPhoto.org this morning and they said they would send an email with my password in a few minutes...that was 6-7 hours ago :\

I changed around a couple options in the layout. I made it so it has a blue background around the image no matter if it was visited or un-visited. I changed the background color to a light light grey...I might even go lighter...actually yeah, I just did and I like it a lot more, using #EDEDED now.

So everything is setup...it's just getting them into the K2 layout. The hard part...but hey, for day one, I am not doing that bad!

Day 2 & 3: Alright, I did a lot of work since and I've already figured a ton of things out. I posted on ZenPhoto about trying to get WP2.0 and ZP working together. They had this bit of code:

/* Start Wordpress */
define('WP_USE_THEMES', false);
require($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"].'/journal/wp-blog-header.php');
/* Start zenphoto */
require_once("zen/template-functions.php");
$themepath = 'themes';
$theme = $_zp_gallery->getCurrentTheme();
$_zp_themeroot = WEBPATH . "/$themepath/$theme";
if (in_context(ZP_IMAGE)) {
include("$themepath/$theme/image.php");
} else if (in_context(ZP_ALBUM)) {
include("$themepath/$theme/album.php");
} else if (in_context(ZP_INDEX)) {
include("$themepath/$theme/index.php");
}

Basically that allows you to use WordPress funtions in ZenPhoto or whatever you include it, i.e. bbPress also. So I did that but nothing seemed to work. If you notice this line of code from that require($_SERVER["DOCUMENT_ROOT"].'/journal/wp-blog-header.php');. That would obviously not work in my situation. I have ZP and WP installed on 2 different servers, so I had to change that to include 'http://www.equestrianhonor/wp-blog-header.php' instead. And it seemed to work because i had no call errors or anything. The stupid thing looked the exact same as when it didn't have that code though. So I tried messing with that stuff for hours, calling the header and footer files but nothing seemed to work.

So then I tried working more with bbPress since WP and bbPress were on the same server and I used the same method provided by the ZenPhoto boards. This actually worked. So I've been working a lot with the EzStatic plugin for WordPress. It allows you to include PHP code in your WP posts. So I tried to include bbPress in a page file but it looked really screwed up.

So I hit up the WordPress codex and I found this. I found this function called get_home_template. Which eliminates the need to call the footer and header which is really nice and it works. Although I still get this error which I navigate away from the homepage which sucks.

So that's basically where I am at with the project right now...

-- Later in the day... --

Alright, I spent more time learning about a couple PHP functions, include and require and what the differences are. Basically require will stop on a fatal error and stop processing the page. It will output the error.

So since I wasn't getting an error I assumed things would be working. But for some reason I couldn't use the get_header and other WordPress functions on ZenPhoto. My solution?

I installed ZenPhoto on the ASO server which also has WordPress and bbPress. Things now work and actually ZenPhoto is completely done. Check it out, it's got most of the same CSS as the blog but I changed the links around a little. Added some neat little effects.

Now the only thing left is to get bbPress working. I am going to work on that now. I guess I might have to upgrade my hosting package because the photos take up so much space...oh well, oly and extra $5.00 a month for a little more then double the space I have no and about double and half the bandwidth.

Alright to hack up bbPress!

-- 7:41PM (10 minutes after the last update) --

Wow, I think I just did my first REAL piece of CSS. And I am so proud of it:


.news {
border: 1px solid #FF0000;
background-color: #FFD2D2;
width: 375px;
padding: 2px;
text-align: left;
}


I wanted to create a red box with some text inside of it. And I DID! If you check out the photo page you can see it in action! WOW! I feel so good haha I feel so accomplished!

Day 4: Alright, commenting now works on the photo album and no errors are being returned. I had to move where I was calling the header file and change a function to just $FIXME.

This fix also fixed the AJAX functions in the layout when namng/renaming photos and descriptions of photos and albums. The photo album is 100% done? Of course there could be errors I missed!

First here's a few photos emilie took this morning. Thought I would share them with you all! That's my little kitty!







So anyways, I had to pick up my parents at the airport yesterday, they were just getting back from a trip to Ireland, kind of sounds boring to me, but hey, they had fun. Maybe if they had some horsey activities over there, I could handle it, and I am sure they do, but I could probably do the same thing here, for a lot cheaper.

Today, not much going on, just finishing up some Mint installs. It's some really great web analytics software, check it out if you have your own website and stuff. Also working on a new social website for equestrians. It reminds me a lot of FaceBook, but obviously not a feature-filled, but I think people will enjoy it.

I actually chatted with Adelaide the other day, one of my ex-girlfriends who I've not spoken to in ages. She was a really great person, still is, we definitely had a lot of fun. Unfortunately she's way down in CT, but who knows, maybe we'll meet-up sometime.

It's miserable here, crappy and raining...but I think I will still go to the barn as I've not got a lot of other work to get done and I've got some really delicious (or so they say) horse treats to give out.

I am thinking about going back to school since I might have guaranteed admissions to the University of Vermont, but ONLY if I can get into the Equine Science program. I think it will definitely be a challenge but it would be a real lot of fun and stuff to learn all about it. We'll see, just waiting for an email back from my advisor.

Well, I'm off to get some other things, done. I've been messing around with Linux and I love it. I've been using it for servers for many years but now I've turned my main desktop into a Linux machine and I must say, it's awesome, although not as good as Mac OS X, but definitely much better then Windows! Have a lovely day everyone!