January 2007 Archives

Hawaii has defeated my blog. Who knew? I figured I’d have so much cool stuff going on that I’d have TONS to write about. Well, all the cool stuff is happening, but for some reason I’m having difficulty dragging myself to the computer to actually write it out.

Per Billy’s suggestion, I plan to start posting lots of pictures of what we’ve been up to since we’ve got tons of pictures of all the places we’ve been. From fourbying on red dirt roads on Lanai, to camping on the beach on Oahu, to flying over the Waimea canyon in a helicopter on Kauai. Plus, this weekend we are taking our first trip to the big island, and then 2 weekends later we’ll be back on Kauai.

Less Than Me may be down, but I promise that it’s not out!

As promised, I put up a photo gallery last night. There were a number of features that I really wanted in my gallery, so I searched long and hard for a good gallery program.

The features I wanted (in order from most important to least important) were:

• FAST – The gallery MUST be fast and easy to use
• Easy album creation – I don’t want to create albums through a GUI, I want to drop a folder onto my webserver and the album is automatically created
• Photo commenting – I want people to be able to comment on pictures
• Sub-albums – I want to have a hierarchical structure of albums
• Show new images – I want a quick way for visitors to find newly added pictures
• Show new comments – I want a quick way for visitors to find pictures with newly added comments

And so on with the losers:

• G2 Gallery – The default install with my webhost, very full featured but WAY too slow.
• Photoframe – a simple PHP script that intrigued me until I noticed that you could not link to specific files (the URL always stays the same while different images are viewed). Also, does not handle multiple albums well.
• SPGM – Looked like it was easy to set up, but doesn’t allow comments on pictures.
• JAlbum – Nice looking, but again no comments on pictures.
• Linpha – Seemed slowish, kind of ugly.

The two that looked promising were:

• Coppermine – Another big program, has all of the features I want but looks pretty complicated which probably means lots of configuration
• ZenPhoto – A small lightweight program that looked easy to setup and configure. Does not have all of the features I want, but enough of them to make it interesting.

So, because ZenPhoto looked easier to try out than Coppermine, I installed it last night. So far I like it because it’s so simple, but it is missing some of the features that I want such as sub-albums (actually sub-albums are in beta and looks like they’ll be added soon), show new images and show new comments. It might be possible to at least show the number of comments per picture on the thumbnail screens if I develop my own template, but I’ll have to look at it…

So, without further ado, please checkout my trial album at http://lessthanme.com/photos. Leave a comment, try it out, let me know what you think of it. I suspect that I will still give Coppermine a shot to see if I can get all my wants with minimal hassle. But if Coppermine looks big and nasty, then ZenPhoto it is!

Kara and I spent the past three day weekend on the Kona side of the big island and had a great time! I’ve posted pictures in the gallery, and Kara has gone through and added comments to the pictures. Also, check out this video that we shot of a turtle having lunch! This was in the wild, in about 3 feet of water just off of the lava shoreline that we were walking on.

I had a doctor appointment today, but the doctor was running 30 minutes behind schedule. I told them that I'd eat lunch and be back in a half hour. I walked over to Panda Express and noticed that something weird was going on... First, the doors were propped open which i've never seen before. And I saw balloons through the windows, and a huge line of people. As I walked in, I noticed that there were signs up about how today was their 20 year anniversary of being in Hawaii. Then I noticed that people that had placed there order had special flyers in their hands. "Must be some coupon" I thought. Well when I got to the front of the line, they handed me one and said that it gives me a two-item meal and a small soda for free! Apparently the first 88 people through the door got free lunch. I was #75.

My bike log wasn’t spared in the troubled time that I’m calling The Great Less Than Me Neglect of 2006. Besides me losing overall motivation for Less Than Me, two additional events happened back in October which caused the daily update of Bike Log to stop.

First, my bike got a flat tire… At the time I didn’t have supplies to repair my own bike tire so Kara had to start dropping me off and picking me up from work. By the time Kara would pick me up each day, the bike shop would be near closing so I wasn’t able to get my tire repaired. Finally one night we drove out to Kahului and I was able to get all the supplies I needed to fix my own tire.

Second, we moved to a new place. This caused a problem with my Bike Log software because “Home” in my database is currently set to my old address. I couldn’t just update the Home address, because then past trips would reference my new address, and that’d be no good. So, all I really needed to do was add a new name like Home2 or something like that, but that seemed kind of dumb. So, I planned on working on the code a bit more to make names of places more dynamic while preserving past locations, etc. But I never got around to it…

But really these reasons just gave me an excuse to stop updating the page… It was a bit tedious to type in “Home to Work to Home” everyday, and it was obvious that it wasn’t making a very interesting page to look at. So, instead of completely decommissioning the Bike Log, I’ve decided to only use it to record bike trips of interest. When I take a recreational ride on Maui, I’ll record it. If I ride to the store, I won’t…

This last weekend we were on Kauai where we hung out with Dave and Kayle all day on Saturday. We went snorkeling at Poipu Beach Park, drove around and looked at some waterfalls, and went out to a nice dinner. They were leaving on Sunday around noon, so we met up with them for breakfast and then bid them farewell.

We weren’t leaving until 6pm, so we decided to drive up to the north side to do some more snorkeling. Unfortunately once we got all the way up there (over an hour long drive) we discovered that the ocean was way too rough to do any snorkeling. So we drove back south to Lydgate Park because we read there was well protected areas for snorkeling.

However, by the time we got there, I was really tired from driving for so long… So, I just laid my beach towel down on the sand and slept for at least an hour. After my nap (Kara sunbathed and got in the water a bit) we went out for lunch and then it was time to return to the airport. In all it was a nice relaxing weekend; we didn’t do a whole lot on the island this time, but that’s because we did a bunch of it back in October. I don’t have many pictures to post from this trip, so I put up the pictures from our October visit here. I think Kara’s going to add info to them, so you might check back later for descriptions.

I've seen a couple of movies recently... My thoughts:

I Robot

Imagine a future world where there are robots on every street corner. Our very lives depend on these automatons; they are integrated into every facet of society... And then one day the robots decide that they'd rather kill us than serve us. You should have no problem imagining such a scenario since this has been drilled into us by COUNTLESS movies/tv shows/books/etc.

I Robot is one such film and it carefully follows the well worn path in a dumbed down, actioned up way. And yet I was entertained... Perhaps that's why it's such a common plotline in sci-fi, apparently we like to watch ourselves being killed by robots... Weird.

Lady in the Water

Wow, this was one of THE worst movies I've ever seen. Where to begin? Let's see... The movie is supposed to be like a fairy tale, I guess... A water sprite has to travel to the land of humans to inspire one to write a world-changing manifesto (yeah, don't ask). Once the message has been delivered, the title lady must escape back to waterworld with the help of humans. But see, the movie isn't that fairy tale... The movie is a bunch of characters TELLING that fairy tale and acting it out in the most idiotic way possible. I can't possibly give this crapfest the description it deserves... Just do yourself a favor and never watch it.

Superman Returns

This one wasn't too bad, but it was too long. It clocks in at 2.5 hours, and by the end you wonder why it took so long to retread the same old story... Bad things happen, Superman stops them. Lois Lane likes Superman. Clark Kent likes Lois Lane. Lex Luthor comes up with evil plan, Superman tries to stop it. But wait, there's Kryptonite, so Superman gets weak and gets beat up. But then Superman escapes and stops Lex Luthor's evil plan. The end.