wiredfool

The NW Folklife Festival was this weekend. Marks the beginning of the summer around here – a signal that you’ve got a three day weekend ahead and lots of great bands to listen to. Taiko, Bluegrass, Klezmer, Reggae, Samba, Koto, Blues, Drums, Cirque de Flambe. It’s all there.

It’s summer. I can tell because sometimes when I wake up, the air smells so sweet and the temperature is already climbing into the sixties. But I still only have the energy to park my widening butt in the driver’s seat to get to work. Unless it’s in the 70’s by 9am, I just don’t get past the excuses to bike to work.

Two years ago, I rode to work 3-4 days a week through the winter and summer. It was as fast as the bus, and more reliable.

Four years ago, I didn’t have a car and commuted to school every day on the bike – rain, snow and sunshine.

Now? 3 times this week, but maybe 6 times this year. And we’re having a drought. So there’s less rain than usual. At least I have a convertible so I get to enjoy it.

So bring on the gas crunch. Make me want to go a month between fillups. Fix all of the potholes in town. Make driving hell. Because It’ll be good for me.

Just don’t take away my covered parking space.

There are 2 main fears for beginning gardeners.

1. The fear that nothing will grow
2. The fear that everything will grow

At this point in the year, I think I’ve managed to avoid either of these fears just yet.

As Garrison Keillor says, August is the only time people lock their cars in Lake Wobegon, because unlocked cars attract gifts of tomatoes.

Saw the Mariners last night, third base side, 4th row. Pretty good tickets. And what’s even better, it’s the first live game in the last 5 years that I’ve seen that the Mariners have won. I don’t go often, and it seems like I always see the opposing team’s ace.

But when the Mariners are 30-9 the odds get a little better on seeing a win. They had it all, Hitting, Running, Fielding, Clutch hitting, Pitching. Even Norm Charleton came in, pitched three pitches and got 2 outs to get out of the inning.

All the runs came with 2 outs. David Bell hits at the bottom of the order, fouls off 10 pitches before getting a single up the middle.

There were sacrifice bunts, sac flies, and fielder’s choice plays to move the runners forward. This is not the Mariners of the last few years. Runners get on, and a single scores them. 7 runs last night, and nothing bigger than a double.

Last few years were runners on base, waiting for a homer. And they’d still be waiting at three outs.

Sorry Dave, but the Mariners are the complete package right now. They even have a philosophy, somewhere between “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out” and “See you in game 163”. Super-Stars? Who needs them?

Once More, With Feeling.

There’s an update in the root updates pipeline to fix the bug where the imageGallery and the next/prev links macros wouldn’t work in storyreader urls. There’s also an update for the template macros turning into html entities. Choose Main -> Update PicsPicker.root to get the update.

There was also an update on friday to deal with the installation issue where a table wasn’t found.

For my purposes, this is the handiest feature in the plug-in. I build a lot of image-intensive sites here at UW and spend a lot of tedious time pushing them up to my sites, one by one. This plug-in will certainly speed that process up for me.

I have 2 suggestions for further development of the plugin:

1. It would be nice if the plug-in could be pointed at a folderfull of images on my machine and have it upload the whole folder to one of my Manila sites. I tend to batch process lots of images with PhotoShop and then upload them, rather than pulling them from other websites.

2. It would be nice if the plug-in could offer the option to trim off the .jpg or .gif extension when it uploads the images to Manila.

This is a great idea for a plug-in — thanks very much for making it available!

However, I have been unable to get the image gallery macro to work. I typed the following into a page on my site:

\{picsPickerMacros.imageGallery(“55 57″,”59, 60”)\}

and keep getting the following error message:

[Macro error: Can’t evaluate the expression because the name “msgNum” hasn’t been defined.]

Any ideas what I’m doing wrong?

The mid may garden gallery.

Enter –>

10/25/01 – 10am
Fix for the sitename bug that Raymond Yee found.

8/12/01 – 9pm
Added a random image macro: picsPickerMacros.randomImage(strImageList, metadataField=”numRandom”, border=0). If the numRandom field is included via metadata, then the specified number of random images will be shown. If not, then one will be chosen from the list.

The Linked Image macro now will link to the bare picture if the user doesn’t have access to the discussion group and the target is a picture.

5/14/01 – 5pm
Fixed a bug where the special macros in the image gallery and next prev templates would be turned into html entities.

5/14/01 – 4pm
Fixed a bug in the imageGallery and nextPrevLinks macros where they would have errors when called from a storyreader url.

5/11/01 – 4pm
Added the picsPickerData.prefs.databases table, since the installer looks for that to add the database to user.databases.