Gary's cousin paying us a visit

I wonder if anyone other than my wife picked up on the Spongebob reference ;-) I love that we get visited by so many fun critters in our new place!

Music Midtown

So one of MC's favorite bands is Coldplay. I have been checking their site periodically, and it seems like they are always playing in Germany or South Africa or some other place nowhere near us. The last time I checked, they actually had some domestic venues, including Atlanta! They were scheduled to play at Music Midtown, which is a music festival that hasn't happened in a few years and was coming back for the first time. So I decided that would be a great early birthday present for my sweetie! Since it was one day and started in the afternoon, we decided to just leave early Saturday morning.  We checked in to the hotel and got ready to head to the shows. [caption id="attachment_616" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="View from the hotel"][/caption]

Since the lady at the front desk said it would be up to $15 for cab fare and it was just over 2 miles away, I convinced MC to just walk so we moseyed over to Piedmont Park just in time for the second band, The Constellations, to start. They put on an awesome show, and we knew it was going to be a good day! There were two stages set up, and we found a great shady spot since we got there pretty early.

[caption id="attachment_617" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Luckily we found a place where we could enjoy both stages"][/caption] The acts alternated between the stages and after The Constellations came Walk The Moon.  We really enjoyed their set as well. Unfortunately, the next few bands were really our taste, but I still had fun relaxing with my sweetie and drinking some Sweetwater :-) The crowd started picking up as the day progressed until the field started really filling before the Black Keys. [caption id="attachment_618" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Getting pretty jammed!"][/caption] The Black Keys were one of the only other bands in the lineup that I was familiar with, so I was pretty excited to see them play.  They definitely didn't disappoint! [caption id="attachment_619" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="I have no idea about the random stuff on stage with them"][/caption] We had watched as the crowd moseyed back and forth between stages, but that happened a little less this time.  Cage the Elephant got a little screwed in that respect because a lot of folks wanted to stay by the main stage so they could keep their place for Coldplay.  We just enjoyed each other's company and, before long, it was time for the big show! [caption id="attachment_620" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="Yellow!"][/caption] As was to be expected, they put on a frickin' awesome show!  MC really enjoyed the setlist and they had some pretty entertaining theatrics. [caption id="attachment_621" align="aligncenter" width="600" caption="No need to bring a beach ball to this concert"][/caption] They also did a cool tribute to REM (who recently broke up) with a cover of Everybody Hurts, which was pretty awesome.  It was a great show and the love of my life finally got to see Coldplay!  After a bit of walking, then a cab ride, we had no problems crashing at the hotel after a long, but awesome, day. Sunday we got up and met with my friend Heather (whom I hadn't seen in forever) and her beau Levan.  We met at Ria's Bluebird Cafe, which, once we finally got seated, was extremely good.  It was great catching up with Heather and talking with Levan! After we finished, we bid them farewell and stopped by IKEA (you pretty much HAVE to when you are that close) then hit the road back to Tallahassee.  It was a quick, but awesome, trip and I was glad that we finally got my sweetie to see one of her favorite bands.  Happy Birthday my love!

Music Midtown!

Currently listening to The Constellations, but stoked about the Black Keys and the headliner, Coldplay!

Low-carb diet = sacrifices must be made

We got spaghetti'd!

Saw this as I left for the office this morning. Apparently, something thought our bear, Eduardo, looked hungry and dumped some raw spaghetti on the ground to entice him.

Sunday brunch with my sweetie

Fiber One pancakes made with almond milk, sandwich thins toast, and an omelet made with garlic, red onion, scallions, mixed greens, and eggs from chickens owned by my wife's coworker.

A Froggy Visitor

Chillin' on the door to our apartment home.

Strawberries and Bubbly

Book Review: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone by J.K. Rowling
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

It was a lot of fun re-reading this book after having seen the movies. It is definitely hard to picture any of the characters in any way other than visualizing the actors. It was also cool to read the book and have my memory refreshed about details that either were changed in the movies or were left out completely. Definitely a fun story and easy read. I look forward to continuing with the series.

View all my reviews

Red Cross Hurricane Run 5k

We are still getting back into the running scene, and this looked like a good Labor Day race for us to try out.  We got a little excited the night before with our mimosas/beermosas, so we were definitely not 100% for the race.  My advisor's wife Marie joined us for the first time and gave Julia a running buddy since there was no way MC and I were going to keep up.  We took a few walk breaks and weren't really going for a time.  It was just a fun run with my wife and we enjoyed not getting rained on (it looked pretty threatening).  It was also cool to run around our new neighborhood for a race instead of having to drive across town.  Hopefully, we'll be better prepared for the next one and get back into working on our times.  I want to hit a PR this season! :-) 34:44 MC - 34:43 Julia - 28:02 Marie - 28:10

Beermosa!

Creating a Wordpress gallery of images from posts in category

So to start, I will describe exactly what I was trying to do and give a little background.  I did a lot of googling, and it seems that no one really had put together a tool to do what I wanted so I had to piece it together a bit myself.  Perhaps, when I have more free time, I can convert it into a plugin so it will be even easier for someone to use. In my blog, I have a category called "Mobile" that is used whenever I post items from my phone.  This virtually always consists of me posting a picture that I took on my phone, so I wanted to try to set it up similar to Twitpic or any other Twitter photo hosting site.  I wanted it to work identically, but use my own web space instead of having some third party host, and do what they like with, my pics.  One of the only means I found to do this involved having an Android app that allows the user to use a custom photo hosting site (most only give choices of several popular ones).  The only app I found that allows this wouldn't talk to the code I had set up on my site so I abandoned that idea and decided to just stick with having "Mobile" posts with a single pic as part of my blog. While a user can view all posts in a category, it seemed a little cumbersome to scroll through pages of posts that just included a single pic and a few words so I decided I wanted to just put together a gallery of pictures posted.  I found many photo gallery plugins, but, surprisingly, none had enough customization to automatically populate the gallery from my posts.  After a little searching, I discovered this post on the Wordpress support pages. It has some php code for getting the first image from Wordpress posts, and, since all my "Mobile" posts have a single image, that is exactly what I needed (though it would be pretty simple to modify to grab all images if someone wanted a gallery of all images posted to their blog).  It used another utility called TimThumb, which creates thumbnails of the images. This worked pretty well, but the result was ONLY a gallery of thumbnails.  My preference was to have the ability to click each pic and it would take you to the associated post, but, at the very least, I wanted to have each thumbnail link to the full resolution pic.  So I created a new page template in my wordpress theme and included the php code. I didn't worry with formatting because the thumbnails just tile to fill the space. I had to modify the code a bit so that it would grab only from the "Mobile" category and to make each thumbnail link to the full resolution picture. I was pretty happy with the result.  So now, every time I post from my phone it creates a new blog post, and there is a gallery of all the pictures from the posts from my phone that can be viewed all together.  Kinda snazzy! I still have a couple of tweaks that I would like to do, though.

1. As mentioned earlier, I would like the link to take the user to the post associated with the pic, not just the full resolution.  I would like this because I always have a title and sometimes have additional text associated with the picture.  I am also entertaining the idea of combining the title and post text and having them be the ALT text for the thumbnail in the gallery.  Then a user could hover their mouse over a pic and see the text associated with it but wouldn't have an additional step to get to the full resolution version.
2. I would also like to get comments working so people could comment on the entire gallery. This would probably be only useful if I haven't implemented #1 yet because, as it is, there is no way to comment on a single pic without just searching through the posts. I have tried to put the code to add commenting to the bottom of the page, but for some reason it never shows up. I am too unfamiliar with wordpress and it has been too long since I really used PHP to figure it out at a glance.
3. The last thing that would be nice to do is to package this up as a plugin.  Then make it easy to customize where the pics you want displayed will come from and add some formatting options. What would be IDEAL is if I could also create a (or tweak an existing) plugin like WP to Twitter that automatically tweets when I make a post so that the resulting tweet would be the title followed by a link directly to the photo. This should allow most Twitter clients that have previews to see the photo and people could get a glimpse instead of just having a link they would have to click on (i.e. it would work exactly like Twitpic).

None of these will likely happen until I have finished with my dissertation, but it never hurts to have plans in mind.  Hopefully, people that want something similar in their blogs will benefit from this post!

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A Lone Rose

St. Stephen's Green

St. Stephen's Green, originally uploaded by fincher69.

A panorama of St. Stephen's Green in Dublin, Ireland. The sky was definitely over-exposed, but that is an issue I have been dealing with on this camera lately. It was a pretty overcast day, so there wasn't much to see in the sky anyway :-)

Stitched together with DoubleTake

With a little creativity, anything can be the "bread" for a sandwich!