return void;

winningpose pointed out to me today that my permalinks are broken. The old style with the date and title in the link is not currently working with lighttpd. I’ve done nothing different except upgrade to WordPress 2.0, I do not believe there was a lighttpd upgrade and I even used the old config file.

For the time being, I will have to resort to using the nasty “?p=#” format until I can resolve this issue. Stay tuned for more information.

[edit]

The solution is to include this line in your php.ini file:

cgi.fix_pathinfo=1

For more details on the dealings with lighttpd + PHP + WordPress, check the Trac FAQ.

[/edit]

I went on a vacation trip with my 4 other cousins to Vail, CO on Jan 13-17. We rented a condo in Gore Creek properties. It’s basically a rental town home with 2 bedrooms, 2 baths, kitchen, living room. It feels like living in a small house. This place is 5 miles from the Vail Village, which is where all the action is (skiing, dining, snowboarding, etc). There is a free shuttle that comes every 15 mins to pick us up. That was very convenient because we didn’t have to rent a car (especially since I’m under the 25 age limit and never driven in snow). The shuttle ride was nice because we get to see all the beautiful scenery around the valley. At peak times (i.e. 7:30am-8am) there are a huge zerg of people rushing in the shuttle and we were all packed in like sardines in a can.

Here are a couple of views in the Vail Village.

We rented skiing booths from Gravity Jones ski-werks store that includes skis, ski booths, and ski poles. The ski rentals cost us around $20 a day (not bad at all) with the luck of having a 25% off coupon from a guy from skiing school. We took a private skiing lesson for Saturday morning which really helped.

The instructor started us off at the bunny slopes, which didn’t look very intimidating to us. The carpet on the right side brings you up to the hill. Have you ever tried walking uphill with skis?

I got the hang of skiing quick and then moved on to the chair lifts for a hill with more slope. I managed to take lots of pictures from above.

The next day my cousin and I decided to take it to the next level by going all the way up the top of the mountain and ski down. Mind you, this is our second day of skiing, in our lifetime. From Vail Village we went up Lift 16 to Mid Vail, had lunch, went up to Lift 4 to Patrol Headquarters (middle mountain peak), and skiied down to Mid Vail. The ski was not a pleasant experience for us as it wasn’t as easy as we thought. I fell a couple of times and slightly sprained my thumb, but that didn’t keep me from going. Then we went to Lift #3 up to Wildwood (right mountain peak) and skiied all the way down from there back to Vail.

Here are some pictures I took while up there. It started snowing and continued pour snow till the rest of the day. There were times when it was so foggy that we coudln’t see anything in front of us.

I tried snowboarding too, but that was harder for me to learn than skiing.

I had a blast going to Vail. If you guys have a chance you should visit this place and try some skiing.

Random Pics:

How is one able to deal with the cube neighbor, who seems like a nice person, but has one of the most annoying little habits? I was over in a co-workers cube today, when one of the people that work in the area asked if I wanted to switch cubes. Of course I asked why he was interested in swapping, and it turns out his future cube neighbor has some obnoxious little traits of his own. First off he uses a speaker phone, why I don’t know; second he speaks at unusually high levels – even if the person he is speaking to is right in front of him. Third, he has one of the most distracting laughs, something out of a cartoon.

I said to him, yeah but I have to deal with the throat clearer. “The throat clearer?” is all I heard in response. This person has a terrible tendency to clear his throat about every 45 seconds to a minute, totaling what must be close to one hundred times daily. For no rhyme or reason either, he isn’t about to speak, or talk on the phone. He clears his throat before he starts to type, enough to drive me nuts.

“Oh, so that is why you are always wearing your headphones.” “Yea, now you know” I reply, but they don’t do a great job. If I keep them at a reasonable level I can still hear the clearing of the throat ~ it seems to have just the right frequency to pierce what ever it is I am listening to.

So how does one broach this subject? I already feel like an asshole for bringing it up, but I have reached my limit. I don’t want to come off as a prick to this person, but I think I need to convey how disruptive this thing is, especially since it has been going on for over a month. I have a good feeling that it has to be partially psychological now, and is nothing physical due to the duration and frequency it has been going on.

Oh, and it is starting to spread – the person on the opposite side of him has started doing it. She doesn’t clear her throat as often, but the pattern has started.

The possibility of physical and mental breakdown is now very real. No sympathy for the Devil, keep that in mind. Buy the ticket, take the ride. –H.S. Thompson

WordPress is not technically a full fledged CMS (content management system), but it is pretty flexible. Today I learned about “The Loop.” In WordPress, the basic theme index.php file loops through the posts and writes them out, along with any other important information, such as category or author. Then, outside of a div called the “content” div, the sidebar and footer is loaded with a single php call (get_footer, get_sidebar).

So I set out to develop a static template for a page so that I may dump content into without worrying. I’m having troubles with getting WordPress to leave my pre blocks alone, so I will have to refer you to the codex page. I threw a test together and everything loaded correctly.

Months ago, when I originally discovered JAlbum, the idea was to ultimately integrate this into the WordPress site. I fiddled with many of the skins but was mostly unsatisfied. I eventually found Chameleon and was satisfied temporarily. I next wanted to develop a theme (custom CSS for the skin) that matched the WordPress theme I was using. I put this off because I found that Chameleon was insufficient for such purposes. At the very least, I found that Chameleon lacked the flexibility of WordPress Pages. I tried cleaning the source up for XHTML 1.0 Strict compliance, but then the original author took that idea (after I informed them) and decided to make it HTML 4.01 Transitional instead. After successfully getting the test page to work, I realized the skin was far more insufficient than I originally believed.

So now, I am on a mission to create a WordPress static page skin for JAlbum for inclusion into this site. I will post more information when it is available.

I just completed the official switch to WordPress 2.0. Unfortunatey, I had many things installed on the old system that are no longer installed. The themes are not available, the plugins are not installed, and there are plenty of options that have yet to be configured.

This may take several days to get things back to working order. The Dusk theme needs to be reinstalled and the sidebar needs to be copied over and the CSS needs to be fixed so images do not span past the limits. There are several plugins that I need to reinstall such as the Word Count plugin, a stats tracking plugin (not likely WP-ShortStat again), and the Slashdot plugin.

Good news is we finally broke the 1000 hit day. The stats are going to be skewed for the rest of today and likely the week due to the conversion. I think the webserver is still missing some things and will work on getting everything up and running. I’ve also been working on getting more aggregation to places like Technorati, blo.gs, FeedBurner, and so forth. If anyone knows of a good ping service, please share.
More on this as things develop. Stay tuned as things stabilize around here.

So my neighbor who will remain “Oscar the Grouch”, and not because of his counting ability or witty remarks to small children as he helps them count finally got a citation for leaving trash outside his door. When I first moved into the complex there was no evidence that there was going to be such a problem, but time after time “Oscar” has been leaving trash outside his door for days at a time. I’m not talking one bag either, up to four bags at a time.

The neighbor adjacent to him down the breezeway takes a hint and starts putting their trash out front early, so I am surrounded by people’s trash. It is nasty to see and to come home to, further more I would shiver at what my friends or guests may think if they ever saw the filth. The punishment for this filth is supposed to be $20 a bag, which I thought would teach this chump a lesson since I have reported him on several occasions.

Unfortunately it seems that the person responsible for handing out these citations knew the people who lived there, so simply reporting them was going to be a losing battle since it would be squashed by the friend in the office. It seems the protection is no longer there and with a little luck the citation he received is for $80, sweet justice at last? We’ll see.

As a side note, this is great:
Vocabulary Lesson

What are some of your favorites? Hoyvin-Mayvin, and Car Hole are two way up there; ha!

This weekend, sunshine and I added a new member to the family. No, we’re not having a kid; we adopted another bird. For a while, we have been contemplating the idea of getting a companion for Birdie (yes, her name is misspelled in the photo album). There is a woman in our apartment complex who owned a Lutino cockatiel, like Birdie, and was looking to get rid of it. Someone else had given this owner the bird and the current owner was unable to give the bird a suitable home.

When we checked out the bird, she was in bad shape. There was fecal matter surrounding its vent which can lead to serious infections (think: never wiping your butt). The bird was also showing signs of an injured wing. The pet had clearly been neglected and appeared to not be hand tame. We estimated the it was a very young bird which likely explains its inability to fly well (the wings were not clipped). The cage was dirty and the owner was feeding the bird bread crumbs because she was too lazy to go buy more food (seed). The water drip was bone-dry and the perches were covered in feces. The bird seemed starved for attention because its chirp was piercing; the owner kept the cage under a desk. I told the owner that we cannot take this bird into our home until it gets a clear bill of health from the vet, so she agreed to let me take it in for a brief physical exam.

I took off work early Friday and picked up the bird. Heading to the vet, the bird seemed calm and interested in the car ride. It also kept the chirping to a soft chatter. The vet was able to handle the bird with no problem, no fuss. She (the vet) said that the bird appeared to be in decent health. We both noticed that the owner clearly tried to give the bird a srubbing (a few tail feathers were recently plucked near the vent). It was almost as if the bird I had taken to the vet was completely different. Its wing was bruised however and the vet said that this will clear up with time. We did a gram stain test (feces test) to make sure there was no infection in or around the vent. The only other test that the vet recommended is a psiticosis test (upper respitory infection) so there wouldn’t be any problems mixing the birds.

So the bird landed a clean bill of health pending the psiticosis test that we will try to do next week. The two birds have to stay separated for the next 2-3 months. For now, the bird is currently residing in the bedroom.

Without further ado, I give you Rose, the newest member in our family. We believe it is a female but this is very difficult to tell with the Lutino mutation.

Note: rainmain pointed out to me today that we now have 2 birds named after characters in the Street Fighter Alpha series (Birdie and Rose).