Gomery Inquiry – all for nothing?

October 25, 2006 at 7:10 am · Filed under Politics

According to John Gomery, the new government hasn’t acted on any of the recommendations given in his report. A CBC news article also tells of how the only thing to come of the inquiry is the federal accountabilities act, and this was legislation prepared before his report was even released.

It’s kind of funny that the Sponsorship Scandal was the defining issue for the 2006 election, yet the new government hasn’t done anything with the recommendations. Granted, the Conservatives don’t seem to be as likely as the Liberals to actually create such a scandal. If a political party is going to campaign and win an election because of an issue, you’d think they would at least follow up with some type of action. However, it is obvious that the Conservatives are equally capable of the unethical practises that they accused the Liberals of, such as patronage and bullying.

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Even losers can win

October 18, 2006 at 9:19 pm · Filed under Politics

Leading up to the 2006 Federal Election, I wrote this post on Canadian Values which discussed what many consider to be a darker aspect of the Conservative Party. Luckily for Canadians (at the time), Darrel Reid lost in the election. But even losers can win. Environment minister Rona Ambrose recently appointed Reid as her chief of staff.

I can’t say for sure, but I bet Reid is one of those guys that thinks that the earth is 8000 years old. I don’t find a lot of comfort that a person like Reid is in a position of power when it comes to Canada’s environmental policies. I can only imagine the disregard he has for certain accepted scientific theories in favour of his Christian beliefs.

Rick Mercer summed it up in his “Rick’s Rant of the Week” from October 10.

Rick gave another scathing assessment of the Conservative’s environmental policy in his October 17 Rant of the Week.
You sure get the feeling that Harper appointed Reid as the chief of staff and that Rona is just doing his bidding.

In contrast to these two rants, check out Rick’s Skinny Dipping With Bob Rae. Rae certainly echoes values that are much closer to my heart.

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Almost finished

October 18, 2006 at 8:30 pm · Filed under Tern 14 kayak

Just a few more steps left to finish the Tern14!
I think my list of things to do, in order, are as follows:
1.1 glass 2nd side of bulkhead panels
1.2 epoxy the hip braces in the cockpit
1.3 cutout the stern hatch
2.1 tweak the inside shear seam tape and epoxy
2.2 precoat the hatch strap fixtures
3.1 epoxy the bulkheads in
3.2 epoxy the strap fixtures to the hatches
4.1 apply the WR-LPU polyurethane finish
5.1 drill slots for webbing / deck rigging
5.2 fill the slots with thickened epoxy
6.1 drill new slots in epoxied areas

I’m not sure if I’ll do the webbing /deck rigging before or after the WR-LPU. I think I’ll do the lpu first, then the slots sometime in the future. I can touch up the slot edges with lpu afterwards.

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Photobloggin with WordPress

October 6, 2006 at 9:14 am · Filed under Just Stuff, Photos, Technology

Having recently gone online with a photoblog, I went through several different software packages before deciding on the one to use. In the end, I decided to go with WordPress for a few different reasons.

I found a good list of photoblog software on photoblogs.org Wiki. I looked at a few of them and the most promising seemed to be pixelpost and OneReaction. OneReaction looked especially cool. Unfortunately it runs on ASP.net, and my domain provider doesn’t offer this (I need to use MySQL). Pixelpost is a very solid platform for photoblogging. It was designed specifically for this purpose and has many usefull and easy to use features. As well, it is easy to customize the look of your photoblog. The big downside to pixelpost is that you need to store your photos on the server that it is running from. I wanted to host all of my photos on zooomr, and I cannot do this with pixelpost. I’m not sure how important it is for me to host photos on zooomr. I managed to get a Pro account for free, so I have 2gb of storage available. My domain provider only allows me a total of 300mb for storage, and this includes all files including my general photoalbum. As well, zooomr provides another method for sharing photos within a community and it also provides cool features such as geotagging. If you want to upload and store your photos on your webserver, I advise to give a good try with pixelpost.

In the end I decided on WordPress (I didn’t bother looking into other blogging software). WordPress does everything that is needed, but maybe somethings aren’t as elegant as they could be since the software isn’t designed specifically for photoblogging. Now onto the “how-to” portion of photoblogging with WordPress!

First thing I needed to do was choose a theme to start with. The three obvious choices were: start with the classic theme and basically build a new theme from the ground up; use K2; or use BlueBlurry. I tried starting with the classic theme but found it was going to be too much work at the time. As well, the navigation functionality needed for a photoblog was confusing. BlueBlurry was very good too. I could have used either BlueBlurry or K2. I decided to use K2 in the end although I can’t exactly remember why. K2 can be quite confusing, so be warned.
Okay, so if you are going to use K2 then the first thing you need to do is check out Kristin Pishdadi’s tutorial on using it for photoblogging. This was the key to setting up K2. (Now that I think about it, I believe I used K2 because the archive functionality was there).
You’ll need to customize the theme for the look you want. This can be quite tricky in itself. This doesn’t have anything to do with photoblogging in itself, customization is an issue no matter what theme or purpose you have. If you have a particular question about my customized theme, let me know.
The next question is how do you want to display your pictures? As linked photos? Inserted photos???? I decided to use a div in the post content to display my photos. Here is an example of a post content:
[php]

[/php]
As you can see, the photo is inserted as a background. This would allow me to insert text boxes, graphics, or whatever on top of the photo if I wanted to. I set the height of the background in the post so that the footer is always spaced a certain distance from the photo. Without this, it becomes very difficult to incorporate photos that are shot “tall and skinny”.
Okay, the photo is inserted now. The next thing I wanted to do is add some photo info. I like the look of pop-ups, so I wanted to do this with the photo info. I tried out several variants of lightbox in order to find a good jjavascript that worked for me. The important aspect I needed from a lightbox hack is that it needed to display inline divs. In other words, I don’t want a separate html filed to be required for each photo info. I wanted the popup to display text that was inside the post. Thickbox is a cool variant of lightbox (which only handles photos afaik), but Thickbox doesn’t do inline divs. The next variant I tried was leightbox. Another cool variant, it handles inline divs and it doesn’t have much overhead. However, I couldn’t get it to work with ie. Finally I found iBox. it also uses inline divs. As well, it supposedly works even if java isn’t installed (I haven’t tested this though). I probably would use Thickbox if I didn’t need inline divs. What I ended up doing is adding my photo info to the post then used the the rel=”iBox” to call the iBox popup. I add the style “display: none;” to the photo info content (via css) to make sure that the photo info text isn’t displayed except in the popup.
There was little trick I used to add the photo info to the post content though. I installed a plugin called Get Custom Fields Value. Then at the post of the write post page under custom fields, I add a custom field key called “photo_info”. In the value I enter the text for the custom field. Finally, the the_loop.php I added the code < ?php echo c2c_get_custom('photo_info'); ?>. So the last thing the_loop does is add the photo_info text.
In hindsight, since I am now using iBox I could probably just change the post content to:
[php]

[/php]
Maybe i’ll try that next time.

Finally, I also added another instance of iBox in the “About” at the top corner of the photoblog.

I think that about sums up my experience with photoblogging with WordPress. I guess there are many more small details involved, drop me an email if you want more specific information.

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