Author: Joe

Categories
Adventure

Wizard’s Wedding

I attended the Wizard’s wedding on Sunday. It was all the way up in Douglastown NY at the Douglastown Manor. Since the Wizard was pretty much our honorary 4th brother growing up our entire family got the invite to attend. My older brother who was also the best man, my mom and myself were able to attend.

The car ride there wasn’t too bad. We were able to navigate with the assistance of GPS without a wrong turn. Traffic wasn’t too terrible either, especially considering that this was Memorial Day weekend.

Once we arrived it was great to get out of the car and walk around. I did get a quick bite to eat at a Subway across from where we had arrived. I did assist the store keeper with removing an older advertisement cling on from their window. Stuff like that is fun to me.

We then headed over to the church. Besides the lack of air conditioning the church wasn’t too bad. The ceremony went by rather quickly. Outside I got a chance to say hello to a few of the other guys who were invited and were in my older brother’s grade growing up. All older now, but still just as goofy as I remembered them all.

We then went over to the reception. Driving to that wasn’t too bad either. It just just 3 or 4 miles from the church. It was very nice inside the Douglaston Manor and the hors d’Å“uvre were excellent. In fact I found that as long as you were eating that random people would spend less time talking to you. Needless to say, I really did overeat at this time. But at least it was yummy stuff.

The rest of the night went smoothly. The band played a greatest hits of the 80’s set. So there was anything from The Police, to Judas Priest going on. I thought that they really sounded great and did a good job. People were dancing the entire time. I never realized that the Wizard’s family was such dancers, but I guess they were always into music so it does make sense. Especially keyboards.

Oh and for my embarrassing moment of the day. I had to use the restroom and on my way to locate them followed a guy who was walking a few feet in front of me into the restroom. Well upon my exit, I literally bumped into two girls who were entering the restroom. All three of us froze in confusion as to why each of us were in the wrong spot. Well apparently I had entered the women’s restroom by accident thinking it was the men’s (thanks a lot guy for going in the wrong one). I’m pretty sure some guys followed in after seeing me enter similar to what had happened to me. Oh well, I pretty much felt dumb at that point and just vanished. At least the people whom I encountered all seemed to be with a different party and I didn’t have to continually see them the rest of the night.

The drive home went by much more quickly than the ride there. It was very late and even though we took a wrong turn that took us through Manhattan, it didn’t set us back too much. All in all it was a fun though exhausting day.

Categories
Books

63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read

63 Documents the Government Doesn't Want You to ReadWhile looking over the new arrival section at the library 63 Documents the Government Doesn’t Want You to Read by Jesse Ventura with Dick Russell caught my eye. I’m really not much into conspiracies and all that fun stuff, and assumed that it could make for some comical reading.

Much to my surprise the book wes very open and had very little to do with one person’s interpretation of the 63 documents featured. There was a little intro by Jesse, then the document was made available with not altercation, comments or added material. So you are open to making your own interpretation.

My favorite document was the U.S. Capabilities in Chemical and Biological Warfare. I found it very interesting to read the transcripts from 1970 between a subcommittee and the head of the biological dept at the time. Lot’s of focus on agent orange as well as our attempts at creating biological weapons and the logic behind their justification. The statement on debilitating weapons instead on fatal seemed nice at first. Until it was pointed out that the reasoning is that it’s much more resources intensive fo the enemy to care for wounded than a dead soldier. Wow, they’re pretty cold.

My only complaint was that since the scanned original documents were used, it was difficult to read some of them. I guess it did add to their authenticity while reading, but the font-size was too small and blurry on a few of them

All in all this was a pretty interesting book. I found the materials from the 50’s thru 70’s much more interesting than the more recent info. There’s also some great links to further info provided int the book as well.

 

Categories
Development

Output WordPress Gallery In Sidebar

A client really wanted to make use of the built in WordPress gallery shortcode. It’s a really cool built in feature to WordPress that easily allows them to manage basic photo galleries. But we wanted the gallery thumbnails to be generated in a sidebar, not the actual Page or Post.

This took a bit of time to figure out how to do, but luckily it was right in front of me in the WordPress documentation.  I just entered the following in the sidebar.php file (just gallery in the brackets):

echo do_shortcode('[the-word-gallery-goes-here]');

You can add that standard gallery shortcode options to that as well. So simple, I can’t believe it took me as long as it did to figure this one out.

Categories
Books

Planet Google

Planet GoogleI decided to give non-fiction a chance with my last read. Planet Google turned out to be really interesting. It detailed the history of Google, which as a web developer is something I follow closely to begin with.

The early years were really interesting to me. With the emphasis on the algorithm throughout very cool. The chapter on the YouTube acquisition and the failure of Google Video was cool. I’d almost completely forgotten about their early video efforts. WIth all their amazing success, it’s easy to forgot some of their flops (such as social media, Wave, etc.).

Some of the early chapters were massive and the book did get off to a slow start, but I stuck with it and it did pick up and am glad that it did. Heads up, this was published in 2008 so much of their hottest properties such as Android and Chrome aren’t yet mentioned.

Categories
Development

Adobe Contribute CS5 Sucks, But Here’s a Fix That Worked for Me

I really dislike using Adobe Contribute CS5. It was a great solution many years ago before the web based CMS has become so easy to use. However, I do work with some sites that are still based on it (for now) and do have to tolerate it.

Recently it’s been crashing every single time I’ve started up the application. As you can imagine this can pose quite a serious problem. I attempted all the tricks, even a clean uninstall then reinstall of the application on OSX.

I finally stumbled across a discussion thread that saved the day for me!

Deleting the folder “ConnectionsHomeOMBackend”

(user)/Library/Application Support/Adobe/CS5ServiceManager/extensions/ConnectionsHomeOMBackend/

fixed the crashing on startup issues. Thanks so much for the folks who took the time to share this on the forums. I was really beginning to grow a bit scared that there wasn’t a fix for this.

Categories
Books

Star Wars Fate of the Jedi Outcast

Star Wars Fate of the Jedi OutcastI’m still on my library reading tear, and the second book I’ve conquered has been Outcast. All those hours of watching Lavar Burton on Reading Rainbow is finally paying off (except for that goat episode, that was just plain scary). It’s the first Star Wars book in the Fate of the Jedi series.

The story takes place 40 years or so after episode IV, so a lot of the standard characters are prominent with a lot of new characters that I wasn’t familiar with as well. While I’m still very much bummed that Chewbacca was killed off previous to this book, I still decided to give this a shot.

Things started off a bit slow for me, but that also may’ve been that so many of the characters were new to me. Much of the early story was politics driven, and I suppose I was expecting more lighsabers and blasters. But the slow start did setup the story a good deal, and this is a 9 book series so it does make sense.

I was glad that Lando and Wedge Antilles both had roles in this book. I always liked the side characters, and was glad to see they’re still around. I expect to read this entire series now, pretty sure 7 of the 9 are already out with the remaining 2 due out pretty soon.