Back in Portland
After spending the last month at home in Ashland, I’m back in Portland and having to get used to the idea of having classes to go to. Since I haven’t written anything here, this is going to be a big conglomeration of things that don’t really warrant individual posts, but I still feel like talking about.
Winter Break
The day after school let out in December, I hopped in a car and rode south to Ashland to spend a month having a great time with family and friends. At one point or another I got to see my parents, my grandparents, my uncle Tom and his girlfriend, Elspeth, Talia, Isaac, Damon, Hilary, Diana, Tim, Scott, Shawna, Sophie, Charlie, and several other people who I hadn’t seen for a long time. Being the first time I’ve returned home for Christmas (as in,the first time I’ve been away and thus, able to return) it was nice to see that so many people still flood back to Ashland for the holidays.
Highlights included watching Reefer Madness: The Movie Musical, wandering around town with old friends, trying to drag people salsa dancing on new years, going to the family fun center (and WinCo), and playing backgammon into the wee hours of the morning.
Software
The first little bit of 2006 has brought about several software releases that have got me excited. Here’s a quick rundown:
First of all, this site is now running on WordPress 2.0, an update which I feel with make future site features much easier to implement. I whipped up a WordPress plugin in an afternoon to run the line list on my parents’ site and was quite impressed with some of the new hooks that are available for plugin authoring.
Also of interest to the site is the release of the zenphoto 1.0.1 beta. I’ve been using 0.9 to run the gallery on the site and 1.0.1 brings some cool new features such as gallery sorting and image deletion. I haven’t upgraded the site to the new release yet but I’m planning to as soon as I have an evening free to clean up the metadata import code I was working on a while back and get sorting by exif capture date to work. (yes, Isaac, I’ll send it to you when I get it working).
Moving away from web stuff, Google finally released a Mac version of Google Earth. This makes me very happy. I’ve long been interested in maps and geographic representation of data and this release just fuels this interest. Within a couple of hours of downloading the software, I had transformed an export from my parents’ Daylite contact management database into a KML file which mapped the locations of their accounts. Also, satellite photos of the world are the coolest thing since red hot apple pie.
Routine
I’ve long shunned the concept of routine as something that makes life boring and repetitive. Now, this is not to say that I don’t have routines that I adhere to on a daily basis, but more that those routines haven’t been consciously designed. After living alone in Portland for a few months, I’ve come to realize that routine isn’t nearly as bad as I gave it credit for being and that following certain routines can make my life much easier and more pleasing. Being in the middle of winter, the first thing on my list of routines to get into is making tea or cocoa or some other hot beverage in the morning and filling my happy new IKEA thermos with it (yes, I know thermos is a registered trademark and I should be calling it a vaccumn flask, but I’m not going to because I’ve been socially conditioned to call it a thermos).
French Tangent
While searching for the link for the thermos, I came across this French shopping guide for ‘Shopping de l’été tout en rouge‘ which I think is a cool concept.