elorg.net

I couldn’t take it. I have too many projects that I’m working on, and too much school work… that I need to get started on. I found a fun theme that could hold me over for the moment until I had time to finally break down and decide on an idea and stick with it long enough to create my own theme. It doesn’t have the Journal stripped out of the main page, and /journal doesn’t work at the moment, but all the content is easily found for now.

Enjoy!

P.S. Sorry!! The forum’s still broken. I’m in the middle of mapping out the database tables between Vanilla and bbPress to see how that works out…

I think I finally have all the photos over the past month’s events resized, color corrected, and uploaded. Now I’m going to cheat and back-date some new journal posts about them.

WordPress has been updated. Not surprisingly, this did not seem to affect the (non)functionality of the forum at all. I’m looking into finding another solution for the forum now.

Went to my first NIN concert. I tried to buy tickets as soon as they went on sale. But when I added them to my shopping cart, the price had tripled! Thankfully, my mom was able to get some free tickets

The concert totally rocked. Best concert ever. Seriously. Trent is one geek that I would love to meet. He doesn’t just play his music for the audience - he puts on a complete show. We were in such awe at the combination of technology and lighting effects that he had used… It was amazing. The band was interacting with the background/foreground lighting effects and screens. At one point they even made it look like it was raining on stage!

Check out the rest of the photos on Flickr. They’re not entirely clear or detailed because they were taken with my phone They’ll give you an idea of some of the lighting effects even if they they don’t do them justice.

Looks like the forum’s cookies are broken on the forum again. And again, nothing has changed so I don’t know why it happened. I might start looking into migrating to bbPress again because this is just getting ridiculous.

So we made it back home! Not too many delays on the way home (unlike the trip out to Cali). We even somehow made it to the airport about 6 hours before our flight boarded (oops). I’m almost over the jetlag and working on sifting through my photos from the trip and resizing them, so keep an eye open for them on Flickr. I’ll also follow up with a journal entry summarizing the trip.

This year I finally broke down and went to Comic-Con. It was a great excuse to get back out to Cali, visit with friends, and bring Steve out to see the west coast.

We started off with our first trip to the San Diego Zoo. It was a long day of walking around, but we saw most of the animals and had a great time. I let Steve take most of the photos since he had better zoom on his camera.

From there we cruised quickly through Balboa Park with just enough time to grab some photos before sunset and grab dinner. We were all starving, so I’m glad that everyone humored me and let me grab pictures. It’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen.

On Friday I went to Comic-Con with KC and Kim, while Steve tooled around historic Route 101 and wandered down the coast (I figured I’d only subject Steve to one day of the convention). We all met up for dinner with Pete and his girlfriend for dinner at this Hawaiian place with a great view of the San Diego skyline.

We realized how close we were to the Pacific and ended up wandering down to the beach each night. It was great. Relaxing. The tide was so strong compared to back home!

Saturday we all went to a great sandwich place for lunch that Steve found on the coast. It’s on a cliff in La Jolla with a great view. There are hang gliders and paragliders all over the skies there. More photos here.

Afterwards we all went to Comic-Con. I took a bunch of photos - but not nearly as many as I would have liked. Sunday we headed up to LA and detoured to Temecula for a wine tasting and tour of the Callaway Winery and Vineyard. They had a few decent wines, one or two great wines, but the rest were either “eh” or horrible.

Our hotel in LA was pretty cool. Minimalistic. Comfy bed. Very “Euro” looking. Creepy photos in the elevators. Expensive minibar. Funky sheep in the hotel lobby that would randomly be rearranged when no one was looking. hehehehe

LA was a bit of a whirlwind. We checked out Venice Beach (briefly - it was a moderately frightening experience), dinner on Sunset Boulevard, wandered through the 3rd St Promenade and the Santa Monica Pier before heading into the almost icy water on a very windy and unseasonably cold day. We even stopped by In-N-Out burger to get my annual fix.

The toughest part of the whole trip was the 5.4 earthquake the day before our return flight. Apparently the largest one in almost 15 years? Pretty scary on the 6th floor of a hotel…

The Last HOPE has come to an end. I can’t wait until The Next HOPE. They were originally expecting that this would be the last one (hence the name) because of plans to tear down Hotel Pennsylvania. Apparently the economy is so horrible that those plans have now been delayed - and so they’re planning another HOPE for 2010.

I had a blast. I wasn’t sure what to expect, and I ended up having a great time. I missed the Segway racing =( but saw some neat (and otherwise indescribable) “art”. Many of the talks didn’t sound particularly interesting to me, but once I sat down at them and listened for a few minutes I was glad that I went. The more talks I attended, the more I wanted to go to.

The highlight of the weekend was Adam Savage. He only had an hour and I would have happily sat there for several (compared to Jello Biafra who had 2 hours - and no matter how much inspiring and interesting things he had to say, I can only listen to him talk for so long). Adam seamed genuinely humbled and ecstatic to be there. His “talk” was only about 15 minutes, and gave the rest of the hour to the fans for questions. This time spent listening to his stories and talking to the fans in the crowd only increased my respect an admiration for him and the Mythbusters.

Several (but not nearly all) of the photos taken have been resized and uploaded to Flickr here as well as embedded in this journal entry. I may upload more there after I return from my next trip. Until then, I hope enjoy what I’ve uploaded so far.

I wish there was an iPhone app that could turn off particular things to save battery life with one touch of the screen. Perhaps you can configure it under the General Settings to specify what you want turned off/on like 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth, and/or GPS. Then on your home screen you can touch one icon to turn it all off when you know you won’t use it to extend your battery life. When you want to use it, press the icon again and it all gets enabled with minimal effort. I’d pay a couple bucks for that.

I’ve been on a quest to update all of everyone’s contact information in my address book so that I can sync it with my new iPhone. During the process I found an option to sync OS X’s address book with Gmail. Sounded like something that could be useful - right?

Don’t do it to yourself. Just don’t. Unless each person you have only has 1 email address. As I was sorting through more and more contacts each day, I started noticing duplicates and triplicates of some people’s address cards. I assumed that it had something to do with the Gmail syncing, but I wasn’t exactly why. Until now.

Gmail only allows 1 email address per contact. The OS X address book app will allow multiple. For some people I have 5 email addresses. Address book syncs with Gmail - and Gmail splits each address to its own contact. Then syncs back. Oops.

I’ve stopped syncing Gmail and the address book. It just seems simpler that way. If I’m ever in need of an address that’s not in my Gmail contact list, I can just look it up quickly in my iPhone.