Randy and Kristi posted a whole bunch of flickr photos recently, and now you can see the follow up pictures to this post, including the one shot of Nick hanging down behind the dryer by his feet to hook it up, where Randy stuck the camera back in there and you can see him looking back up.
That one’s in the moving set, but they’ve got a whole bunch more up too.
I messed something up on my e-mail server, and I haven’t gotten a chance to fix it yet.
I’ve finally upgraded to WP2, so if you notice any slight differences in the way things work (or perhaps don’t work), that’s why. Well, actually there’s another change that I’ll talk about more later, after it’s finished.
My theme is pretty much just copied straight over from 1.5, but eventually I’m going to go through and rebuild it based on a 2.0 original, since I’ve already caught a couple things that I had to adjust for the difference.
Please comment here if you run into any issues.
For those of you who I’ve recently tried to convince of the coolness of playing with Asterisk, here’s a little sample of the fun kinds of things you can do with it.
I don’t want to make it a tradition to wait a week after something happens to write about it, so I thought I’d better hurry up and post my review of the Melting Pot, which Martha and I went to for dinner on Friday.
It started out with me making the reservation earlier in the day (via the connection to opentable.com from the Melting Pot web site). I made the reservation for 6:30, which turned out to be a mistake, since we couldn’t make it there until 7:00. The hostess did her best to try to fit us in anyway, but apparently in bypassing the normal channels, we ended up not getting assigned a waiter, and therefore did quite a bit of waiting ourselves until it eventually got straightened out.
The food itself was really good. If you get one of the meal packages, you start with one of the many available cheese fondues (which they make fresh from scratch at your table), along with some bread, vegetables, and green apples to dip into it. This was all pretty good, except for the green apples in the cheese, which neither of us really liked much.
On the negative side, if you don’t drink alcohol, like me, you may want to just get water since the coke I tried was pretty much the most watered down one I’ve ever had.
After that, you get one of several available salads. We both had the Mediterranean, which was good too. Then you pick a combination of various meats, vegetables, and a special cooking sauce, which is mixed and then used for you to cook all the pieces of meat in yourself at your table while you eat. They also give you various dipping sauces for the meats for after you cook them.
This was actually a pretty cool idea too, and it worked out to have the added bonus of forcing you to eat more slowly, because you can only get a couple pieces in to cook at a time, and you need to cook each piece for 2-3 minutes, depending on the type of meat. This allows you to not get full as fast, and to take the time to enjoy it more.
All in all, I’d highly recommend it. Just be sure to get a reservation, and be there on time. I also had the feeling that even without the mix up / delay that we experienced, it seems that the dining experience here is longer than usual, so don’t plan on rushing off anywhere afterwards.
In one of those interesting twists of logic, it appears that the importance of freedom as it relates to the feeling of security actually fluctuates depending on where you live, longitudinally speaking.
For example, if you live in the United States, it is now apparently considered acceptable to surrender any of your freedoms the government deems necessary in its efforts to provide you with “security”.
However, if you live on the other side of the world (in Iraq, for example), it’s actually OK and even “successful” that in the last several years your home country has lost a great deal of “security”. As a matter of fact, it has turned into a hotbed of terrorist insurgency and tens of thousands of your civilian neighbors have been killed. This loss of “security” is an acceptable price to pay, because you have been lucky enough to have someone bring you “freedom”.
I’m awarding myself the prize for spotting and correctly identifying the grown-up version of Deon Richmond, the Cosby show’s “Kenny” (or “Bud”) in the opening sequence of the new show “Teachers” on NBC a few minutes ago.
Of course, after confirming on IMDB, I realize that he’s been in a whole bunch of stuff in the meantime, but I sure haven’t seen any of those things.
After all the talk of lists on here this evening, I found myself inspired to go ahead and create a new WordPress plugin for list management (ironically bumping it ahead “in the list” of all the other things I’ve been meaning to write lately).
Without further ado, I present the Ta-da List Plugin!
The basic idea is that this will allow you to display any of your lists that you manage in the very handy (and free) Ta-da List application, brought to you by the great guys over at 37signals.
Technical details and important compatibility notes:
This plugin basically takes the RSS feed (copy/paste the url from the link in Ta-da list) from any of your lists and transforms it (using XSLT) into a basic HTML list which you can insert into your sidebar or wherever else you choose.
With a simple echo jbGetTadaList("http://yourid.tadalist.com/lists/feed/123?token=456"); inserted into your theme, you will see the list title (in an H1 element) followed by the list itself. The relevant CSS class names are “TadaListTitle”, “TadaList”, and “TadaListItem” - for styling purposes. Pretty easy, eh?
While this is very handy and one of many examples of why XSLT is so useful, there is a catch: your web server must support performing XSLT transformations in PHP, specifically by using the PHP extension that supports such transformations. Sadly, this is not enabled on some hosting providers, and so you are pretty much out of luck if you don’t have the option of installing it on your server. If you do have such access to your server, here is a guide, if you’re feeling lucky/brave.
Ironically, even the server that this blog is currently on does not support it, since I haven’t moved this site over to my VPS server yet (which I can install whatever I want on). That move is one of the many items on my list that remains unaccomplished, but as soon as I do, I’ll add a demo list to this blog.
Because I imagine this will be a significant issue for many users, I do plan to release a non-XSLT version of this plugin at some point in the future, which will avoid any such dependencies (probably by using plain, old-fashioned, boring string manipulation). But, until then, enjoy if you can!
when they know just enough about a certain subject (like “hacking” in this case) to make themselves look really dumb.