So KC and I have taken vacation this week in order to do a few things around the house AND… to go to Chicagoland and get ourselves some Christmas presents. Me likes the Christmas presents me gots!!!!

First stop for us was Fry’s Electronics in Downers Grove. It has to be one of my favorite stores. Imagine a store as big as a Super Walmart or a Super Target that is completely devoted to electronics! Yeah, boy! They have everything from a diode to a home theater system, from a DVD movie to a vacuum cleaner, from a CPU to a refrigerator. Man, they have A LOT of stuff. So, I got me a nice ViewSonic VA2012wb monitor there. Pretty cool. The price there was $299 but there was a $90 rebate, so it will end up costing me $209. Not bad for a 20″ wide screen!! Also, because I got the monitor, I had my choice of a Canon printer or a Canon all in one for “free”. I chose the all-in-one, which turned out to be a Canon MP160. The in-store price was $70.00, but there was an instant $20 rebate and since I got the monitor I also got a $50 mail-in rebate – that’s how the monitor was free. So for $209 I get a really nice monitor and a pretty darned good printer/copier/scanner! KC also wanted a new clock-radio so we picked that up there as well.

After a great lunch at Portillo’s (YUM!) the next stop was Tall Girl in the Streets of Woodfield strip mall in Schaumburg. While KC spent a lot of time (and $$$) there, I went over to Dick’s Sporting Goods and got myself a very comfortable pair of “knock-around” shoes. I came back and waited some more before KC was finally finished at Tall Girl.

Next stop was the Woodfield Mall in Schaumburg. We trooped around there, looking for a shop where I purchased a pair of jeans a while back but never did find that shop. We did some more window shopping but never did find any place we wanted to look, except JC Penney, where KC got a casual winter coat.

Next (and last) was the Aurora Outlet Mall. We stopped there mainly because we needed gas and we needed to return a pair of shoes that KC had purchased in December on a “girls-only” trip. Turns out they have an Ecko store where I ended up getting a pair of jeans. Eckos jeans run longer than most, so I don’t have to purchase special “tall-sized” jeans.

What a day!

Merry Christmas

Interesting Perspective….

A woman in a hot air balloon realized she was lost. She lowered her altitude and spotted a man in a boat below. She shouted to him, “Excuse me, can you help me? I promised a friend I would meet him an hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.

The man consulted his portable GPS and replied, “You’re in a hot air balloon, approximately 30 feet above a ground elevation of 2,346 feet above sea level. You are at 31 degrees, 14.97 minutes north latitude and 100 degrees, 49.09 minutes west longitude.

She rolled her eyes and said, “You must be a Republican.”

“I am,” replied the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” answered the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to do with your information, and I’m still lost. Frankly, you’ve not been much help to me.”

The man smiled and responded, “You must be a Democrat.

“I am,” replied the balloonist. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You’ve risen to where you are, due to a large quantity of hot air. You made a promise that you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. You’re in exactly the same position you were in before we met, but, somehow, now it’s my fault. (Thanks, Ron!)

Happy Birthday, Carrie!

WP RandomQuotes is a modification and melding of two separate WordPress plugins: WP Quotes by Dustin Barnes and RandomQuote by Abhijit Nadgouda. In fact, RandomQuote is simply a widget wrapper for WP Quotes. The problem was that WP Quotes had it’s own admin interface which actually required the WordPress user to drop a file in both the wp-plugins directory and in the wp-admin directory. This is not an elegant solution; many WordPress users are simply not technical enough to handle such an operation. In addition, the typical upgrade process for WordPress involves replacing all files in the wp-admin directory by deleting the entire folder and replacing it with the newer release’s folder. You could easily lose that functionality. Also, the RandomQuote would do nothing if the WP Quotes plugin was not in place and working. And, you had to add elements to your CSS file in order to format the quotes on your blog. Lots of “ifs”, “ands” and such. While the existing system worked, it was kind of convoluted.

So, I decided to take all three parts of the code and wrap them in to one plugin file. I had to rewrite a lot of the admin interface as it was dependent upon a lot of the code in the file that had to be dropped in the wp-admin directory. There was other code I had to change as well. It went rather quickly, though, as the original files I drew from are all stable and documented enough to hack in to. Thanks to Rob Lund for the suggestion of including a markup for specific quotes to be placed in posts and pages. I’ve added that request to the plugin’s functionality and kept a modified version of the tag from WP Quotes that allows a user to display all quotes in their database.

To see more or download the plugin, go to my wiki page here.

Happy Birthday, Al!

I found this beautiful winter poem and thought it might be a comfort to you all. It’s very well written. ENJOY!

I just changed over from McMike’s Random Quote of the Day to Dustin’s Random Quotes. You see, McMike’s Random Quote of the Day is not widgetized and does not have some of the capabilities at the back end that Dustin’s Random Quotes has.

I’m currently using Dustin’s Random Quotes together with Abhijit Nadgouda’s widget that incorporates Dustin’s Random Quotes. While the two work together OK, I think I’m going to rewrite the entire thing so it is all one widgetized plugin just to make the entire thing easier. You see, there is one file in the admin folder and two files in the plugins folder that all have to be in place. It would just be easier to make it all one file for the widgetized plugin. I think once that’s done I’ll redistribute the resulting package; giving plenty of credit to the authors of the original work, of course!

Happy Birthday, Paul!

Michigan was screwed! They should be playing for the national title. No, I’m not a fan of the Wolverines, but the BCS just shoved a football where their sun don’t shine.

It’s a crisp 12° outside tonight. The good news is that yesterday I finally got the hot tub fixed. Took it to the repair shop in Iowa City and the guy did it in about an hour. Turns out I needed to replace the motor, the impeller and the pump. The date on the original motor was 1996. I guess that after 10 years, parts tend to rust and seals tend to break or wear out. It cost me about $550, but I think it was worth it. Now tomorrow night I should be able to actually step in to the tub. You see it takes a while to heat the water. I filled it with the garden hose and tap water and it was about 50° when the whole thing started. As of right now the water temperature is 84°… only 20 more degrees to go!!

I made the leap. I used to use Gallery for my online photo album. It is a very complete program, and kind of a bear to set up and get exactly the way you want. It’s not easy because there are so many options available and each photo gallery can be set up with different options for frame, titles, captions, comments, thumbnail size, display size, etc… there are just too many options for what I want to do, which is just display some photos. I had been toying with QDig for a while. I had used it a while back and like a lot of things about it. It was small, taking up only about 200K or so (smaller than some pictures) and it was fast. I didn’t want to delve in to the code and change a lot of the settings, so I went and tried a number of other photo gallery softwares: Plogger, MIG, MG, etc. While each one had its strengths and weaknesses, I kept going back to QDig and Gallery. My biggest issues with all of them is that when I changed themes in WordPress, the changes didn’t jump over to the photo gallery.

Well, I finally settled on QDig and here’s why: you can embed QDig in WordPress. That’s right; you simply use the QDig WP Plugin and follow the setup directions there and you have your photo gallery all ready. Since my photos were already out on the website, all I had to do was point QDig WP to that directory and let it do the work. How hard is that?!

So now when you click on the “Photos” link on the main menu, you’ll get a WordPress page with QDig embedded in the page. COOL!!