Blog Master G

For some reason, I’ve been really into revamping my sidebar lately.

The latest addition: Random photos now appear at the top of the sidebar throughout my site. Leveraging my existing random entries script and the thumbnail photos already in my photos section, I created a new table in my database and threw together the following PHP template, which you can also see in stand-alone version:

<?php
include(“CONNECT_TO_DATABASE”);
?>

<div id=”random_photos”>

<div class=”sidetitle”>
From <a href=”http://gabeanderson.com/photos/”>Photos</a>
</div>

<div class=”side”>
<p>
<?php
$sql = “SELECT URL, imgSrc
from photos
order by RAND() LIMIT 1”;
$result = mysql_query($sql);

while ($row = mysql_fetch_array($result)) {
printf(“<a href=\”%s\”>%s</a>”,
$row[“URL”],$row[“imgSrc”]);
}
?>
</p>
</div>

What do you think of this feature? Is it too much? Does it make the sidebar too cluttered? I really like it (at least I think I do). It makes the site a bit more interesting and personal.

Next up: I’ll throw more photos into the table. There are only 18 right now, which map to the number of photo albums to which I’m currently linking in my photos section. You’ll notice that clicking on each photo that appears in the random photo feature will take you to the corresponding album. So if I want more random photos and want to maintain consistency in linking to related albums, that means bringing more albums online.

Of course, the alternative would be simply to throw in a bunch of thumbnails and not necessarily worry about making every one link to an album.

Suggestions?

What a difference 729 days can make.

© 2003 Chappatte, globecartoon.com (published with permission)

[via bit.ch]

From the September 2003 Harper’s Index:

“Maximum number of miles per gallon in Ford’s most fuel efficient 2003 car: 36
Maximum number of miles per gallon in Ford’s first Model T: 35”

The first Model T was built in 1908. Here we are in 2003 — nearly 100 years later — and we’re only getting a single mile more per gallon than we did at the turn of the 20th Century.

Car companies certainly could improve gas mileage if they wanted to, but what motivation do they have to do so? We keep buying SUVs and we continue to pay $2 per gallon at the pump. Oh, and the oil companies fill the pockets of the car companies.

Until we the people change our ways, most cars will continue to get no more than 20 or 30 miles to the gallon. I don’t think our planet has another 100 years to spare. The environment and ozone are suffering while making auto and oil executives richer. If our children are to breathe on planet Earth, we’ve got to begin using alternative sources of fuel: biodiesel, ethanol, liquefied propane gas (LPG), and the like.

A sign of hope: Alternative fueling stations like Regional Transportation Center (RTC) are beginning to pop up, most recently in San Diego. Ironically, “The $15 million RTC was conceived more than five years ago by a Ford dealership marketing executive.”

(Thanks to Jen for the Harper’s lead.)

“The homepage is dead, long live the Blog!” –Jordan Reed

My site’s primary index template (index.php) now contains the following code (thanks, Ben, for pointing me to the PHP header redirect after realizing that a modification of my .htaccess file would not work for this tweak, due to site content leveraging the /index.php?id=XX format):

<?php
if (!$id) {
header(“Location: http://blogmasterg.com/life/”); /* Redirect browser */
/* Make sure that code below does not get executed when we redirect. */
exit;
}
?>

Translation: gabeanderson.com is now gabeanderson.com: life. My blog is the new home page for my site.

I first pondered this last week and decided to go with Jordan‘s great suggestion, ala Wil Wheaton dot net… for now anyway. Silus also had some cool suggestions, but they would require more significant overhauling of my current site architecture… maybe some day soon.

As it stands, my new site navigation is down, though not by much, to 12 items instead of 14. By removing the home page from my site and linking to my about page from my new welcome page, I was able to remove those two items from the navigation. I also removed my writing page from the main navigation last week and plopped it under archives since (1) my blog is where I do most of my writing these days and (2) the writing section was so outdated (i.e., it’s been nearly two years since I’ve had anything published outside this blog). So those 3 minus 14 equals 11 plus my newest site addition, Google Galore, equals 12.

I’m happy to announce the latest addition to my site, Google Galore, a new blog that’s all Google, all the time. As I’ve written in the blog’s first post, my motivation to create the blog was simply the desire to have a place to capture observations and anything else related to Google (hopefully akin to the Google Weblog, but with more frequent updates). I hope to add to it often and encourage you to send me leads or anything related to Google, too.

It’s hard to say what it will become, but I’m willing to give it a shot. There are tons of us Google enthusiasts out there in the world, so I hope Google Galore can become a valuable resource for learning and archiving whatever we can about everyone’s favorite search tool.

Enjoy! And please let me know what you think.

Saturday night was wedding #4 of the year for Jen and me (including our own, of course). It was Karen and Bill’s reception at a beautiful location in Santa Rosa. They actually got married about a week before Jen and I did — in Hawaii — so this was the local celebration for a much larger crowd. We had lots of fun and the weather was just perfect. Congrats to Karen and Bill! They looked great and Karen was beautiful in her dress.

Can you tell we were in wine country? Was it the grapes or the Wino Way sign that gave it away?

It’s official, but a bit unreal: Jen and I just purchased our first Mac together, a refurbished PowerBook G4 (867MHz 12″ model). I was glad to find this past week that the great deal on the refurb, which I first wrote about in this posting, came back after not being available for a couple weeks. So we finally took the plunge tonight and bought the PowerBook in preparation for beginning production this month on 100 Faces of Marin.

Of course, the added bonus is that I’ll get to be back in the wonderful world of Apple again. I’m an Apple guy at heart. I grew up with Macs and would take one over a PC any day. I spent my entire 4 years of college working in the Apple Store. Quite simply, Macs rule.

My first Mac was 1987’s SE. My family upgraded to the Quadra 800 in 1993 (with A/V ports). When I left for college in 1995, I was equipped with my trusty PowerBook 520c (still around the house somewhere, but not used in years), which I used until my junior year in 1997 or so, when I purchased my most recent Mac, the Power Mac 7600. That old workhorse (also with A/V ports) rocked many an MP3-powered party during my final two years of college.

And here we are…a brand new G4 PowerBook should arrive within the week.

Part Number: F8760LL/A
Product Name: PowerBook G4 867MHz/256MB/40GB/Combo/E/12″TFT – Refurbished
Unit Price: $1,399.00
Quantity: 1
Net Price: $1,399.00
Estimated time to ship: 1-2 bus.days

Part Number: F8881LL/A
Product Name: Airport Extreme Card – Refurbished
Unit Price: $89.00
Quantity: 1
Net Price: $89.00
Estimated time to ship: 1-2 bus.days

Part Number: M9035G/A
Product Name: Apple Mouse
Unit Price: $49.00
Quantity: 1
Net Price: $49.00
Estimated time to ship: Same bus.day

Last night Jen and I hung out with my cousin Sararose, her boyfriend Ruben, and their Brit friend Barry in breathtaking Sea Cliff…photos are directly outside the house (talk about the ultimate arrangement):

It seems that misc.vassar.edu is back online! Content, no. Archives, no. But the server, yes. That’s a start. Way to go, current info tech editor who’s behind this, whoever you may be!

It would be great to track down all the archives that we had online once upon a time and restore them. Many of us ex-editors and writers would love to see that.

For a good laugh, take a look at my bio page (and see what one of the old versions of The Misc. Web site looked like) from 1998, when I was editor-in-chief.

Also, I archived this misc.vassar.edu history back on October 2, 2002, when I last linked to it and had a couple email exchanges with then-EIC Marcie.

Finally, no trip down Misc. memory lane would be complete without reminding my readers that if it weren’t for said collegiate publication, Jen and I would not have become best friends, not to mention wife and husband. Click here to read the first email I ever sent to Jen — on November 16, 1997.

Siva Vaidhyanathan has an excellent assessment of exactly how Jen and I have felt since getting married: “We exchanged our vows before a justice of the peace of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. And as a result, we get to benefit from the rights and privileges that Massachusetts grants married couples. And, thanks to our Constitution, those privileges extend to every other state. But there are many people in this country, some of whom are in this room, who are just as much in love, just as committed to each other, yet who cannot enjoy those privileges. We hope some day soon they can.”