Don’t punish everyone for one person’s mistake.

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(via Matt Mullenweg)

I enjoyed this short message because I’m definitely among the people who tend to smirk when confronted with half a dozen signs telling customers what they are and aren’t allowed to do in somebody’s store. The Subway nearest to me has a bunch – don’t use your cell phone, only one coupon per order, your rewards card must be registered in advance to use it, etc… and sometimes I can’t help but think that if I wasn’t as hungry, maybe I should go someplace that doesn’t lambaste me with orders when all I want is to pay them money in exchange for a sandwich.

new D&D photo galleries @ tampadnd.org

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So today’s big project was something that ended up taking a whole lot longer than I had expected, but at least I can say that I’m definitely happy with the results. Up until the latest one, I’ve been using Flickr to host the photos for the write-ups that I occasionally do for our Wednesday night LFR games, however I actually hit the photo cap for free accounts (200 photos) a while ago and in the meantime have just accepted the fact that as I added newer posts, the photo sets from the older ones were disappearing. I wasn’t crazy about the idea, and I almost considered just paying the $18 for a while to side-step the issue, but ultimately I knew that eventually one day I needed to suck it up and migrate all of the galleries back to my own server because a) it’s silly to pay Flickr when I already have a monthly hosting bill anyways, and b) hosting them myself allows me to do a lot of cool things that I simply can’t do via another service.

Anyways, several nights of uploading photos, updating posts, and tweaking code later, everything has been moved over and seems to be running smoothly. I’m using the NextGEN Gallery plugin for WordPress – the same one that I’m using for the other big project I’ve been randomly musing about – and all in all I think I’m really starting to like it as a photo gallery for WordPress sites. My one beef is that it doesn’t handle comments on a photo by photo basis, which is more of an issue for the other site than this one, but in the same vein I’ve already spent years struggling with Gallery2 and even though it’s technically a more robust gallery system, integration with other sites is just atrocious and I don’t think I’ve ever come across a site using it in a way other than the regular, blocky templates that come stock with it.

In fact, I’m currently running Gallery2 for the photos on scottandsara.info and I’ll probably end up moving those into NextGEN eventually too because it just seems too clunky for what it does these days…

That said, here’s the final product for the D&D site:


I’ll do a separate post here in a little bit about the technical hurdles that I faced with this one because there is some customization taking place under the NextGEN hood, but overall I really like how it allows me to highlight the photos from my LFR Adventure Logs because there are times when I think I enjoy going back and just flipping through the pictures more than reading the actual posts! Bottom line is, after over 300 photos across 24 separate games, it was time for something a little fancier than Flickr sets and I think NextGEN does the job nicely, if I do say so myself! 🙂

Thin Post : Checking In…

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Admittedly I haven’t exactly been nearly as active at trying to lose weight this summer as I was in the springtime when I lost my first 20 pounds. Today I weighed in for the first time in 8 weeks and found that I’ve gained 0.2 pounds since that last victory, and frankly, I’m ok with that.

Mainly because it helps to reassure myself that I’m going to be able to keep the weight off once I actually get to my target goal. I barely exercised in the last month and a half, and I had my share of indulgences as well, but not so much that I felt like a pig … most of the time, anyways … so it’s kind of comforting to know that I can let up from time to time without throwing all of my hard work away…

I can only imagine how devastating it would’ve been to step on that scale and see it jump right back up over 250 again!

But that said, I do still have quite a long ways to go, so I think it’s time to finally get back to work. I’ve decided that I want to lose a little over 8 pounds by my birthday (August 25th) to get me to my next milestone, and I think that 8 lbs in 33 days is certainly doable if I can focus and get myself back on track. I’ve already got ideas for exercise – last night I took Cleo for an hour-long walk and then swam to cool down for another hour after that, so I think just making that a regular habit of 3-4 times a week should be ok there. As for food, that one’s honestly my real enemy – not only do I need to curb my snacking, but regular meals could also stand some attention as well. I’ll probably write more about it next week, but basically I need some better organization around what I’m eating so I’m not either settling for bad food or just skipping meals and scavenging for whatever I can find throughout the night. Still doable – I just need to refocus.

Dare I say that today marks the first day of phase 2 of this weight loss journey of mine???

Hamburger Mouth Makes a Full Recovery!!!

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I don’t know how he did it, but no thanks to me it looks like somehow my behemoth of a plecosthamus will continue to terrorize the smaller fish in my tank for another day…


A month later and looking at him now you’d have no clue that five weeks ago he was nearly choking to death on some strange infection-thing. I’d still be curious to know what in the world it was, if there are any freelance marine biologists out there who could diagnose over the interweb via these photos.

Cleo, on becoming a good dog…

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Cleo’s done a lot of growing up in the last week or so.

She’s really starting to grow farther and farther away from that little puppy that we first picked up around two months ago and as Sara has been saying, she’s beginning to shape into a really nice dog. Over the last week in particular I feel like she really bonded quite a bit with us, I think, because we had some relatives in town who were knew to her, so it became increasingly clear as the weekend progressed that she was flocking to what she knew whether it was sleeping in the corner of my office or even just sticking close to one of us when everyone was all together.

She’s been friendly, but cautious with new people around her home, which all in all I think is a good thing.

Granted, she also still occasionally pees on the floor, and we’ve still got a ways to go with all of her puppy classes, but it’s kind of neat to see her personality developing as she matures and finds herself at home around us!

an end to a 30-year legacy…

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Despite a horrendously scripted read (sorry, they can’t all be rocket scientists AND public speakers!), I thought this little thank-you clip to everyone in the space program from the astronauts about the Space Shuttle Atlantis while still docked at the International Space Station was a nice, little send off to the incredible, 30-year adventure in space exploration…

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/videogallery/index.html?media_id=101162701

I know that there are a lot of nay-sayers who think that the shuttle was nothing but a ginormous waste of money (despite the fact that 30 years of space cost us the same as a single year of our wars these days), but aside from the financial debate, I sincerely hope that whatever’s next proceeds to prove me wrong here in the upcoming years and somehow manages to keep kids young and old excited about the prospects of exploring space because I know that it had a huge impact on me growing up.

I have fond memories of flipping through my Dad’s hard-cover National Geographic books talking about all of the planets and stars, and what we had learned about them thus far (back in the 80s, anyways). We built model rockets that we launched high into the air and my LEGO spacemen performed many a mission exploring the far surfaces of the living room floor, and frankly it all just made for a really neat childhood to grow up in. The idea of people traveling into space excited me in a big way and even if it didn’t result in my entertaining a career in aerospace myself, it’s still been awfully inspirational to know that somebody’s been doing it.

In short, I guess I just hope that my children and my children’s children still think of astronauts when asked what they want to be when they grow up.

build me to the stars…

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I actually got this set from my wife last year for my birthday, but just have never gotten around to putting it together until now. This seemed like a fitting enough time, though, with the final mission for Atlantis coming to a close (touching down today, in fact). Plus, my nephew was visiting with his family for a couple of days and it gave us something to do!

Probably one of the more fun sets I’ve put together in a while, although admittedly there’s certainly a bit of historical significance with this one…

Fun Space Shuttle Facts

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(as collected from various sources around the interweb…)

A total of five space shuttles have flown 135 missions from 1981 through 2011.

Cumulatively, these space craft spent 1,330 days (over 3.5 years) in flight, with the longest flight being almost 18 days.

Each space shuttle launch requires about 150,000 gallons of liquid oxygen and almost 400,000 gallons of liquid hydrogen, on top of the solid rocket boosters each containing 1.1 million pounds of propellent, to get into orbit.

The shuttle accelerates from 0 to 17,000 mph over a period of 8.5 minutes during lift off.

A total of 356 astronauts have flown on the space shuttle during its 30-year program. Roughly 32,000 people had a hand in the shuttle at one point or another.

Just some of the inventions that NASA had a hand in with the space program – cordless tools, smoke detectors, running shoe insoles, velcro, memory foam, scratch-resistant eye-glasses, and improvements to pacemakers.

The space shuttle actually breaks the sound barrier twice during re-entry – once at the nose of the orbiter and a second a moment later at the tail of the craft.

The five shuttles have travelled in total an excess of 542 million miles, or just over the distance from the sun to Jupiter.

The Space Shuttle Endeavour cost $1.7 billion to build. The entire shuttle program in its 30-year duration cost $470 billion. The average cost per mission was about $450 million.

You Shall Not Pass (without ice cream…)

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This is a really cute story – a group of guys are playing D&D at one of their houses when suddenly the game is interrupted by the DM’s 7 year-old, who happens to believe that she can help the party with their quest … for a price!

http://community.wizards.com/go/thread/view/75882/27928765/Well,_I_didnt_see_that_coming

I love that the entire thing became a new angle to the role-playing, even to the DM’s surprise, and anything that gets kids using their imagination is fantastic in my book. My favorite comment was a couple of pages later suggesting that she’d eventually become some random ghost/witch in the game who just shows up at odd places and says, “I live here!”

Critically adorable.