Statrix Redux

I managed to survive my fiftieth birthday. To be honest not much happened. I had a very nice time being taken to dinner by a friend and his partner, Verbano’s on Waialae Avenue if you are ever in the area. It’s great.
Saturday was a business day it seemed. Not work mind you, but one of the organizations I belong to demanded a bit of my time. Ah well. It’s all worth it.
Finally I went to an anniversary celebration for a friend of mine. She’s a popular character and there were dozens of folks there. A good time was had by all. I just pretended the party was for my birthday. Nah. That would be selfish, besides, I’m not much for big parties, at least mine.
Today I’m trying to figure out which of the many calendar options for WordPress I should use. I’ve installed Event Calendar here on Statrix (as you can see by the sidebar), but I’m undecided on what to use for the site I maintain for others. I wish I could get WebCalendar to work inside WP. There is a widget/plugin, but it hasn’t been updated for a while and some test showed it wasn’t working for the versions I have. Sigh – if this is the biggest problem I have, I’m a lucky guy.
Aloha!

Area Inventory Assembly at Wahiawa Park

Today’s the day. I am now officially a half century in age. Of course as I understand it, were I Chinese I’d have already pretty much have used up my fiftieth year. Apparently, at least according to Wikipedia I’m a rooster:
Jan 30 1957 – Feb 17 1958 Yin Fire Rooster
Other charts that just use the year make me a dog.
Rooster, dog, I can’t say I get worked up over this, I’m just mentioning it in passing.
For my 49th birthday I quit smoking and it’s now been a year. It went very well and I’m not really bothered with urges, though I will admit that once in a while I do give it a thought.
This year I’ve decided to pay the cost associated with quitting smoking. Weight. I’ve gotten too big and have decided to watch my diet (which is different from dieting) and try to exercise a bit more.
I stopped drinking some time ago so this will make no drinking, no smoking, and now no eating. What’s next? Breathing? 🙂
I do get a kick out of lines like, “fifty is the new forty.” The truth is, I’m fifty, my body sometimes feels like it’s seventy, I think I’m twenty, and I generally act fourteen. Let’s see, my real age is (50 + 70 + 20 + 14) / 4 = 38.50.
Yes!!! I can work with that. 🙂
So today I’m going to celebrate my 38.5th birthday.
Aloha!

It’s pretty clear that this site is based on WordPress. It’s pretty stock, acts like a blog, and hasn’t been modified too much at all. Why do I bring that up? I’m glad you asked. 🙂
I’m the webmaster of a private site I inherited about six months ago. When I got it the site was a mess, filled with Microsoft Frontpage kludge. I know some folks may like that program, or it’s replacement Expression Web, but I wasn’t a big fan, especially after looking at the code it put out.
The first thing I did was rewrite the whole site, no more than 50 pages, in pretty straightlaced XHTML Transitional 1.0 Transitional. I didn’t change the look and feel much, other than the specific font type stuff. Good enough.
Well, maybe not. The site was still hard to navigate, requiring one to go through a couple pages to arrive at some locations. Not good. I decided to treat myself to Dreamweaver to make things easier. And it did, all while keeping the markup very simple. I ended up using their Spry Ajax stuff to do the menus and a couple of accordions, but other than that, the only “tricky” thing I used was some server side includes for the menus and footers – that and a bit of fun with Google Maps.
Still it wasn’t all that much fun to update and I’m not a big WYSIWYG guy, so I mostly wrote my own in Dreamweaver, not relying at all on the visual editor.
It has always been our plan to migrate the site to a CMS and I figured with the new year, why not now? Indeed.
I’d looked at some of packages like Joomla and Drupal that are out there, but frankly, they seemed like overkill for this site. It’s pretty lightweight. And then it struck me, could WordPress do the job. Yep. It seems that in that few releases static pages have gotten pretty easy to work with and that meant I was good to go.
In flurry what amounted to mostly cutting and pasted from the original site to WordPress, I managed to port the whole thing over in one day and that included having to do a whole set of pages over. They had maps and for some reason they didn’t work when I moved from my server to my project’s server.
I did find out why, btw, and regret I didn’t look harder last night, but it was late. As it turns out I could have kept all the work. But, as with many things, in doing those pages over I got a better result than the first time around anyway. Which reminds me of writer I met who never kept first drafts, claimed they were never any good anyway. He’d write them out, toss ’em, and start again. He was a pretty decent writer, so it must have worked for him.
In any case, the new site is up and running smoothly on WordPress. I like it a lot better and am only writing the entry to keep myself from diving back in to tweak some more. 🙂
Aloha!

Yes, I’m one of those folks who bought an Amazon Kindle eBook reader last year. And I did so early enough that I actually received it early as well, though not in the first wave of deliveries. I think I got mine the first week of December, so I’ve had it a month now.

The short take is that I love it. I’m a big reader, both of genre fiction and non-fiction history, so I’m always up to ears in books floating around. I am loathe to part with them once I’m finished, so they end up stacked up all over the place until I get so sick of seeing them I put them in the lobby of my building for other folks to take home and stack up in their apartments. Now, with the Kindle, those folks are going to lose out.
Why do I love it?
Well there’s the aforementioned cleanup of clutter for one thing. There’s the ease of shopping – having books delivered almost instantly is great, if a little dangerous on the wallet. Better though is the fact that I can get the first chapter or so of each book as a sample before I purchase. Mostly I’ve purchased the books I thought I would, but I’ve gotten a couple I probably wouldn’t have picked up based on the quality of the sample chapters. In addition I didn’t purchase another book I was sure I’d like – I didn’t.
The device itself isn’t nearly as clunky or ugly as many have made it out to be both on the Amazon review section for the Kindle and in general reports out on the net. I think many of these folks based their judgments on pictures of the device and not on any actual experience.
And what’s with that – so many of the reviews on Amazon, especially the negative ones, are based on the what they’ve read and not on actually holding the machine or using it. Some give it 1 star simply because they don’t think they’d like it. A review is supposed to be about one’s actual experience with a product. Otherwise we’d see movie reviews written by folks who hadn’t seen the movie. Maybe that’s a bad example – I think we do see that quite often. 🙂
Anway I love mine. I’ve read more books in the last month than I had in the three previous months, so for that alone I’m grateful – I much prefer reading to TV, but when I don’t have a fresh book it’s too easy to turn the darn thing on.
I’m not going to write a huge review here, but if you want more information, I suggest visiting Amazon and reading the reviews from folks who actually own one and not those from folks who think that eBooks mark the end of civilization. That started some time ago and had nothing to do with books, ‘e’ or otherwise. 🙂
Aloha!

I was reading Salon this morning, or more correctly, watching a Joan Walsh commentary on Barack Obama, when it struck me, I went to school with both of them!
I attended Punahou School in Honolulu as a middle school student before I moved to Milwaukee and attended the same high school as Joan.
Let’s not make it sound chummy here, I never knew Barack Obama because he was a couple of years back and at that age even a one grade difference is huge, not to mention three. But we were on the same campus at the same time as best as I can figure.
Joan, on the other hand, I did know. I’m not going to lie and say we were the best of friends, but the school was small and everyone knew everyone. In fact, as you can find out in other parts of this blog, I attended our reunion this past summer (’07) and got to meet back up with Joan. We do, it seems, share a love of baseball, she’s a Giant’s fan (I think) and me, with no pro team in Hawaii, am a UH Rainbow baseball fan.
Aloha!

I’m taking a half day off of work so that I can have my moped looked at, it’s due for a checkup as it’s been running on the rough side. I’m one of the few folks I know who, at age fifty, have never owned a car. I’m a decent driver, just never needed one. Instead I drive a moped these days. Mine is white, but other than that, looks a lot like this:

I got mine at Cycle Imports in Honolulu and I highly recommend these guys. George, the owner, runs a great business and James, my usual mechanic, goes the extra distance consistently. I’ve had the same bike for 3.5 years or so and they keep it in tip top shape. I’m thinking of getting another and there’s no place else I’d consider getting it from.
The only complaint I have about the place, and it’s minor one, is that they aren’t a coffee shop as well. Bike shop, cafe, and WiFi hug, that would be perfect. 🙂
So, instead of waiting there, I’m down the road a piece at Cafe 2600. This is a great little cafe on University Avenue here in Honolulu, part of the more or less non-existent university culture in this part of town. You’d really think there’d be more of a “culture” but at heart the University of Hawai’i at Manoa is a commuter school. Most folks don’t live on campus. Of course on an island as small as Oahu, it’s what you’d expect.
Back to Cafe 2600, my mocha is excellent, WiFi is free, and the seating is comfortable It’s not a spiffy, shiny, upscale place, but rather a homey, comfy, delicious sort of spot.
Aloha!

Congratulations to my friend Claudia, SHS grad and all-around cool person! I just spotted her in the “Women’s Online Magazine” where I believe she is an editor. The tag to the magazine is “men don’t get it” but I’m not going to let that vampire in the door. 🙂

It’s great to see another classmate get her due!
Check our her blog at The Practical Vampire Slayer.
Aloha!

I arrived this morning at my favorite coffee shop, the rRed Elephant, only to discover that my usual Saturday barista is being laid off for a while. Sad but true. It seems everyone’s shifts are being lengthened but as she has other obligations it’s out the door for her.
Sigh!
The good news is that her replacement is a very nice person as well, so I guess I’ll be okay!

Aloha!