Archive for the Category ◊ gailatlarge.com ◊

02 Jan 2010 Gail At Large, By The Numbers
Author: Gail |  Category: Unabashed Geekiness, Videoclips, gailatlarge.com  | 4 Comments

I thought while I try to get my printer/scanner working with my iMac (Snow Leopard says the driver is pre-installed, but my scanner doth protest), I would post the table where I keep a tally of all the posts I’ve written here. Also, because I’m a data nerd.

I was surprised that I’d posted less than last year — it didn’t seem that way. Come to think of it, 2009 was a rollercoaster but I was quite preoccupied with many things that I couldn’t discuss online. Travel-wise I would say 2008 was a bigger flying/driving year than 2009 due to my work situation, so it could also be that many of those posts are mobile phone pics from hither and yon rather than written posts. My most prolific blogging year thus far was 2006, but I moved from Pennsylvania back to Canada and was in a state of flux, recovery, and rebuilding. I did not work most of that year and thus had more time to write.

Of course, I had to make a graph, too. I’m a visual person and it’s part of what I do for a living, a table just wasn’t enough…

With 3,380 posts and counting, I’ve been searching for a better way to display archives without killing my server with database queries. I used to have the Extended Live Archives plugin — built on Ajax, which I loved — to review the posts but the developers have neglected it and gone MIA. My search for a better mousetrap continues. One reason why I want to get the archives list back is because I use the list to help write my Year in Review. My last one was 2007, which I wrote a year ago. 2008 and 2009 were both big years (actually, I can’t remember the last time I had a “not-so-big” year), but with 619 and 534 posts, respectively, there isn’t an easy way to skim the post titles.

Video for today: something a little different this time… fingers breakdancing. It’s a minute long, so bear with me — it’s cute…

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26 Dec 2009 Boxing Day
Author: Gail |  Category: Unabashed Geekiness, Working Life, gailatlarge.com  | Leave a Comment

fancy footwear deserves a fancy box

Hey hey, it’s Boxing Day and I have kept to my word and have yet to step foot in a shop. It probably helps that most shops are closed the past day or two, but Boxing Day is Sale Day in Canada, much the same way Black Friday works in the USA: consumer chaos. I don’t think I’ve bought anything on Boxing Day, ever, and I plan to keep it that way.

In other news, I’ve been busy creating things and wrangling code. As always, it’s a work in progress but I’ve set up another photography site using a photo application for the web called Pixelpost. One reason why I wanted to try this is because it’s specifically for showing photos — the code is light, and the templates are created with photos in mind rather than text. Anyhow, take a look:

ImageNation : imagination with images

I didn’t come up with the name “ImageNation” until after I created the first incarnation of the gallery page. I didn’t know what to call it, and I didn’t want to use my name since it’s already the domain. Somehow I came up with this, not with the idea of registering it or anything, but just to give it a name. I like the word imagination and I wanted to base it on image. Tonight I put the name in Google to see what was out there and I see there are lots of sites using the name already, so it’s a good thing I didn’t bother to see if the domain was free. I kept the folder name as “gallery” with the idea of changing the site name if I can up with a better moniker. Kind of like calling a baby-in-utero Junior until it’s born…

I’m still populating the photo gallery, but at least it’s up and running. I’ve also made changes to my other sites, but not major ones just yet.

I’ve also created a home page for gailedwinfielding.com that acts as a portal/listing for the other sites I have: http://gailedwinfielding.com

I used iWeb to build that page, which was my second time to use it, the first time was to build the Santa Comes To Bay Street pages. iWeb comes bundled with iLife which came with my iMac, and my first impression was that it was too basic to be more useful than the other software I’m using for building webpages. I thought I would only use it for the occasional event, but after building three pages I must admit that being able to drag-and-drop and push page elements around rather than mess with CSS files is very useful, indeed. After all, I do that enough with my other sites, so this is a welcome break.

I’ve had a Very Geeky Christmas. Three days at home and I had to have something to show for it!

28 Jul 2009 7th Blogiversary Cake!
Author: Gail |  Category: The Ms, gailatlarge.com  | One Comment

My blog is seven years old today! The above is a cameraphone pic of a cake I shot in New York City, December 20, 2006. It’s very “Gail at Large”, wouldn’t you say?

This blog has benefited me in many ways, not the least of which has been to connect me with many interesting people who I’d never have met otherwise. A recent example of this is from my Ottawa road trip the other weekend when I met up with two well-travelled people through totally different channels: Zhu, a multilingual expat blogger from France, and Lisa, an Ottawa native who was referred to my blog by someone else and works in the aviation industry. Who knew when I started writing in this space that in seven years it would morph from a working university student blogspot templated rant to a mostly pictorial account of my ever-evolving life filled with cameras, airplanes, cats, code-tweaking, and blurry cameraphone shots of food? Certainly not me!

Speaking of travel, I got a very cute postcard today from my nephew, I’ll scan it after I get home later… which I’m sharing with you because it brought a big smile to my face and if it doesn’t bring one to yours I’ll be a monkey’s uncle (auntie?):

postcard from my nephew Michael, age 8

Aww, poor Kermit, he’s probably got heatstroke!

Michael and I had a funny conversation on the phone a couple of days before their road trip. (Bear in mind he’s a little over a month away from turning nine years old.) Here’s a snippet:

Me: “Have all my postcards arrived yet?”
Michael: “We got one from Bra… Brats… Brat-sylvia.”
Me (chuckling): “You mean Bra-ti-sla-va. Do you know where that is?”
Michael: “No. Where is it?”
Me: “Slovakia. Do you know where Austria is?”
Michael: “That’s where Beethoven is from. But I don’t know where Austria is. I’m only in Grade 3, Auntie Gail, Geography is in Grade 5.”

Earlier in July, when I phoned Melissa for her 10th birthday, she told me they got my postcard from Rome.

Me: “Do you know where Rome is?”
Melissa: “I’ve heard of it.”
Me: “Have you heard of the Pope?”
Melissa: “Yes, he lives at church.”

Maddy (nearly eight) was too busy plotting world dominance playing to stop and talk to me. The twins (age five) are talking like crazy and say funny things, but they don’t like to talk on the phone… yet, anyway. Once they do, I’ll be sure to post the gems.

05 Jul 2009 Gail At Large [Photography] Is Live!
Author: Gail |  Category: Blah Blah Blah, Unabashed Geekiness, gailatlarge.com  | 2 Comments

Picture 1

Since June evaporated before my eyes and I’m a quarter of the way through July already, I thought I would finish at least ONE web project for momentum to tackle the next three that have been waiting patiently. My apartment’s not much cleaner than it was on Friday and the laundry’s only half done, but I did manage to create a site to feature my non-wedding photography. I’ve found some bugs and there’s some tweaking to do, but it’s mostly presentable, if a little empty-looking…

http://www.gailatlarge.net

It’s going to take me a while to populate it with my photo albums.

Why a second personal website? Hey, I wrote a post there to answer that very question.

This blog turns seven years old later this month, it’s high time it stopped trying to live a double life of blog and photo website. The clutter of a regular blog, with various media like video, competes with the need for a minimalist approach to displaying photos. It’s like trying to hang a big picture frame on the wall of a busy kitchen: there’s lots of viewing traffic, but not much space. Anyway, I hope you click through once in a while to look at some pictures — there’s more room over there and the photos are at least twice the size!

19 Oct 2008 New Theme
Author: Gail |  Category: gailatlarge.com  | 2 Comments

A new autumn look! Still a couple of pages under construction (eg., Linkage), but here’s one nifty feature: the image in the middle frame of the header changes every time the page is reloaded. I’ve only got four images in the cycle for now, but I’ll add more as I go along. The new theme might be a little testy for a while before all the kinks get ironed out. Let me know about any other weirdness, please and thank-you!

28 Jul 2008 6-Year Blogiversary
Author: Gail |  Category: gailatlarge.com  | 8 Comments

Neesa (BW)

Today I officially reached another milestone: the six-year mark for online publishing. I’ve only celebrated the blogiversary once before, last year, but it’s really only been in the last few years that the posts evolved into full-length chronicles and the photography resembled more than just snapshots.

Current tally of posts is 2,552 including this one!

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08 May 2008 Upgraded to PHP5 FastCGI
Author: Gail |  Category: Unabashed Geekiness, gailatlarge.com  | Leave a Comment

You may not have noticed, but last night I upgraded from PHP4 to PHP5. Everything went smoothly, so I went one step further and upgraded to FastCGI for PHP.

What does this mean?

PHP5 (FastCGI)
All files with the extension .php will be handled by PHP5 FastCGI processes. FastCGI for PHP makes all your PHP applications run through mod_fastcgi instead of mod_suphp. This eliminates the overhead of loading the PHP interpretor on every hit. Since it is always in memory ready for the next hit, the responses will be generated faster.

Depending on your computer and what applications you use, there should be a difference in page loading speed. If you have the password, password protected posts should now login normally (input password, hit ’submit’) and those posts will stay open for you as long as your cookies are enabled.

As per usual, please let me know if there’s any weirdness. Cheerios!

24 Apr 2008 What Do Raccoons And PHP Have In Common?
Author: Gail |  Category: Critters + Creatures, gailatlarge.com  | Leave a Comment

Nothing, except this post. Unless raccoons in the new millennia have tired of raiding rubbish bins and moved on to coding websites.

PHP: The wonkiness regarding password-protected posts has nothing to do with your machine and everything to do with Apache files and my website needing a full migration from PHP4 to PHP5. Apparently this started a while ago, even before the upgrade to WordPress 2.5, but I have to do a bit more research before I continue with the changes, otherwise I will break my site completely. I had to make some mods yesterday to make it possible to get into that last PWP-3 post at all.

So, if you have the password for the category of posts labelled PWP-3, for now the only way to get in (unless you’re a hacker) is to enter the password into the field and click the POST TITLE, not the “submit” button. You may have to clear your cache and then make a couple of attempts, it seems to vary between machines. I’ve tried it on PC and Mac (not Linux, though), and Firefox, IE, and Safari. Once I get everything migrated, that submit button should be working again.

Enough of that, on to the raccoons!

At 6:00 yesterday morning there was some rustling around the skylight directly above my head. It was getting light, and I could just make out some ears…

… then a tail… of a big raccoon — doing what, I do not know — and Beano FROZE. Xena was probably sleeping on the recliner, but Beano is always beside me. I didn’t want the raccoon hanging around and making the skylight filthy and freaking out the cats, so I had to get rid of it.

How do you get rid of a raccoon?? First I got the flashlight and tried to blind him (her?), but that didn’t work (of course). The only other thing to do was bang on the skylight, but what if it just made the raccoon angry and bang back? Great, just what I need: wake up to a raccoon face directly above my head, staring at me angrily and shaking his fist. I already have two cats waking me up in the morning, crying for food.

Thankfully, the raccoon decided it was more interested in possible food caches in the eaves of the house and moseyed away. And hopefully that will be my last raccoon-in-the-skylight post, otherwise I’ll have to wear one of those airplane eyemasks to bed.

12 Apr 2008 Site Note
Author: Gail |  Category: gailatlarge.com  | Leave a Comment

I’ve got some updated anti-spam plugins activated, so if you try to comment and it won’t let you, please email me.

If you comment and there’s a message “your comment is awaiting moderation” then everything’s OK.

11 Apr 2008 WordPress 2.5
Author: Gail |  Category: Unabashed Geekiness, Xena & Beano, gailatlarge.com  | One Comment

WordPress 2.5 upgrade

I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my site to the latest version of WordPress, but I did it a little differently… so if you see coding weirdness, please do let me know. The site itself will look pretty much the same as before, but the whole interface behind the curtain is laid out differently. It’s an improvement on the admin side (hurrah for one-step plugin updates!), with more features that largely don’t impact me while I’m still using my Gail-ized version of K2 Beta Two r167 (the current version is Release Candidate 3). At least one of my plugins has been updated to work better with 2.5, which hopefully means the other plugin writers will follow suit.

This is gobbledy-gook to most readers, yes, but cross your fingers this upgrade doesn’t break anything!

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