What a great story… and pretty nice pictures, too.
“I was skiing in Brooklyn’s Prospect Park and I found a roll of film. I had the film developed and this is what I found. Please contact me if you recognize the people in the photos. brooklynfoundfilm@gmail.com”
YouTube Link | via Richard’s Notes
Well, I’ve updated my install of WordPress, and the various plugins I use. I also updated my Media Temple server from MySQL 4 to 5 – which will be necessary for WordPress 3.2, as they’re dropping support for MySQL 4. I still have some tweaking to do, but things are much more up to date now than they have been in a while.
Since I’m starting things up again around here, I decided it was time for a fresh theme too. For now I decided to stick with a slightly modified version of Twenty Ten (the new default theme in WordPress). I’ve been saying for ever that I would create my own custom theme for the site, but I’ve never gotten around to it. I hope to do that early next year.
Before I decided to stick with Twenty Ten, I actually looked around quite a lot for themes by others. I hate to say it, but I was a little disappointed by what I found.
There are literally thousands of WordPress themes out there. While there’s definitely some good ones, there’s also a tremendous amount of junk. All I was looking for was a simple, clean, modern theme… and I couldn’t really find what I wanted. Everything I found was either too much or too little in terms of design and features. Or, they were just plain ugly.
There’s a huge number of pay-theme premium sites out there these days. And, I was totally willing to buy a theme that I liked, but these sites seem to cater to themes with a more “magazine” type layout. I don’t really want that right now. I was looking for a more traditional, one post after another, type theme.
As wordpress has developed from strictly a blogging platform to much more of a full-featured CMS (content management system), it seems like traditional blog themes have kind of fallen behind. From what I’ve seen, it seems like the people who are really putting thought and time into the themes they’re developing, are only creating magazine (or portfolio / business) themes. It doesn’t seem like the same level of effort is being put into simpler themes anymore.
It’s possible this is just my perception of the situation, so feel free to leave links in the comments if there are some good, simple themes that you know of.
I was watching a press conference this morning by the CDC (Center for Disease Control & Prevention), and they were going over statistics from the Swine Flu pandemic. They stated there’s been 1 confirmed death here in the U.S. as a result of the Swine Flu. To put that number in context, they said on average, 36,000 people die from the flu every year in the United Sates alone. I found that number shocking.
I couldn’t agree more. I learned a long time ago the higher up you go in any organization, the less technically-savvy the people become. I love how the Executive Creative Director only knows how to do email. (That’s the Microsoft Entourage (Mac) icon for all you PC people)
There’s actually another lesson i learned many years ago that directly relates to this… the higher up you go in any organization, the crappier their computers become.
I remember several years ago I was working for a company that was doing a big pitch to Amazon.com. The person behind the project was convinced that the Amazon Executives we would be dealing with were very “sophisticated” people, who would have all the latest equipment, and well-versed in how to use it. He decided that our web component should be built at 1024×768, which at the time was considered high resolution. After we sent everything off, we got a call from an Amazon VP who was having trouble viewing the site. It turned out he was using a 640×480 16bit display. Of course, he had no idea that’s what he was using. We had to guide him though checking his monitor resolution over the phone.
I remember another time where we sent a CD-based presentation to the owner of a medium-large size company. When we got him on the phone he said he hadn’t looked at the CD because he didn’t know how to put it into his computer. His secretary normally took care of “computer stuff”, and she was on vacation.
Lessons learned. :)
via Swissmiss
I upgraded the site to WordPress 2.7.1 tonight. Everything seems to be working fine, but let me know if you come across anything that appears broken.
I run the RSS feed for One Digital Life through Feedburner. Google bought Feedburner a while back (2007, I think), but the change of hands never really required me to do anything. I’ve heard rumblings for a little while now that Google was going to require people to migrate their feeds into a Google account, but I hadn’t really checked into it until now.
I tried to login to my Feedburner account tonight, and I can’t. I’m being prompted to migrate my account to Google. I’ve read some mixed reports on how smoothly this goes, and I may or may not need to change my feed address.
I’ll probable migrate the feeds tomorrow, so if the feed stops working, just come by the site and grab the new address.
if you use Feedburner too, you may want to try to login to your account.
If you haven’t already heard, we’ve passed the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act. The chart above shows where the money will be going. Hopefully it really will help.
As the money gets distributed, you can keep track of things over at Recovery.gov.
Image Credit: AP Photo/Alex Brandon
Today was the day. George W. Bush officially moved out, and Barack Obama moved in. Everything seemed just a little brighter today. I have much higher hopes for the future.
President Obama’s official portrait was released the other day. There was a lot of fuss made about the fact that it’s the first presidential portrait taken with a digital camera (Canon 5D Mark II). Personally, I think it’s a little uninspired. I much prefer the image above by Alex Brandon. Whenever I look at it I think to myself… there is no spoon.
