I don't know if you remember a while back when I found some people who were using my Cherry Vanilla Dr. Pepper picture when I had reviewed it a while back (Check out my original rant about bandwidth piracy here.) Well, partially because I am an ass, I edited the image to have a Mountain Dew can there instead. Well I found this site that is using that image, shown above. Should I be mean and change the photo again? I was thinking that I could be very graphic or write something like, this photo has been stolen. What do you think? Also be aware that this myspace page is poorly designed, not saying that I am a good designer.

-Trevor

Genre: Comedy
Rating: R
Starring: Aaron Eckhart, Katie Holmes, William H. Macy, Robert Duvall
Released: 2005

Read more!

I had a chance to go hiking at the Saguaro National Park yesterday. A buddy and I originally planned on hiking a bit by Mount Lemmon, but some impending rain up in the mountains deterred us for now and we decided to go hiking on lower and flatter ground to try to avoid the monsoon rains. We started off by going to a very good/cheap restaurant off of Broadway/Wilmot. I got 2 eggs, 4 pancakes, and 2 slices of bacono for $2.25 and were pretty good as well, the quality was similar to a Perkins, but with only maple syrup as a choice for the pancakes. I can probably thank the snowbirds for the restaurants in Tucson that carry this style of food.

Once we got started the weather cooperated very nicely, though you can see that it was getting fairly overcast by the time we left. It was a tad warm, but there was actually a pretty nice breeze that kept us cool and we had brought along enough water in case there was a problem, such as getting lost/hurt. We didn't come along any rattlesnakes which is generally a good thing, I've been hiking for a year and haven't gotten bit yet, a positive sign.

I uploaded some photos to my test gallery that I am slowly trying to get to look like the rest of the site, but it works well for the moment in order to view the pictures. Anyways, it was a very good hike and got some great nature shots. These are also some of my first pictures I took with my new Sony H2. They turned out pretty good, but a couple of them turned out a bit dark, which is due to me trying to playing with the settings. The overall quality of the pictures is much higher than my old Canon and thus am pleased, but I will miss the ability to keep the camera in my pocket. My new camera fits, but leaves a rather unsightly bulge, though that may just attract some ladies .

-Trevor

I was killing some time this evening to see how I ranked on keywords. Looking for my last name I found our coat of arms as displayed above. According to the link, it is a derivation of the name Kohler which means "Coal Burner". Interesting, though hard to confirm.

-Trevor

Got my new camera and shoes in the mail yesterday and today, respectively. They are both pretty cool and the shoes are even more comfortable than expected, so it was a risk that definitely paid off. They are lighter than my pair of Converse, but seem sturdily constructed by Chinese children, so they should last hopefully a couple of years. I haven't had too much of a chance to really get some good pics on my camera, just checking out the features, but it can take a non-blurry shot of my ceiling fan. Well, I should get going, sort of late, but I will try to get a couple shots up that I took with my camera.

-Trevor

It is truly a sad time, for Chief the Rat had to be put down. Jenny and Greg originally bought him in our Junior year and I don't think it would have been the same without him running around our apartment peeing on the carpet. Jenny mentioned that he had recently stopped drinking and eating and has begun to have tremors. Not a very good sign for a rat. He will be sorely missed.

I thought very hard about the title of this post. Other options included "Poor Management Decisions" or "Companies that deny themselves future revenue over trivial matters". Hopefully I have sparked your interest now. Let me begin my story...

It all began on a relatively quiet night in the city of Tucson, Arizona. A couple of graduate students had decided to meet a local establishment located near campus, called Frog & Firkin. We have been there before as well as many other of my friends down here and enjoyed the assortment of foods offered. On this particular night, possibly due to the start of the school year, the restaurant was particularly busy. While waiting for a table, I began to feel a bit ill due to not having much to eat and made a decision that I needed to eat something sooner than later and by waiting, it would not be a good thing. I proceeded next door to a specialty pizza parlor and purchased a slice of pizza due to my foreknowledge of quick service and reasonable prices.

During that time, a table opened up, so not thinking much of it, I brought the slice of pizza and went to sit down with my friends. Given that the pizza was relatively small and I had not eaten much during the day, I had still planned on buying a small sandwich and a beer or two. Clearly this was a mistake in my part as the greeter/bouncer who had not said anything upon me walking into the outside patio where the table was, soon claimed that I can't eat food at Frog & Firkin that was not purchased at the restaurant. I generally understand that this is a good policy to follow, but rather than listening to my friends who came to my defence at an nonstandard circumstance and asking to be flexible, he decided that it would be much more appropriate to not serve us at all. I even tried to soothe his concerns by stating what I was planning on ordering. He then proceeded to yell that we shouldn't bring food in.

So of course we left and had an enjoyable time next door, where there was a much more positive atmosphere. I was left puzzling at this and wondering why it was such a problem about bringing in the pizza when it was very clear that we were going to spend a relatively large amount at the restaurant that would dwarf the amount that I spent on one slice of pizza. This of course doesn't include the fact that they are losing out on multiple repeat customers. Now, I'm not a management major or have worked at a management position, but this does not seem to be a recipe for a long term business strategy. Whatever happened to the saying that the customer is always right? I decided to leave this a review so I give Frog & Firkins a 0 Galaxy rating out of 5. For the absolutely awful service I experienced, I would no longer recommend this restaurant to anyone, not even if you were starving, for they have no sympathy whatsoever.

As a side note and piece of advice to all my readers, if your computer fails and wish me to look at it, feel free to ask me and I will be more than willing to help. However, if you wish me to look at it quickly and we come up with a mutual time that works well, SHOW UP! The one thing that really bothers me is to feel used and worse when I feel used and disrespected. I am willing to help, but if you don't have courtesy to call that you will not be able to come, that is disrepectful. This is of course in reference to a certain person that will out of some politeness remain nameless, but you know who you are . Well, I guess it happens, but doesn't always leave me with much faith in humanity. As Mike Straka of Foxnews would say, "Grrr".

-Trevor

Well, it's official, my website is now running b2evolution 1.8.1 RC1. This is a good thing! I ran into relatively few problems with upgrading other than the time it took to rewrite the skin.

There are a few changes now, it will now be necessary to moderate your comments in order to minimize problems with comment spam. I'm going to look at the ability to disable this feature for "trusted" users, I'll see what I can do.

With this new version, there are a couple of new plugins which I was able to implement pretty easily, as you can see below:

I'll work on my gallery next , I found a pretty cool skin for that which I think I should be able to better merge it with my blog, so it looks like a more seamless transition. Let me know what you think.

-Trevor

Update:

Screw it, posts will automatically go through for now. That was more problematic than it was worth. You may also be aware that there is not a subscription option in order to receive an e-mail whenever there is a post. You will likely have to create a username for this to work correctly.

My new skin is just about complete. It should fix many of the problems currently plaguing this blog, including links in my posts which aren't really visible as links. However, IE still doesn't want to display as nice as I like so I really do recommend you don't use IE for anything but necessity as it is really a crappy browser. Firefox is a lot easier to have things format the way I expect them to, the differences between how Firefox and IE display code from someone like me is amazing. I suppose since there are so many ways of writing code to do the same thing that I am clearly missing somethhing, but regardless, go get Firefox or possibly Opera, though I am not sure how well it works in Opera or Safari for that matter. If you read this and shortly after my site isn't working or it isn't working while trying to read this, though I don't know quite how that would happen, be patient, all will be well.

-Trevor

Update: Well I believe my skin updating is complete for the moment. I think it is actually a cleaner skin that is easier to read. One thing that changed is the way b2evolution handles the date in the locale options so after I upgrade I will not be able to display the long date format as currently. This is frustrating to say the least as that is a very visible part of my skin.

In the future, and I know I always have high hopes for updating, I may try to tweak the skin here and there to try to update the look a bit.

Well my current pair of shoes are just about done given the fact that my soles are just about to fall out. So I recently picked up this pair as seen here:

You can see the link to amazon here: link

My camera also came to a premature end due to some Tucsonian dust that got inside the lens, leaving nice spots on all of my pictures. Deciding then that it was time for an upgrade, I splurged a bit for a camera that should last a few more years until the end of grad school:

You can check out the review here.

My progress on the upgrade is progressing nicely. My testblog is getting closer to production status, which is a good thing. All that I really need to do now is modify the CSS file, something that shouldn't take too long, God willing. My biggest concern now is being able to import my posts correctly. When that happens, my main site will likely be offline for a bit.

In a weird most likely unrelated development, my gallery appears to have developed a quirk of not being able to view the full size images. I'm not exactly sure what went wrong, but given that I slated my gallery for an upgrade as well, this is not too bad. We'll see what happens.

-Trevor

You may or may not see the fact that the Test Blog is getting closer to production status. I've been working with a couple new plugins to give the blog a bit more "snazz". It should be done within the week.

-Trevor

I've got a testblog that I will be transforming to make it a finished product and then move it to the "main" site. Check out the photo slideshow in the post. Damn that's cool if I don't say so myself. Rumors are that there is a newer version of the blog software set to come out in a couple days and before they release it and I have to try to rewrite the skin for the new version all over again I am going to reeducate myself on PHP a bit in the mean time. Pretty cool stuff if you ask me.

Well it has been a long time since I posted, but I decided that it is about time I spend some time working out some of the kinks that have plagued it for awhile. I am going to upgrade the blog engine. I may have to rewrite the code for the "skin" so it may have a different look for awhile, I haven't had too much time to look at it for a bit. I'll keep everyone posted.