This actually makes a lot of sense. Very cool stuff WordPress has been supporting through XFN links.
Designed for humans first and machines second, microformats are a set of simple, open data formats built upon existing and widely adopted standards.
Link: Microformats.org
Just when I was debating not having a sidebar on my new blog design, the creators of WordPress release sidebar Widgets as a plugin. Widgets allows you to move around the order of widgets in your sidebar without touching a line of code. It actually looks pretty cool, specially the way that developers can write widgets just like they do plugins.
Link: Automattic.com
jux·ta·pose: To place side by side, especially for comparison or contrast.
Link: found via Kimili.com
PayPal is closing the gap between, “I owe you 50 bucks” and “Let me send you the five bucks right know”. Or should I say, 52.50 after they take their cut.
Link: PayPal.com
I just got back from a short trip to the Sequoia National Forrest in central California. Sequoia trees are the largest trees in volume in the world. We stayed in a nice cottage at the Sequoia Village Inn, the last inn before the south park entrance. During our stay we went to the largest tree on earth, the General Sherman (pictured above). And we also did an eight mile hike with two three year olds, one six year old, a seven month pregnant woman and another one on a juice fast. All this while climbing up through very small death defying trails. But it was all fun and we got back home safely.
I’ve enjoyed owning a Nikon 4500 digital camera for a few years now. It has a swivel mechanism that allows me to take pictures of myself while looking at the lcd screen, it has an optional wide angle lens I use often on tight places and overall it takes decent pictures in auto mode. But it wasn’t until a new friend from Denmark, Henrik Jønsby, showed me the tricks of the 4500 a few months ago. It has given new life to my old faithful camera.
The picture above is a prime example. My wife took the one on the left on auto mode then she passed the camera to see if I can get a good picture of it on manual mode. WOW! what a difference. I took that picture in Aperture Priority Mode which let’s me set the depth of field (or how far should the camera focus) and set it at 3.5. I changed the White Balance to outdoors since the light was coming from our front window. In automatic mode it was thinking I was indoors, that’s why the one on the left is yellowish. I set the ISO to 100 since it was daylight and adjusted the exposure to my liking. The best thing is that any change made to these settings are automatically visible, for the most part, in the screen. So as you can see, reading the manual, or becoming friends with someone that has does pay off. It’s time to find that old manual you never got to!
For those of you wondering how I got the heart in the post title “I ♥ Prints“, I have created my own cheat sheet of special characters for this purpose. WordPress supports special characters, but it falls victim of it’s own attempt to fix and correct things. It is possible write special characters in all fields in html mode (like when using safari). However, once a post is created, WordPress’ edit mode converts the special characters back. Since my chart includes some characters that might be interpreted as html code, I had to keep my chart on a text file so that I can copy/paste into my browser whenever I have to edit this post. Not an easy thing to do when yo edit a lot, but worth it in some instances where a heart says it all.
Find the symbol you want, in this case “♥“, and copy the HTML code for that symbol. For hearts it is “♥“. Then paste “♥” into your title, excerpt or post field. If you use a visual html tool like the FireFox or ecto, you need to go to html mode, paste the code and switch back to rich text.
Two weeks ago we introduced Carcassonne to our friend Stephanie. This was her first german board game ever. It was new to her, easy to understand and it played fast. But it was time to break her into a more meatier game and last night we finally introduced her to my favorite game “Puerto Rico”. We spent four hours playing it. Yes, i did say four. Usually, we play it in about two but we had a first-timer and so we took a while explaining the rules and guiding her through her numerous choices. On top of that we had to pause for an intermission because our kids put a dressed up dancing show for us that was quite spectacular. Puerto Rico takes place during the colonization of the new world where you build plantations of crops to send to the old world. Funny observation though, plantations do need peons, and these game pieces are of dark color which makes them historically accurate since the new world was unfortunately developed with slave work. Now my friend is now officially hooked on it, just like everyone we’ve introduced this game to.
©2005 Melvin Rivera 
. All Rights Reserved.
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