.: What’s Bruin :.

I haven’t been blogging at all, and most of my news has been done on my Facebook profile.  But a couple of my classes this semester have talked about Web 2.0, so it’s rekindled my interest in blogging.  I won’t say that I’ll write as much as before, but I certainly hope to write more in the future.

As part of this new spark, I’ve decided to use a different theme and look.  I’ve also started a new fitness blog, Into Fitness, where I talk about my crazy workout and training.  So look for some postings there as I get started.  Just launched it today.

Tags: Blogging

Well, you might not have noticed that my post count and comment count have significantly decreased.  I’ve deleted all my commentary on politics, terrorism, Muslims, and other such controversial topics.  I figured I can keep those conversations to myself.

 I might give up blogging all together since I’ve been kind of bored by it lately.  Or I may convert this to my other photoblog.

Tags: Announcements, Blogging

I’ve finished tagging all my photos from the trip. I’ll try to pre-date some of my thoughts from the conference in the next few days, which will include some reflections on what I experienced and learned.

But in the meantime, enjoy the pics:

Mall of America
Desiring God National Conference

Tags: Announcements, Blogging, conference, Desiring-God, Life, Minneapolis, Spiritual, Travels

I was very excited to attend this first session. I arrived at the main doors of the auditorium early, probably one of the first 50 people inside. I really wanted to get a seat in the very front, but unfortunately, I followed some people to the right and got trapped behind this “media” wall. So I had to settle for some seats in the back, but fortunately, not in the balcony. As a result, I did not take any pictures of David Wells during this first session.

This is where I waited to get inside

The view from my seat on the first night
There were about 3,130 people at this conference.

I knew that there would be at least three bloggers attending this conference, bloggers whose blogs I read regularly, that is. And as we were waiting for the session to start, I started panning the crowd looking for a couple of bloggers in particular. I did not have to look very far since we were seated behind the “media” bar. I found live blogger Tim Challies right away. I snuck a picture of him and during the break after the first session, I introduced myself. He seems like a quiet guy and was a little uncomfortable when I shook his hand. But then again, he must get people coming up to him all the time at these conferences since thousands of people like myself read his blog every day. All in all, he’s a nice guy and I’ll probably see him at other conferences that he blogs about. I would like to attend DG each year God willing.

Tim Challies live blogged each session

The first session began at 7:15 PM. Though hymns are not my favorite style of worship, the voices were good. I like the traditional words a lot. I am more open tolerant about styles of worship music than when I was younger. I realize that God draws people into worship through a person’s musical tastes.

I did not finish reading Wells’ book before this conference (since it was his book that inspired the theme for the conference). However, I don’t think I missed out by not reading it ahead of time because Wells’ talk provided the introduction and the background for all the subsequent talks. And because I read the first hundred pages or so, Mr. Wells’ talk tonight was easier to follow, which is probably why I was able to get more out of it.

Although I did not think Mr. Wells was the most dynamic speaker, I did find him very interesting because he is an intellectual, and older person, and a well-respected author. Because I am currently reading his book, I already knew what kind of tone to expect for his talk. John, on the other hand, was critical, which was not a good attitude for the start of this conference. Criticizing the worship music and the first speaker was definitely not my idea of seeking what good can be gotten from participating in the first session. Honestly, after the first day, I began to wish that I had attended this conference alone or with somebody else.

After the first session and before the evening speaker panel, I think I pretty much was the most insulted I have been in a long time. I commented on why there was a shrieking baby at the conference and how inappropriate that was. The comment back to me was: “Wise words coming from someone who has never had children.”

Well, I am certain the other 3,129 people attending this conference would prefer to listen and participate in these sessions without have to filter out the sounds of a crying hysterical, shrieking child. I won’t bother going into more detail nor the two decades experience I have had working with children almost every day, as well as other parenting experiences here at home. Depositing sperm can make one a father, but it certainly takes more to be a dad. Suffice it to say, I don’t think I will ever be traveling with “close” friends ever again. I think there’s just too much similarity of personalities between good friends that it adds an additional stress to being around each other all the time.

Tags: absolutes, Blogging, conference, culture, David-Wells, Desiring-God, Friends, postmodern, Reflection, Sermons, Spiritual, truth, Worship

In about an hour and a half Josephine will be bringing me to the airport for my 6:30 AM flight to the Twin Cities in Minnesota. I’m attending the Desiring God Conference with my best friend my high school. Not sure about Internet access during the conference, but if there is, I’ll try to live blog it. If not, then I’ll just blog when I get back to the hotel room.

Tags: absolutes, Announcements, Blogging, conference, culture, Desiring-God, postmodern, Spiritual, Travels, truth

Yesterday Josephine and I decided to start a photography business, mainly for shooting pics and home videos for birthday parties and other special occasions. I got the idea because my buddy John from high school asked me to shoot pics at his son’s 2nd birthday party last May. It was a lot of fun and very easy to get great shots of all the people, kids, and the star of the day.

So to start off, I thought I would first create a photoblog to showcase some of my best work. The photoblog will be slightly different than the repository of photos we store on flickr. On the photoblog there will be much fewer pictures since it will serve as a gallery/portfolio.

To create the new photoblog, I used the free open source photoblogging software called PixelPost. Then I used a free template and modified it using CSS and a little bit of HTML. As of right now, I only have one photo in the gallery, but I plan to upload more in the next few days and weeks and add some additional functionalities on the site, nothing major since I don’t know how to program stuff.

The only page not done on the site is the page that describes the services I plan to offer. It’s about 2:30 AM and I’ve been working on it all afternoon and evening (taking a short break for church). So the services page will have to wait until later.

The business and site name were kind of challenging to come up with. All the cool domain names were already taken like 1000words.com, photologica.com, inspiredimages.com :p (that’s a shoutout to my buddy Ennis). So I started looking at some Greek words since photography comes from the Greek word “fotografia”. And that’s how I came up with the name photo • teknis. You already know what the first word comes from. The second word, teknis, is the Greek word for “artist”. Thus, the translation… photography artist.

And so I present: phototeknis.com.

Tags: Announcements, Blogging, business, CSS, HTML, Photography, PixelPost, site_announcements, web_design

Last week I upgraded this site to WordPress 2.0.4. I forgot to mention that earlier. Thanks to Mark, I did the backup and upgrade via SSH in about 3 seconds.

Tags: Blogging, quick_links, site_announcements

Today marks the completion of the second year of blogging for me with 886 previous posts and 441 comments. The volume of posts this past year has been less I think. Perhaps because I got a little bored with politics. In the last year, I blogged more photos since my renewed passion for making photos. I’m looking forward to writing in this third year of blogging.

Tags: Blogging, site_announcements

This is a test of the WordPress feature to post a blog by sending an
email message. Hope it works.

Update: Obviously since I’m editing this here. It worked! Looks like if I use this feature, I will have to edit the post author, insert tags manually, and add/change the categories manually.

Tags: Blogging, email, geek_stuff, quick_links, WordPress

I read about this weblog editor from ranchero.com. So far it seems pretty easy to use. It’s a blend between WYSIWYG and hard coding in that I can see the codes being inserted, but I don’t need to type them in myself. I can preview the new post in a preview thingy.

So far I can’t really tell I figured out how to assign a category to this post, or whether or but I’m not sure I can assign tags that are compatible with the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin.

I’ll try it for a bit and see how it goes.

Update: So far this is way better than Ecto. But I’m bummed that I have to add my tags manually back in the WordPress interface. And I think that if I re-edit a post that was previously created or edited in WordPress, the tags that are not also categories get erase if I publish the edited post via MarsEdit.

My initial impression after just a few minutes: I really like MarsEdit, but I dislike having to edit my tags manually. I would like to continue to use this blogging software, so maybe I will try editing my posts and then just adding the additional non-category tags later when I am fully satisfied with my writing and am sure that I won’t need to edit the post in MarsEdit anymore. Or if I feel that an older post needs more editing, I could just edit solely in the WordPress interface so that I won’t have to re-enter the tags that got erased.

Tags: Blogging, geek_stuff, MarsEdit, WordPress

I upgraded my FAlbum plugin. This post will serve as a searchable reminder for me of the things I need to do after I upgrade the FAlbum plugin in the future.

1. Edit the album.php template located in the wp folder as follows:
   • Comment out the line at the bottom that says get_sidebar();.
   • Add two extra

     <div>'s

     above the

     <?php

     before the previous comment above.

   • Add the pagetitle-wrapper

     <div>

     and text directly below:
     get_header(); ?.

   
   

2. Edit the falbum.css.php file as follows:
   • Style the margins for the .falbum-album-description with
     margin: 10px 50px 10px 0;.




3. Go to the plugin’s control panel and adjust the number of albums and photos displaying per page.

Tags: Blogging, FAlbum, Flickr, plugins, site_announcements, WordPress

I received this book for Christmas. I looked forward to reading it since blogging is one of my favorite hobbies. But it was a struggle to finish it. It’s written with an arrogant tone. I almost wonder whether Hugh Hewitt actually wrote the book or if some ghost writer did.

I don’t think I learned very much from reading it. Basically, the message of the book is: You better blog because it’s important to your business, your faith, and your political candidate.

I didn’t bother reading the appendices because the main text was so torturous.

I’m grateful for the present because this book is one the things I wanted for Christmas, but personally, you’re not missing much if you don’t read it. A definite thumbs down.

P.S. This is not a very scholarly written review. It’s my first review, but I hope to write others that are more serious, especially for books that are worth my time.

Tags: Blogging, Books, book_reviews

I recently upgraded to WordPress 2.01 by myself, again, yippee!

But I’m writing this post so I can search for it later to avoid hassles when I upgrade again in the future.

Lessons Learned:

1. It is good to follow directions. They’ve been rewritten. I follow them pretty much to a T, so I can avoid this. — {Rob is a good guy; I’ve done the same thing.}




2. Remember to copy over my wp-pass file, which was custom-modified by Mark.




3. Quicktags in Safari: Follow the directions here regarding the /wp-admin/admin-functions.php file on line 1080 by commenting out:

   if (!strstr($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], ‘Safari’))

   and delete the word else from line 1087:

   else echo '




4. Remember to replace the /wp-includes/js/quicktags.js file in the new wordpress with the old wordpress so you don’t have to re-edit the quicktags (in other words, you get to keep your custom quicktags).




5. Temprorarily comment out:

   <?php email_notification_future_send(); ?>

   on line 135 of my header.php so that the disabled WordPress Email Notification plugin does not interfere. [That function call will be active is you don’t comment it out. So it will try to call a function from the plugin while the plugin is disabled. Prior to upgrade, you’re supposed to deactivate all the plugins

Tags: Blogging, plugins, quicktags, Safari, site_announcements, WordPress

I like how you can categorize the RSS feeds in Bloglines, the RSS web-based aggregator. This allows me to output my public subscriptions into the nicely categorized Blogroll (new) that you see in the sidebar. I almost spent $20 to upgrade my Blogrolling account so I could do this, but I found that Bloglines was easier to use and best of all, FREE. So goodbye Blogrolling.

Tags: aggregator, Blogging, Bloglines, blogroll, Blogrolling, quick_links, RSS, site_announcements, web_design

I gonna try to upgraded my site to WordPress 2.0 on my own. So stuff may not work for a bit.

All the plugins seemed to work fine except for Kramer and Tiger-Style Administration. I can live without both of those for right now. Perhaps the plugin authors will upgrade the plugins to be compatible with WordPress 2.0 at a later time.

If you find anything that doesn’t work right, please let me know.

Tags: Blogging, site_announcements, WordPress