For TBWITWW's birthday, my parents bought us tickets to Swan Lake at the Civic Opera House. I have to say, sometimes it gets tough to remember why I want to work in theater. The hours are bad, the pay is for shit, and long-term prospects are shakey as a whole. Granted, I've got a pretty steady deal going right now, but still.... And then I go see a show that reminds me why I do what I do. Ballet is amazing. Even discounting the talent, grace, and beauty involved, the sheer strength to throw your body into the air so much for 2 hours is amazing. And then there's the whole talent-grace-beauty thing. I have to admit, I found myself watching the male dancers almost more then the women. It's not a surprise to see women move with grace and be easy to watch. They're like that naturally. But men... we're a bunch of bumbling clods. It's what we're good at. Me lift heavy rock. Uhg. Then you see a guy leap into the air turn around a few times lift his leg about 10 feet and have a snack before he lands. That's pretty freakin sweet.
In any case, Tchaikovsky is amazing. I could listen to that stuff for hours. The set was very nice; simple and wide open as it needs to be for ballet, just enough scenery to set the scene. The costumes were lovely, of course, and the lighting was great. It rarely was even noticeable, the transitions were subtle and the few times when the lighting made itself known were approriate and clean. To my untrained eye, the dancing was beautiful and enjoyable. TBWITWW says there were a few more mistakes than she expected for a company of this stature, but then, she used to be a dancer so she notices that sort of thing more than your average joe from the street. All in all, it was a great show and it really did remind me why I do what I do.
Also, there's some pretty cool architecture at the Opera House.

Image removed (I can't find it) 10-18-2005

So, I got a new camera. It's great. Bought it at Target, for $20... and the picture quality is about what you'd expect. But hey, there it is. So The crappy pictures are from that. It's a nice small camera at least. So here's your first picture from the new camera, one as taken on with a little Gimp-ish magic thrown in.
Raw
Remixed
And check out how the photo section goes all updated. Word.

By Jove, I think he's got it.

Check out that phatness yo!

Comments are appreciated.

It's up and running! I still have some CSS stuff to deal with for displaying it, but the dang thing works. I think it's pretty sweet. Let me know what you think.

It's time for the friday five again:

If you... 1. ...owned a restaurant, what kind of food would you serve?

It would probably be refered to as "fusion" since me and TBWITWW like to mess with our recipes. We have lots of foods we make that refer to as "__________ stuff" Green stuff, mushroom stuff, cheese stuff...

2. ...owned a small store, what kind of merchandise would you sell?

I'd either want to have a book store, probably used books... or a crap shop. You've seen them. the ones that look like a permanent garage sale... I'd collect stuff and then sell it.

3. ...wrote a book, what genre would it be?

Hmmm... I'm a pretty crappy writer. But I think I'm good at stepping people through things so I'd probably write a user guide or textbook sort of thing.

4. ...ran a school, what would you teach?

I'm not sure what I'd teach to start with... probably lighting. But, if I ran the school, I think I'd set it up so that anyone could teach a class and if you taught you could take other classes for free. Course fees would be low ($10) and would go to paying for the facilities and such, teachers would be volunteer. It's a nice theory.

5. ...recorded an album, what kind of music would be on it?

If I recorded an album, it'd probably have crappy music on it since I'm not a musician in any way shape or form. However I wouldn't mind helping produce or engineer an album for my friend Phil.

I've realized that this isn't really a "Hack" for WP exactly, it's more of a stand alone kind of thing that I'm tacking on to WP. My attempt at layout is above. So far, not so successfull. I can't figure out how to center my big image vertically, and I haven't yet tried it with vertical images, so we'll see what's up as I go. Still no closer to figuring out how to automate the process of updating them either.

So, I thought some more today about how I want my photo hack to work, This would be displayed at the top of the content section, before any of the posts and would show up something like this:

Thumbnail B Thumbnail C Image A Thumbnail D Thumbnail E

Each thumbnail and the large image is linked to the original image in my Gallery.

Then, I upload a new Image F (using something like chuckg's WP-Gallery hack)
The script Resizes Image F if it is above set dimensions (400x300?) and creates a thumbnail as well.
Then it updates the page to display:

Thumbnail A Thumbnail B Image F Thumbnail C Thumbnail D

All the better if this also updates my RSS feed as well.

Hmmm... I've got a lot to learn.

I figure once I learn the syntax, the image rearangement shouldn't be that hard something along the lines of:

thm4=thm3
thm3=thm2
thm2=thm1
thm1=(big1-extension)+thumb.+extension
big1=new

The hard part I think would be specifying resizing, but I think that can be done directly in Gallery. So we'll see.