Scion Pix

[fa:p:a=blog-images,id=764745625,j=l,s=s,l=p]See A Need… Fill A Need. I’ve been an active member on a car forum (Your Scion tC) and I find that a lot of people have images but no good places to host them. So I created ScionPix. Its a place for people to host images, simply as that.

I’ve started giving away 500MB sections, but after a passed the initial setup period, its been reduced to 150MB chunks, which should be more than enough for any average user. In encourage you to take a look around on the site, enjoy the images, and if you have a scion, sign up!

Amazon Wishlist Plugin

Chadd had asked me a while back for a birthday wishlist, I hadn’t responded back to him yet because I wanted to try to get my Amazon wishlist directly on my blog. And thanks to a slightly tweaked version of the Amazon Wishlist Plugin by Ryan Prins I am proud to present My Amazon Wishlist kindly formatted to match the rest of my site.

Slightly tweaked you ask? Well although this plugin does an awesome job of getting my amazon wishlist, it did it with pages and in a markup I found difficult to format. So I created a new function, which is mostly a clone of the original calling function but this version aggregates all the items onto a single page, and in a format I could more easily work with. I did however, ditch the use of images that the original function had.

Anyway, if your in the same boat as me, and want to get all of your wishlist items onto a single page, this may just be the function for you. All you have to do is append the following code directly before the closing ?> line in the amazon-wishlist.php file, and change the call in your wishlist page to this function. I’ve included the CSS as well. Enjoy.

/**
  * Print a single page with the entire wishlist for all eyes to see!
  */
  function displayPagelessAmazonWishlist() {
  global $listDetails, $imgSize;
 
  /* Get the complete, and formatted list of items */
  $niceItems = array();
  $listData = prepareAmazonWishlistItems(1); /* Initialize the data */
  for($i = 1; $i <= $listDetails['TOTALPAGES']; $i++) {
  $listData = prepareAmazonWishlistItems($i);
  foreach ($listData as $item) {
  $nice = prepareAmazonWishlistEntry($item);
  $niceItems[$nice['PRODUCTGROUP']][] = $nice;
  }
  }
 
  /*
  echo '<pre>';
  print_r($niceItems);
  echo '</pre>';
  */
 
  if(!empty($niceItems)) {
 
  foreach ($niceItems as $group) {
 
  $h3 = $group[0]['PRODUCTGROUP'];
  $output .= "<h3>$h3</h3>\n";
 
  foreach ($group as $item) {
 
  $dateAdded = date('m/d', strtotime($item['DATEADDED']));
  /* Cheap fix to assure XHTML compliance, this should really happen in prepareAmazonWishlistEntry() */
  $item[TITLE] = htmlspecialchars($item[TITLE]);
  $title = "<a href=\"$item[DETAILPAGEURL]\" title=\"$item[TITLE]\"><span> $dateAdded </span> $item[TITLE]</a>";$output .= "<div>$title</div>\n";
 
  unset($item);
  }
  unset($group);
  }
 
  } else {
  $output = "<p><strong>Error!</strong> There was a problem building your wish list, please try again later.</p>";
  }
 
  echo $output;
  }

Easily Distracted

[fa:p:a=blog-images,id=468655827,j=l,s=s,l=p]Yeah, so….

In case you didn’t notice, I have a new theme (again). Which is particularly funny to me anyway, because I never even finished the one I was working on in this post. Oh well … This is probably for the best.

In the end, I decided that I didn’t really have the time to build a theme from scratch, it just takes to long. So I went with a pre-built theme by 5thirtyone (Wordpress V2), the same designer that did my brothers theme (Foliage Mod). I’ve made some minor adjustments to it, but probably not enough for anybody to really notice so the credit certainly goes to Derek Punsalan of 5thirtyone

Most notably though, in my opinion anyway, is that I’ve ditched using Gallery2 for managing my pictures and conformed into using Flickr. It means I’ve given up complete control since Flickr isn’t installed on my server, its actually run by Yahoo. But thats both good and bad. again with the “I dont have the time” theme, I don’t have to control Flickr. Also, Flickr seems to have a better API, so I was able to install a Wordpress plugin, FAlbum By Elijah Cornell, that puts all the pictures right on my website without having to fool around. There are a few other really good plugins installed to, but I’ll leave those for another post.

I’m interested to hear what you have to say about the theme, all you have to do is post a comment

New Digs

I keep referring to it, but I haven’t posted about it yet. So here we go: I have moved.

Mike & Jenn bought a house in Elk Grove and so it was time for Nick and I to find a new place. We tried to find another house, but didn’t have much luck in finding something we could easily afford. So we ended up heading to Folsom and renting an apartment. We also gained a roommate, Stephen.

So far its working out quite well, the apartment is actually pretty big, although it feels a lot smaller than the house did. We have some pretty nice amenities though. There are the typical apartment things like a pool, gym, common area and whatnot. But something unique, or at least something I don’t usually think of, is that there is a section of the Folsom Bike Trails literally about 30 yards from my front door. And the trail connects up with the American River Bike Trail, so one of these days I expect that a few of us (in particular Keith and Meghann, who’s idea it was) will take the trail all the way from my apartment to Old Sacramento and then take light rail all the way back (which also stops not to far from the new place).

As far as pictures of the place I am afraid I don’t really have any. What I do have is this Apartment Layout though which I actually did before we moved in to try to figure out where we were going to put all our junk. In the end it turned out pretty much as laid out here. I also have a few pictures that are straight off the property management website that you can take a gander at, if I ever get around to taking some of my own I’ll be sure to post them.

An interesting post

I was perusing the internet, as I am known to do on occasion, and came across the Earthling blog ( and in particular, this post which contains images of things that my not be immediatly recognizable. So I thought: “Hmm… I could do something similar and kill two birds with one stone, see who visits the site regularly, and I can play with lightbox some more”.

So … with that said; I present you with a few Artifacts from Indemnity. If I can think of a worthwhile prize for any particular items I’ll let you guys know.

Piss Poor Peepage

I was recently going through a lot of the posts here on my site, updating dead links and putting the magical lightbox on images in the posts I ran across the post I made about 8 months back when I got myself on 25peeps and I decided to hop on over there and take a look at the new blood.

I was completely disappointed though. It seems that the half naked images and blogs about sexually adventurous women has taken over.

Dont get me wrong, I like half naked pictures and blogs about sexually adventurous women. But thats not what I expect, or want to see when I go to a site like 25peeps. To me, its a sign of the downfall of a great idea. Its become a shock contest, which I dont think was ever the intention.

Happy Birthday Jessica!

I don’t know if she reads my blog at all, I think the only reason she will be on here is to read about the hike. But her birthday is today, and so I thought I would take a second to wish her Happy B-Day.

Donner, Castle Peak & Truckee

What is this … A post that ISN’T a week late! Yeah that’s how I roll (well from now on). Now the only challenge is to try to keep it short and to the point (don’t count on it). As always, you can see my whole gallery of pictures here.
This weekend I joined Jessica, Elpida; Becca and Cody on a trip up to the Hoffman cabin at Donner Lake. We left early Saturday morning to head up. Cody, Becca and I drove up in one car, Jessica and Elpida in another.

Once we got up the cabin I meet Cody’s dad, Kyle, who was at the cabin taking care of a few things around the place. The girls all sat down and picked out a hike for us to do, and probably an hour after getting to the cabin we were off again, headed to Boreal ski resort to get to the Pacific Crest Trailhead that is there.

Before I start though, I have to admit, I’m somewhat disappointed in my pictures from this trip. Not that the pictures I took were bad, just that because of the running that Becca and I have been doing, my knees are what they used to be and I had to borrow Nicks trekking poles to take some weight off of them so I couldn’t keep my camera out. So my solution is going to be to hijack pictures from other people’s websites. So basically if you see snow in the pictures, I probably didn’t take it. There is also a great little bit of info about the hike/ski conditions from SummitPost.org.

The hike starts off as a very nice trail, and as such was fairly popular. We passed quite a few day-hikers from all ages. The trail was well marked and even had a few signs pointing out things of interest. Starting at around 7200’, the trail was very gradual until it came up to Castle Pass (~4 miles) where the trail heads up steeply for the last hundred yards or so to the pass which is at 7660’. After that it got a bit crazy for a group who hadn’t hiked in a long time (with the exception of Jessica, who is an animal). From the pass to the peak, is maybe a mile and a half, but probably closer to a mile and rises from 7660’ to 9103’. Obviously there is no easy way to do this, you just go up.

I was able to find Castle Peak on Yahoo Maps, so if you wanted a satalite picture of the peak, you can see it here.

We went up some of the way, and stopped for lunch. I think we probably took a 45 min lunch, which was really nice. I actually nodded off a little after I ate and it did a great job to rest me and my knees before the steepest part of the climb. It was almost a scramble to get up the rest of the way, and defiantly was for the last 30 feet or so. But the views from up top always make it worth it.

A quick thanks to Jessica for pushing the rest of us to summit!

The hike back was fairly un-eventful, the trekking poles came in extremely handy to keep me from slamming all my weight down on my knees, but I wasted a lot of energy trying to make a delicate decent and I got a little dehydrated by the end. I pounded a Nalgene of water when I got back to the cabin and tried to drink more throughout the weekend and all was well.

When we got back to the cabin, we all took showers and had some beers. We played a game of Yatzee which included tequila shots whenever you got a Yatzee, as well as one before we started for good measure. Cody won the game, but we all had a fun time of it. After that we watched the movie “Sideways” which was pretty funny. The guy getting married reminded me of one of the guys I work with so it was fun to watch.

I’m not sure what time we all crashed, but I’m fairly certain it was before midnight. We were all dead tired and I know I personally passed out only a few seconds after my head hit the pillow.

Sunday (today, can you believe it) we got up and Becca made banana and peanut butter pancakes. We headed over to Cody’s Aunt’s cabin which is on the water, and we chilled (almost literally) on their doc for a while. After an hour or two of that, we got back to the cabin, got everything packed up and headed over to Truckee, parked the car and walked around the town poking our head into the shops.

One shop in particular held our attention for quite some time. I forget the name of the place, but it was your typical outdoor sports place. But they had a ton of stuff on sale. Jessica picked up a really nice pair of Solomon’s for $40; I picked up two Dutch Ovens (a 2Q and 8Q) for $35 and Cody and Becca grabbed some Cast Iron pans for dirt cheap as well.

We ate an early dinner at the Truckee Diner, and then parted ways to head home.

In all it was a great trip, my legs are a little tight at the moment, but surprisingly my knees are doing great, better than that have been in a few days actually. Makes me want to start pushing hard to get other people involved in backpacking/hiking so I can get back out there and start doing it again, reminds me of some of the things I miss.

Picture Sources:
KevinGong.com
SummitPost.org

Lawsons Landing

This page/post needs an update. Likely the images, or image links do not work (due to switching from gallery2 to flickr), or some piece of formatting is visually broken. Please excuse the mess until I can get the time to update the post

Better late than never right?

Well the pictures have been up for a week now, I just haven’t gotten around to making a post. I’ll be refrencing a whole bunch of pictures in this post, so when you see a blue link, click it to see what I’m refering to. I’ll also be linking to some of Chadd’s pictures too. You can also read his post about the trip here as well.
Keith, Meghann, Matt and Tiffanee got over here around 8am on Thursday morning joining Chadd and I. We finished packing up the truck in my garage. I went over to Walmart and bought a net to cover everything, which made packing substatially easier. The drive was mostly uneventfull. We got into camp, weren’t able to get the spot we wanted at the very end because there was already somebody there, but Matt and Tiffanee found a pretty nice spot so we ploped down right there and setup camp.

After we got things settled, we all headed over the dunes to play in the sand. We took the outdoor sports set that Keith and Meghann bought and put it to a diffrent use. First, everybody played soccer using the volleyball as the ball, and the volleyball net poles as goal posts. We also played baseball until we completely obilterated the tennisball and had to call the game.

We had hot dogs and hamburgers for dinner, Matt ate way to many and regretted it later. Keith, Matt and I also enjoyed sampling a whole bunch of diffrent beers that Keith and I picked up in the large cans/bottles.

When it finally got dark out, Matt, Chadd and I headed out to the beach to try to take some night sky pictures. I’m pretty happy with how mine came out. Particularly this one where you can see the Milky Way, and this one of the big dipper.

Friday morning, I cooked up hashbrowns, bacon, saussage and eggs in the dutch oven while everybody else lounged around the fire and had s’mores as appatizers. After breakfast, the girls got into their suits, and went for a splash in the ocean. Matt, Keith and I went and got Ice and firewood. We all eventually headed down to the beach to join the girls. Matt and I took a bunch of random pictures, while Chadd and Keith lunged.

I do have to point out, that walking on the beach was a guy with a HUGE dog. An Irish Wolfhound. I didn’t get any pictures of the front of the dog, but I got him walking away. This dog is crazy, I want one!

Matt and Chadd made a sand castle while the girls continued their quest to become popsilces in the ocean. When Chadd and Matt were done, Matt and Keith went ahead and joined the polar bear club, and I started making my own sand castle. Not as exciting, but fun for me all the same.

Tiffanee had to leave shortly after that because she had to work Saturday, but the rest of us stuck around and had kabobs for dinner. As well as an apple and cherry cobler that I made in the dutch oven.

Saturday morning we got up fairly early (for camping) and started packing up. Breakfast was the same thing in a dutch oven as the morning before. We managed to make pretty good time getting everything packed up, but then on the drive home I missed a turn off of Highway 1 and didn’t realize it for a while, so we had about a 45 min detour before we finally made it home.

Long Time No Post

Yeah… so I was doing good for a while there about posting every other day or so, but I just haven’t had a whole lot to talk about lately. However, today I do!

I’m dubbing this weekend a Creative Explosion Weekend, and I am deeming it a holiday to be celebrated around the world. Actually… it wasn’t really all that creative, just more-so than my weekends usually are.

Friday Nick and I took the garage from being a junk pile that you could barely fit a car into (mostly my fault, but generally there was just a lot of junk in there) to something that if you were careful you could park two cars in. I wish I had some pictures because I’m pretty proud of how much room we cleared. Basically we took all the boxes and stuff that nobody had touched since moving in, and tucked it all in the little nook where the water heater is, and put as much stuff as possible on shelves so it was off the floor. We even took the shelving that was in my room when we moved in, and put it up in the garage.

Saturday, I spent some time (with Nick’s help again) cleaning the car to get it ready for what was to ensue on Sunday (I’m starting to realize that it wasn’t much of a creative “weekend”, more of just a creative “Sunday”). I was impressed with the ease of using Nicks Mr. Clean AutoDry to wash the car, and it’s definatly something thats on my wish list but the two other products I used didn’t impress me. I wont go into the details, just let it be known that the wax did not come out the way I was hoping.

Saturday night The Usuals played at the Coffee Gardens. It was a very interesting show because it was supposed to be acustic, but nobody told the bands, so they compromised by trying to play really quiet. Mike brought out Tony’s electronic drum set so they could control the volume, and although there were some leveling issues at first, by the end they were rocking in their Usual way (albiet, with a slight 80’s undertone).

Since the show was over at like 9:30, Keith, Meghan, Lindsey, Nick, Cody and I came back to our place for a somewhat pathetic “after party” which was mostly consumed by Mario Kart on the Game Cube. Cody and I ended up drinking 48oz and 40oz of Coffee respectively, so we stayed up until about 1 am watching “Caravan of Courage“. Yes, thats right … we watched Ewoks Adventures (the first part anyway). And he also brought up some scripts that he had lying around that he wanted to do … and here starts the creative-ness.

Sunday morning, Cody came over with the scripts, explained what he wanted to do and before long we (and by we I mean mostly Cody, with me giving what little thought I could muster) were planning shots in his computer room, and gathering props and equipment. We filmed the first few minutes of what is sure to be the most awesome short you’ll ever see. But for now I’m not revealing any secrets.

Afterwards, around 6:30, I took the tC out to a parking lot near my office and shot 150+ pictures, of which I uploaded 30 into a new gallery. I’m pretty happy with the way they turned out, although I kind of regret not uploading some of them in color instead of the -75% saturation that they are in right now so I may upload some duplicate images, but in color when I get home tonight. I also updated the Scion tC page thats linked at the top of this page, so if you get a chance check that out.

So that was my “Creative Sunday”, some filming and photography. But I had a good time of it, so even if it wasn’t all that creative, it was fun all the same.