editing your blogger template with CSS

If you've ever tried to customize your blogger page template, you might have run into something called CSS, or "cascading style sheets." I don't know very much about these, although now I know more than I when I first started this blog.

I want to point you to a video tutorial on CSS, at Sitepoint. When I first tried to tweak the look of my blog (widening the main text column and the header, for example), I just used a whole lot of trial and error as I edited the template. I wish I would have seen this video first, it would have gone much more quickly.

It runs about 17 minutes, and if you want the additional videos in the series, you have to pay, but the first one is free. It's a great overview, explaining both the "why" and the "how" of CSS, nice and slowly. You definitely need a very basic understanding of web coding in html if this is going to be useful to you, however.

CSS Video Tutorial

There's also an overview video of AJAX here, the technology behind most of the fancy web applications that keep popping up.

the lives of others

Just a quick plug for a great movie I saw last week, The Lives of Others (Leben der Anderen, Das). It seems more and more seldom that a high quality movie makes into the mainstream distribution channels, particularly for non-English language films--what a nice surprise. Great directing, acting, cinematography, set design, and an excellent story, it's all there (well, unless you're really into the CGI graphics; there aren't any of those).

Also, if you live in or around Oaktown (a.k.a Oakland) and haven't visited the Parkway Speakeasy Theater yet, find something that's showing you want to see and go there. Who wouldn't want to eat pizza and beer while sitting on a comfy couch at the movie theater? (They also have some very nice sandwiches and wines if you prefer that scene).

It's a "second run" theater, so you won't find the latest and greatest just released movies, but you can't beet the atmosphere, and I always love the chance to support a quirky locally owned and operated business.

Parkway Theaters link (now in El Cerrito too!)

What's Playing

it was so good, i ate it!

One of the best things that ever happened to my product photography for eBay auctions was this post on the amazing Strobist blog.

Tonight, after making a sandwich for dinner from an awesome recipe inspired by a friend, I noticed how beautiful it was. I thought, "This would be a great time to play with my new flash trigger," pulled out the macro studio, and went from there.

I recently purchased a Gadget Infinity "Cactus" 16 channel wireless flash trigger so I am now able to easily do off camera flash setups. I'm looking forward to participating in the Lighting 102 segment on the Strobist blog. I'll be sure to post the results here.

See my Flickr page for the rest of the sandwich pictures and a couple of setup shots.

Just in case you're hungry, here's how to make the sandwich:

1. Take your favorite loaf of bread and cut it in half (the New York Rye in the picture was scrumptious)
2. Drizzle olive oil on one side and spread some chopped garlic
3. Spread some pitted and chopped Kalamata olives and some roasted red peppers
4. Lay out some sliced mozzarella (provolone would work well too)
5. Put arugula (or spinach) over the cheese, along with thinly sliced tomatoes and just a few very thin slices of red onion
6. Smush the the whole thing together to flatten it (I took the picture before I did this part)
7. Wrap it tightly in plastic wrap to keep it smushed together and put it in the fridge for an hour or two
8. Slice and enjoy!

external hard disk storage, a.k.a. don't forget to backup!

If you're into photography (or any other hobby/pursuit where there is a high volume of digital content), you're probably in need of mucho GBs of hard disk space, a.k.a. "major giggage." Being a laptop user, for me it also needs to be external.

I've just started using one of the Mercury Elite Pro enclosures from Other Worldly Computing, and I highly recommend them thus far. To save a little money, purchase the enclosure from OWC, get whatever size drive you need separately (NewEgg is a good place), and you're good to go. Just make sure you match up the interfaces (IDE, SATA, etc.) so the drive can plug into the external interface.

The model I'm using is the "OWC Mercury Elite Pro -AL RAID FW800 Drive Enclosure for 2 SATA Drives," which allows for three different configurations with two drives: a RAID 0 interface for really fast data recording with matched drives, spanning two drives to make one big one, or just using both drives individually but through one interface cable. It also gives you connectivity through USB 2.0, Firewire 400, or Firewire 800, so you can us it with whatever plugs your computer has (the Firewire 800 being the fastest). The construction is heavy duty aluminum with a cooling fan, so overheating should never be a problem. The installation instructions are clear, and all the needed interface cables and screws are included.

The best part for me is using the enclosure with just one hard drive now, and when my image storage needs grow beyond this drive, I can purchase an additional drive without having to buy another enclosure, because this one holds two drives!

You've heard it again and again, but I'm here to remind you now: back up your data. Do it now and do it often. I almost lost 3 years worth of photographs last year because I didn't have them backed up. Now I do it at least once a week. If possible, find a way to have it run automatically. Put it on your calendar, make it part of your Tuesday night ritual, do whatever you need to do to make it happen often. It's not a matter of if your computer will crash, it's when.

state of the world: 1. good, or 2. bad (please circle one)

Today's headlines

One of the characteristics of socially-concerned and politically liberal people that I am striving to unlearn is bearing the burden of all the world's social problems. Maybe I made this up, but somewhere I got the idea that listening to the news and knowing all the things that are wrong with US society and the greater world and possible ways to fix them is my civic duty.

I even like listening, watching, and reading the news. I do it almost everyday. NPR's Morning Edition is as familiar as eating breakfast. I've been reading the SF Chronicle ever since we signed up for their $10 for 6 months trial subscription. For a couple of years, the BBC News was my web browser's homepage.

But most of the time, I've found that for me, consuming news doesn't make me more concerned or connected. I become cynical, depressed, and a bit hopeless. Hearing too many negative happenings which I have little to no influence over doesn't seem to be very healthy. I start making the generalization that human beings are doomed and nothing will ever get any better. What passes for news these days (mostly sensational and polarizing headlines) doesn't exactly help uplift this attitude.

So are we all doomed and powerless, suffering forevermore? Is the state of the world pretty bad? Can it ever get better?

With an effectively infinite amount of information at our fingertips these days, I could probably construct just about any generalized picture of "the world" that I want to. So instead of either crawling into a hole and trying to ignore it all or making up some happy fantasy that doesn't really exist, I've been trying use the information available to expand how I form my conceptions of what's going on outside my own personal life. Thankfully, many of the local NPR affiliates (like KQED, based in San Francisco) produce some pretty amazing media content that delves into issues more deeply than most news programs. Much of it you can great straight from their websites or through iTunes.

For example, To the Best of Our Knowledge is a weekly show produced by Wisconsin Public Radio. They cover a whole range of culture, mostly through one-on-one interviews. The whole idea for this post got started by listening to this episode: "Hope Springs Eternal." I love that I can hear interesting and dynamic people who probably wouldn't make the mainstream news cycle. The content seems to often hit a great balance between seriously engaging issues while being positive and uplifting. In other words, they give me some hope (amen to that!).

See a funny thing happens when I'm hopeful about a problem. I actually feel like I can do something, however small, to help solve it.

Our urban container garden

For example, from a recent episode, "Going Green," we hear from:

• Colin Beavan, a New Yorker who has radically changed his lifestyle to avoid as much negative environmental impact as possible. His blog is called No Impact Man
• Bell McKibben on his book Deep Economy arguing that more profit and more stuff does not make us happier or our lives any better
• Jeff Ferrell, a tenured professor who gave up teaching and lived off dumpster diving for a year
• Paul Hawken, who started counting organizations working for social justice and environmental sustainability and found over a million of them (no wonder our society hasn't fallen apart yet!)
• And a few more... Isn't this great!
  

To listen, you can subscribe to their iTunes podcast and get a 20 minute segment from each show, or go to http://www.wpr.org/book/index.html and listen to streaming audio.
Going Green can be found here: http://www.wpr.org/book/070527b.html

Other shows I think are great:

• Humankind
• This American Life
• KQED Quest (iTunes link)
• KQED Spark (iTunes link)
  
• KQED Truly CA Shorts (iTunes link)
  

Where do you find informative but uplifting but realistic sources of information? I'd love to hear about it in the comments.

forgiveness

A fellow classmate in my "Mind, Habit, Change, and Conversion" class this past semester did a project on forgiveness. He wanted to expand the paradigm of forgiveness from a way of responding to major transgressions and additionally frame forgiveness as a mindset that we cultivate day-to-day. Ideally, we would all practice forgiveness moment to moment in our lives, forgiving everyone from the driver that cuts us off to the spouse that betrays us.

I find his idea similar to Buddhist notions of mindfulness or the Christian ideal of praying constantly in every moment. Obviously you could take this in the wrong direction and become everyone's metaphorical doormat, but I find some wisdom in what he was doing.

This is even more interesting when you consider his context: as an independent lawyer who often takes on cases involving tenant rights. He says that one of the common expectations that clients have is that he will be a "tool of vengeance" by helping them win lots of money from people who have committed transgressions against them. These expectations seem to go somewhat beyond the system's intent, which is to compensate people for damage and harm done to them.

I hope that today you will practice forgiveness and forgive me, as it's been so long since I posted anything on this blog!

It is now summer, and while I actually do have one more paper to finish by the end of this week before my semester is officially over, I'm looking forward to the free time this summer holds. In addition to much more frequent blog updates, I'm expanding my posting scope, so it's not just my supposed deep thoughts and photographs, but lots of random stuff I run across that you might find interesting, everything from YouTube videos I like to tips on making cheap photo equipment. It will be a little more rough around the edges and stream of consciousness, which will hopefully make it a little more personal too.

So, if you're willing to give me a fresh start, check back every couple of days for some random interestingness in my small corner of the web.

Much love,
G