The Tragically Hip
I was standing in Starbucks the other day and grabbed one their iTunes pick of the week cards with a code on back for a free song. This week it was for The Tragically Hip. They’re pretty good. Definitely check them out.
Simple Plugins for Press75.com
I wrote a couple WordPress plugins for Jason Schuller over at Press75.com. Jason designs premium themes for WordPress. Many of his themes have been video centric and he asked me to write a couple plugins to make it easier for his customers to post videos.
Simple Video Embedder adds a widget to the posting screen with fields for inputting URLs to videos on popular video sharing sites such as YouTube and Vimeo. The plugin can automagically generate embed codes for many video sites, but also provides a manual embed code field for unsupported ones.
Simple Post Thumbnails adds a widget to the posting screen as well. It provides an upload form to upload an image to use as a thumbnail. The plugin will crop and resize the image to the correct size for you so you don’t have to open up Photoshop every time you want to post a thumbnail for your posts. The plugin also has another field to input a URL to a remote image which gets downloaded and cropped, making it even easier.
Hope you like the plugins and definitely check out some of Jason’s awesome themes.
Things I need to work on
I do a lot a few things well but I have come to realize there are still some basic things about being a person I need to work on some more. A few that I can think of off the top of my head:
- Smiling and saying hello to people I know when I walk pass them–I’ve just never been good at this for some reason.
- Walking people to the door.
- Expressing gratitude–I get embarrassed when people do things for me. Might be because they never did until recent years.
- Cooking (basic survival skill, mucho importante).
- Talking to people–historically not very good at this either.
A few things I’ve gotten better at recently:
- Less arrogant–finally.
- Less competitive–somewhat related to arrogance.
- Less self-conscience.
One Semester Down
I’m sitting on my bed waiting for 6am to come around. I leave for home in the morning so I probably should get some shuteye, but I can’t sleep. Not sure if its because I’m excited to go home or if I’m just too used to going to bed at 3am. Either way, here I am, waiting for the inevitable.
It’s kind of strange to be one eighth of the way done with college already. The last few months seemed to have passed rather quickly. The first couple months were hard. I missed home; the classes were hard; and everyone seemed to know more than me. I figured out how to manage it all and cope with the stress after talking to a few people. There were moments where I wondered what I was doing here at CMU and if I had made a mistake in flying all the way across the country for school. I managed to convince myself that I wouldn’t be happy anywhere else knowing I could have gone to CMU. That worked for a while, but the longing for home was still there. These past few weeks have been different. CMU finally feels like home. Nothing has really changed, but I guess I’ve finally settled it.
Category Posts Widget update
I made a small update to my Category Posts Widget plugin regarding the problems people were having with displaying excerpts. Thanks to “carnyfeet” who posted the fix in this thread on the WordPress forums.
You can download the update at the official WordPress plugin repository or use the automatic update feature in newer versions of WordPress.
Thanks to everyone who is using the plugin! Over 10,000 downloads since I first released it in October 2007!
Bond returns with a vengence, shows human side
Quantum of Solace movie poster
The Bond trilogy had been getting stale and boring until Daniel Craig took the role of James Bond in Casino Royale. The previous movies had been self-contained with little connection between them so there wasn’t much to be said in terms of plot. Quantum of Solace changes that, but not by much. Nothing really happens… There are a lot of cool action sequences of Daniel Craig being a badass, but the plot hasn’t progressed much at all. It’s like what Pirates of the Caribbean 2 was to Pirates 1. All it really did was setup for the next movie.
Bond’s signature gadgets are notably absent again. Some fans might be disappointed by this, but I personally like the added realism. The action scenes are intense. Some people complain that they’re hard to follow at times because the camera switches every five seconds, but I didn’t mind. And of course, there’s an obligatory car chase scene and a boat chase too. There’s also a definite homage to Goldfinger. Oddly enough, I don’t remember Craig ever introducing himself as “Bond, James Bond” in the movie.
Quantum of Solace isn’t what I expected, but it’s worth seeing. Daniel Craig introduces a more human element to the character while still being a badass. Quantum of Solace is more about Bond coming to terms with his loss in the previous movie than anything else. It explains why Bond is the way he is, but I’m not sure it needs an entire movie devoted to just that. People who liked Casino Royale will probably enjoy this one and those who didn’t might not. I’m in the camp that liked Casino Royale: 4/5 stars.
