The Substantially Similar Weblog

Still Falling

[Tags]Snow, Blizzard, Boston[/Tags]

Past seasons…

[Tags]Leaves, Autumn, Fall, Kids[/Tags]

We were hit pretty hard in Boston. My office was shut down and deserted by mid-afternoon, but I decided to stay until late afternoon — big mistake. You might think the trains wouldn’t be as affected by the snow. And they weren’t — it only took me twice as long to get home, while it took my brother over six hours to drive from Somerville to Roslindale.

Still, it was a pretty extraordinary scene at South Station around 4:30pm. It was packed inside and out. A few trains arrived, and no one got on or off. I was wondering if they were ghost trains until finally things started moving.

The odd color balance in this photo set is because these were all taken in the dark with very long exposure times. But the apocalyptic cast may actually be appropriate.

Earlier: Proof of Fall 2007, Blizzard 2007, Blizzard 2005, First Snow 2004, Winter Sunset 2005.

[Tags]Boston, Roslindale, Snow, Blizzard[/Tags]

I’ve been playing around with Gallery and wpg2. I’m still a bit puzzled attempting to integrate Gallery and WordPress. I’ve resolved most issues; the main remaining issue is to display images in the Ajaxian theme without running over the borders in the Ajax/slideshow views. Also, the embedded image apparently doesn’t render in the RSS feed. Update: I’ve given up on the G2 tinymce plugin and the WPG2 tag for now and just hardcoded the image and album URL. Update 2: now the embedded image is working again for no good reason. Suggestions on the entire configuration are welcome.

In any case, I took some pretty photos today in our back yard (use left and right arrow keys to scroll through images after clicking on the one below — I still can’t get the navigation icons to appear):

Before: Proof of Spring 2007.

[Tags]Autumn, Foliage, Trees, WordPress, WPG2, Gallery[/Tags]

For anyone who doubts the arrival of Spring 2007:

Update: all of the below was fixed by disabling Privoxy! Who would have guessed?

Meanwhile, I can’t for the life of me get the gallery2/wordpress integration plugin (wpg2) to work. I decided it was time to get organized and stop storing/uploading photos in a totally ad hoc fashion. When I try to validate the wpg2 installation, however, I get this error:

Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/adam/public_html/adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/wp-admin/admin-header.php:16) in /home/adam/public_html/adam.rosi-kessel.org/weblog/wp-includes/functions.php on line 1221

When I then click to confirm that I want to validate, I get an empty page back.

No errors in apache logs.

This problem appears to have come up several times, and the most I can gather is the Gallery people point the finger at the Gallery Plugin people; the Gallery Plugin people point their finger at the Gallery people; and sometimes everyone points their finger at the WordPress people. E.g.

Not the best way to spend a beautiful spring day.

We’re finally having a decent snowstorm!

[tags]Snow[/tags]

The New England tourism industry has been hit hard this year by a weak showing of autumn colors. This Japanese Maple in our front yard has finally turned brilliantly red, though:

Breaking news! As of about 10 seconds ago, we’ve received our first snowflakes in Boston. So long, Autumn. I’d post photos, but the flakes are almost invisible.

I spoke too soon. It started out just barely visible:

But pretty soon it was snowing cats and dogs:

And now it’s sticking!

(front)

(back)

Today’s forecast reports:

Any travel is strongly discouraged. If you leave the safety of being indoors… you are putting your life at risk.

Above is our front yard picnic table and our back yard picnic table as of this morning—they might be totally gone by the end of the day. Good thing it’s no weather for a picnic.

Incidentally, if anyone has any ideas about how to take good quality digital photos of snow, or how to use the GIMP to get better whites, please let me know. I did a little fiddling with these shots, but it’s really much brighter out there than these images would have you believe.

Being both sick and snowed in inspires me to file bugs and ask mailing list questions. For example, this bug with mplayer that prevents me from playing AAC files that I’ve tagged with mp4tags has been bugging me for a couple of months. And I just learned that sending a USR2 signal to openbox forces ‘reconfigure’, which is quite useful if you script changes to the rc.xml file.

Now if someone could help me with this strange, intractable Apache bug my day would be complete.