Ok, scratch Tallulah Gorge. Events conspired to prevent us from making it. Nevertheless, we visited one of our favorite spots (by Lake Lanier) and Matt got a good swimming workout while I read by the lake. 🙂 It would be considered in the realm of TMI (too much information) if I went into the reasons I wasn’t able to get into the lake. Anyway, it was fun and we took some neat pictures with Matt’s dad’s camera. He has a nifty Sony Cybershot DSC-P72 camera and while the user interface is not very friendly (IMHO), the pictures are way better than what my old Kodak Easyshare CX7300 would have come out with. I’m inserting some pictures of us and Lake Lanier. Enjoy!
In other news, Matt and I watched a new movie (The Number, 23) that came out featuring Jim Carrey. Now, I’ve trusted Jim Carrey with my comedies and the like. I was a bit leery of him in a serious role like this although I’d heard good things about him in that movie with a really long name (eternal sunshine of the spotless mind). I have to say that this movie was not worth my time. I felt like getting my money back from Hollywood Video. The writers of this sub-optimal plot would have you believe there is some hokey significance in the number, 23, with the silly way they thought up coincidences to this number. Am I the only one who thought it was a bit of overkill to start with the 23-significance-overload right as the movie was starting?? I didn’t like the style of the movie nor the plot which I couldn’t figure out in time to stay for the rest of the movie. I guess I can’t even really speak to the plot because I didn’t finish the movie. I couldn’t finish the movie because it was that bad. It plodded on and on till I gave up. Matt stuck it through although he had some difficulty explaining what the hell the movie was about. This movie attempts to achieve the psychological thriller status (kinda like the Secret Garden) but fails miserably. I think Carrey should have taken a rain check with this movie. He didn’t fit the role and I couldn’t get past the unsignificance of the number especially as they made every attempt to beat it into our heads that something’s not right with that number. Puleez. Not to mention the horrible camera angles or the filming method (I don’t know the lingo). I suggest you pass on the movie, The Number 23 and go rent Legally Blonde … or something. Save yourself the misery. *exhales*Â 🙂
I’ve added a bunch of old static html pages that I had sitting on my hard drive. In a few short hrs after they were up, they were indexed by the Google bot and I started getting hits. I am simply amazed by the efficiency of Google’s crawlers. I have some quality stuff in those pages and with time, I’ll keep validating and adding to them. I’ve decided to use WordPress as my publishing platform in order to save me HTML hell. Right now, some plugins that are keeping me from pulling my hair out:
- TinyMCE Advanced: Turbo-charges the inbuilt TinyMCE in WordPress.
- WordPress Blog Stats by Automattic: Stats galore! Hosted by WordPress.com so need an API key. Not a hassle as you most likely are using Akismet ergo have an API key.
- WordPress reports: Condenses my Google analytics reports into an easily digestible form. I would love to see some referrer, network location, etc detail there.
- Cforms II: Excellent documentation and tracks sent messages. Useful for cases of misdirected mail. 🙂
- Clutter Free: Jebus! If you don’t have this, get it. It customizes your “Write Post” screen to remove unwanted things like the post preview, upload box, etc. It minimizes the loading time to write a post for me.
- Embedded Video with Link: The un-fussiest embedding video application I’ve tried. You can save your bandwidth by linking to videos from a broad variety of sites including Youtube and many more. It also adds an ‘easy’ button to your tinyMCE toolbar thus making life easier for the video freak!
- Extended Live Archives: This plug-in hasn’t been updated since God knows when. However, several WordPress updates later, it still works seamlessly for me! It saved my butt when my WPG2 plug-in messed with my categories and there was no way for the reader to view my posts via categories. This plug-in beats out the other archive plug-ins in my book.
- Google XML Sitemaps: This plug-in has been in beta for a long while, but I’m sure there’s a lot of production going on in the factory. Heck, it works fine beta or not so I’m not complaining. Simplifies the process of notifying major search sites of your new and updated content. A must have for search engine optimization.
- WordPress Database Backup: This is a time-saver and a lifesaver for some. I’ve had plug-ins ruin whole installations before, but my life was spared as I had a database backup lurking around on my hard drive. Get this for the most painless database backup experience. 🙂
- Exec PHP and Executable PHP Widget: These two are especially handy for working with plugins that may need insertion of PHP code into WordPress posts. These are indispensable right now and will be for you.
Phew! That was an honest-to-goodness mouthful. I wrote my list in order of what I thought of (not priority based). In essence, if I had to start a blog over again, I would have these plugins as staples. Feel free to tell me what your plug-in staples are.