terrimonsterphotos

Two years ago today, Sam Haber made me the happiest woman alive by saying “I do.” He’s made being married a fun adventure, and I’m a really lucky woman to have such a funny, awesome, and supportive partner.

Happy anniversary, my love.

I can post from my Android phone. Let’s hope the script that allows this to happen isn’t as vulnerable as I remember.

I’ve started a few WordPress blogs before, although none of them has exactly “stuck.” But for all of them, there’s a few minimum things I do.

When you first setup WordPress, right when you login for the first time, you’re given the option to let search engines spider your site. I always turn this off. As a systems administrator, I’ve had to spend many many hours troubleshooting why WordPress sites have started making the server unstable. Very often, the cause are a whole slew of aggressive search engine bots aggressively spidering the site all at once. The worst is Baidu spider. It’s even worse when it’s trying to spider PHP scripts, and those scripts are trying to process, but it’s not actually transmitting any information to the spider because of their very nature. I just leave it off.

I also enable Akismet. Spammers are a bane to the internet, and any little step that I can take to block them, I do it. Akismet takes a few steps to setup, but I think it’s worth it. Aside from the annoyance factor, spammers are very destructive once they’ve leeched onto an insecure blog. They’ll keep hitting the comments over and over again, while the server is churning away to try to keep up with requests, until the server falls over and I have to get in there and figure out what’s going on.

The latest and shiniest WordPress also by default includes HashCash, which apparently automatically blocks spambots using Javascript. Damn right I’ll use another tool to block those jerks. For this install, I enabled HashCash, and kudos to the developer if it works as advertised.

Last but not least, I always tweak the appearance. I kept with the stock WordPress theme, but now the WordPress Dashboard includes an easy way to replace the header image. I tweaked the settings for that image so I could use one of my own. It’s a picture I took at my grandmother’s house the last time I visited Chicago. You can view the full image and the whole explanation of that image here.

Here I go trying this out again.

I have many things on my mind right now. I’m going to Burning Man at the end of the month (holy crap). I’ve made the decision to bring my camera (my Nikon D200 and my Canon P&S as a backup) and really throw myself into photography. I don’t know if I want to go pro, but I do want to be a better brand of hobbyist than I have been thus far.

I’m debating about uploading the photographs I took last night at the Hollywood Bowl. Gustavo Dudamel conducting the LA Philharmonic for Ravel’s Bolero. This piece has been one of my favorite classical pieces for many, many years. My friends and I had the $8 cheap nosebleed seats, but you don’t have to go for a good view. You go for the music, and hanging out with your friends, enjoying a warm LA night, and drinking wine.

Dudamel is somewhat of a rock star in classical music circles. He’s a young South American with longish curly brown hair, a boyish smile, and endless energy. He tells stories and jokes with the audience between pieces, but it never comes off as forced. It’s like he’s confiding with the audience.

It was a beautiful night, and hearing Bolero done by Dudamel and the LA Philharmonic was something intensely special. I also got to see an opera performance live for the first time. The lyrics were in Spanish and translated on the big screen, and thus also for the first time I could understand what was being sung. Opera is like a poetic cancel jam, it sometimes just seems like words flung together, but then the meaning hits you and it’s very beautiful. I really liked it.

I want to upload the photos I took, even though there are few considering the seats we had, and it was nearly pitch black by the time we were seated. I also would like to edit them in LightZone, but I do not have that installed on my home machine, and still just in the trial anyway. LightZone isn’t expensive (as image editing software goes), but the amount of things I can do to alter photos with it is incredible. It helps that it runs on Linux. I probably will buy it, but I might wait until the trial runs out.

Compromise – I shall look at how the photos turned out. Maybe they do not need that much post processing.