lines of flight

Spent some time trying to figure out how to post pictures via email, then I realized, there’s an app for that!?

One two, testing, testing, testing…

A lovely sunset after a thunder-filled rainy day.

A few notes on how I’m feeling about my blog, Twitter and (what I think is about to be) my embrace of Flickr.

Recently I was doing research on the 90s music scene in Hawai’i.

I found this guy JonHawaii2003 had posted footage of Tool and Stone Temple Pilots at the first Big Mele—an alternative music festival that ran in Hawaii for seven years—on YouTube. Turns out Jon was one of the sound guys for the show, and knows a thing or two about getting quality concert footage.

I contacted him to thank him for the hard-rocking flashback, and a week later he reuploaded the Tool footage in even better quality!

Here’s the link to the entire 10-part playlist, or if you just want to hear my favorite (aka most popular on Radio Free Hawaii) song of the day, that’d be Opiate featuring a surprise guest appearance from singer Layne Staley of Alice in Chains:

The one thing you can’t see here is the waves, they are going off(!!) in an area of the island where huge surf is not that common. Despite Kualoa being a Ranch and having an abundance of ranchly things like cow poo (and the fungus that grows upon it), I can hardly imagine a more beautiful backdrop for a killer music festival.

I wasn’t even a huge Tool fan until that day, when the bass in my face—an emotionally blown state since I’d just been dumped that day—rocked my world. Other artists that played the Big Mele were Stone Temple Pilots, Fishbone, Violent Femmes and Primus.

No subsequent Big Mele ever packed as much of a punch as this one did, for me. They lost even the little bit of diversity they had, becoming way too alterna-punk-heavy for my tastes, tho I did go in ’96 (No Doubt! plus Cypress Hill and their ginormous inflatable Buddha) and ’97 (Wu Tang, sorry guys, that is *not* Wu Mountain behind us). Lineups of all The Big Mele festivals on hawaiibase.com.

This three minute, 50 second video was featured as a web extra to accompany a story about seahorses in the January 2009 issue of Mālamalama online.

My job was to coordinate the production, do the interviews, edit the spoken audio and when we didn’t have all of what we needed, to do some narrative voice-over. The decision to add the voice-over was last-minute and it ended up being recorded in an empty office with leftover fake Xmas snow used as sound insulation(?!).

This web extra has had over 400 views on Vimeo so far; that’s the version embedded into the story, but you have to go to Vimeo to see the glorious HD version. We used Vimeo because we were having some problems uploading to our Mālamalama YouTube channel. Now YouTube is cooperating, so I’ve embedded the HD version here.

Splitting our views between different video hosts is obviously not ideal. YouTube is less elegant than Vimeo, but it has a *much* larger community. Vimeo looks awesome, and for a small fee, we’d be allowed to embed HD video on our site, but no decision has been made yet.

I welcome any feedback and opinions on the issue of video hosting and playback.

This post looks briefly at two plugins that integrate WordPress and Twitter. I spend a lot of time with each, and this kind of integration makes sense in theory, but I have not yet seen it work incredibly well in practice.

Both Twitter Tools and TweetSuite have options to enable widgets for displaying tweets (including favorited tweets in TweetSuite) and also give the option to auto-tweet when you publish a post.

The developer-described “experimental” digest features of Twitter Tools were the main draw for me to test this WordPress plugin by Alex King. I wanted to see what happens when you extract a specimen of Twitter text and consider it out of context. At the very least, I could have an archive of my tweets.

However, missing for me in the Twitter Tools digest is the option to collect this daily or weekly digest as an Unpublished draft, which would allow me to comment, edit and tag before it goes live, or even chose to keep it private (on account of being extra boring or annoying).

Apparently this plugin isn’t being actively developed anymore, which does not bode well for its usefulness in the future.

The other Twitter-based plugin I’ve tested recently is Dan Zarella’s TweetSuite. TweetSuite generates trackback-like “tweetbacks” that post automatically when anyone twitters a link to a blog page. The list of tweets at the end of the article on Zarella’s page is probably the best(?) example the tweetback display in full force.

To see it on my site, I sent a tweet about my own post, and at the end of that post, voilà! you see the tweet that the twitterverse saw. (You can go ahead and ignore the lame fact that that post has one comment and one tweetback and both are from me :~p what I learned on that post helped me produce a page that got over 3,300 views in one day!)

Neither Twitter Tools nor TweetSuite does it all for me yet, nor are they right for the Mālamalama magazine site. Both my sites may be too non-techie for it to ever take hold, but who knows, even Mālamalama is on Twitter now, so maybe one day…?!

Double rainbow at dawn on New Year’s Day in Honolulu, 2009.

Can you take a bad picture of a rainbow? I wanted to share this, but I could not for the life of me figure out which of these photos is best.

there are rainbows

12 Photos

So I’m adding them all but justifying the lack of editorial eye by using this as a chance to play with the NextGEN photo gallery plugin (again).

This time it needs to be a sidebar with a thumbnail that launches the whole photo gallery, from alongside a larger story. This is a functionality that has been requested at Mālamalama, just testing it here.

By the way if anyone else is just getting started with NextGEN Gallery plugin, there are some helpful instructions available from this guy.

UPDATE January 12, 2009

Doing this all kinds of wrong, ugh. Using the compact view album instead of a link to a gallery that has it’s own page(!!). Makes a lot more sense… I think? Only thing is, I can’t have words wrap around this because if I put it in a narrow div then the gallery and slideshow try to open within it.

Now to figure out why the captions don’t show in the slideshow…

A few photos from my recent trip to Northern California.

[Show as slideshow]

Not that spectacular, I know. I mainly uploaded them to play with the WordPress NextGEN photogallery plugin. I installed this plugin looking for a fast, easy way to get slideshows online, specifically for Mālamalama magazine, which is now built out in WordPress(!!).

However, I find myself really liking the gallery (thumbnail) navigation. The slideshow gives more control to the creator for things like picture order and audio–we like control at the magazine–but the gallery lets users select the pics they particularly like and breeze through the rest, or not.

The other option for this type of photo presentation would be to make a video with the still shots, but that takes a bit more labor and creates issues of how to insert the caption info. But, video can be hosted on a site like youtube, which reaches a wider audience and can be easily embedded by others.

decisions, decisions…

Summer is over. Time for the dusty Bluebird theme to fly away, not least because Twitter incorporated it into their design ages ago (I had it first), but things are just different now. New season, new nephew, new deadlines.

Time for something more subdued. This loamy, static look is called MNML and so far it suits my mood perfectly.

The MNML theme is conceptually related to Twitter in that it lends itself to micro-blogging, which I’m liking lately. Perhaps a bit too much. Something about posting these really tiny snippets of myself feels like a freer form of expression. At least, it’s more portable (phone-friendly) and easier than blogging, that’s for sure. Freer? eh. Whatever. LoL.

I will try not to go all “dear diary” with the content, but I don’t apologize for being inconsistent in my posting style. My published clips are still listed here as for the rest, we’ll see.

Thanks again to WordPress for making this possible.

Ti$a – Vote Obama

[via The Rap Up]

Why didn’t Obama Twitter the news of this video?? LoL. He’s got his account set to follow everyone that follows him. Brilliant! and how flattering: Barack Obama is following me! hahaha! No doubt it’s an aide that reads & sends the messages, but still, interesting use of technology. And fun video :~j

Pretty much every blog that ever blogged in the blogosphere has a blogroll, a list of links to other blogs. Making this list is a task I’ve long put off because there are just so many cool sites to link to, I know I’ll miss someone. How could it ever be complete?

But I finally added linkage to some sites of interest in the far right column, under the Twitter updates, above the Flickr pictures, under the title Hi, Friends.

I’m starting with links to people who commented on this here humble site (many thanks!) and including a few news sites I like (tho Under The Radar Media and Lorelle on WordPress actually each count as both). The blogroll is capped off with an Airspace Workshop link since I’m like their #1 mixtape fan and happen to be listening to their "called off because of rain" mix as I write this.

Watch that space, it’s gonna grow. And comment if you have a site and want to quickly link up with jeelago.net :~j

I’m forgetting something important….

I’ve decided to expose my <body> on the internet in honor of Naked Day ’08 on April 9th. Thousands of other people are doing it, too, so I figured, why the heck not. You heard right: I’m stripping off my styles and going bare on the internet… that is, my website will be going bare on the internet, for all to see. What were YOU thinking? ;~p

My purpose in participating in Naked Day ’08 is three-fold:

• Advocate web standards This is the official reason for Naked Day and a cause that I am fully down with but am much too lazy to explain here, mainly cuz I do it all the time at work! That’s what a good link is for anyway, right?
• Celebrate good design Trying to pick matching link colors and backgrounds and fonts for a site is not fun for me as a non-designer, and the results always underwhelming. The industry has come a long way, baby, and now hundreds of beautiful, free templates are available for WordPress alone. The design I currently use is called Bluebird and it’s by Randa Clay. Many thanks, design people!
• Show off WordPress The code for the WordPress software that powers the blog is clean and standards compliant, meaning that even when you strip away the pretty work designers do, the site still makes sense.

WordPress makes participating in Naked Day ’08 super easy by providing a plugin that will automatically turn off my CSS template. The result should be a text-based, bare-bones-looking site. Not pretty but very usable…. at least I hope that’s what happens LoL… it’ll be a good experiment.

On the jeelago.net index page, which is not powered by WordPress, I manually strip-teased out the very minimal amount of CSS I’ve used to do things like align the text and set the width. Were my site more complicated and I more adept in php, I could use a script to strip, but that won’t be necessary this year.

So apparently Mobile phones are ‘more dangerous than smoking.’ Great. [via Under the Radar Media del.icio.us news feed]

Guess it was a good idea to upgrade my busted up phone, even tho I had to betray Nokia for the $100 (w/contract) Pantech Duo.

This new phone easily encourages me to text message even more. I’m thinking that is a good thing, cuz it keeps the rays away from my gray matter. It’s a theory anyway.

If only I could stop complaining about the data package they sold me to go along with this phone, which basically doubles my monthly bill. I must be brain damaged already to pay that much!

But the old phone didn’t do important stuff, like ring. Or work as an alarm, or have a data cable. An upgrade was imperative.

The two are actually about the same size when the keypad is pushed in, and the same thickness, but the Pantech has another slider with a number pad that comes out the side. It does feel a little flimsy, and I don’t love Windows Mobile, but it has 3G, removable MicroSD memory and the lovely keyboard. I think it’ll hold me over til the day I maybe get my hands on an internet tablet, kick-ass PDA, or next generation iPhone.

That perfect device is just around the corner …right?

The much anticipated WordPress 2.5 upgrade has been installed and is working away to power this blog. There shouldn’t be any changes on the front end, but let me know if anything looks off. My cynical friend among many, took the time to highlight some of the improvements.

One of the things I had hoped to do after the upgrade was install the Popularity Contest plugin which would generate a list of the most trafficked posts. Unfortunately for me, that plugin is not working correctly with the new version yet. So I’m just going to guess.

From monitoring my stats and eyeballing the numbers, rankings and search terms that bring people here, these are what I think are the most popular posts from my first eight months of blogging:

1. Lapp it up: Pamela Anderson’s Finnish heritage
2. the pop secret is out–microwave popcorn is super easy to make
3. watch the Boondocks
4. in search of the perfect travel backpack
5. reservations about Anthony Bourdain in Hawaii
6. supreme master moomin vision and the muumibuumi
7. the overwhelming cuteness of twin baby Bengali tigers born different colors
8. Barack Obama- Yes We Can