Flamencohead

Friday, February 22, 2008

So what does Microsoft have to offer…

Hey! Word 2007 supports blog posting using the meta weblog API too. I decided to thy it out to see how it works and whether it works for me. It has about everything you would expect from Word which is both good and bad. Word is just a bit too heavy for easy blogging. 

I started this post with Word. One feature that is nice is the photo uploading. Here is an old photo of my guitar from my PC …

But there doesn’t seem to be a plugin for inserting images from Flickr directly into the blog like ecto has.

Hold on! A little googling turned up Microsoft LiveWriter. Here is an update from LiveWriter using the Flickr plugin:

Very cool.  This a very nice tool and an even better flickr plugin. You can find the Flickr4Writer plugin here.

Being a blog tool LiveWriter is more tuned to blogging than Word for sure. There seem to be a gazillion plugins and you are not tied to MS Live. The downside? It still feels a bit heavy, especially when compared to something like ecto.

Wednesday, February 20, 2008

Upgraded to EE 1.6.2

I just finished upgrading Flamencohead to EE 1.6.2 and am running it through it’s paces. For example posting a picture from our trip to Mexico using ecto…

This one is the temple of Quetzalcoatl at Xochicalco, near Cuernavaca.

Sunday, February 10, 2008

Mexico 2008 - a photoset on Flickr

We just got our photos from our trip to Mexico posted to Flickr.

This January, to celebrate my birthday, Gabi and I spent two weeks in Mexico. We visited four colonial cities around the central highlands: Puebla, Cuernavaca, Morelia and San Miguel de Allende.

Unfortunately, the day before we left, our Olympus digital camera died! To make things worse, half way into our trip, our Canon 35 MM camera died too! Most of shots ended up being taken on disposable cameras. All of the photos were digitized from film at very low resolution, so forgive the photo quality.

Friday, February 08, 2008

The Fuji Project

I just added a story with pictures about building up a new old bike.

The complete set of photos is on my Flickr account.

Tuesday, February 05, 2008

Awesome Lucene tool

These days I’m doing a lot of work with Lucene. It is wonderful, but sometimes Lucene can be a big mystery. I often find myself wanting to analyze the documents in your index to get a better idea of why it is doing what it’s doing. That is where Luke comes in.

Luke is a very cool tool for poking around and analyzing your Lucene indexes. More later…

Saturday, February 02, 2008

Test blog from ecto

I’m trying out desktop blogging tools for posting to expression engine. So far I’ve tried  w.bloggar and ecto. They both are pretty easy to set up with expression engine and both are nice. But ecto is a really sweet blogging tool. It is a lot more polished. It even has a flickr integration.   

Monday, February 26, 2007

Mosaico Flamenco

A great flamenco band at the Scottsdale Hyatt Regency.

A couple of weeks ago we spent a long weekend in Scottsdale Arizona. Not that California winters are all that bad, but we had heard good things about Scottsdale in the winter. So off we went to check it out.

We went with reservations for dinner at a couple of highly regarded restaurants in the area. The Vu Restaurant at the Hyatt Regency is one and for good reason. We had a fantastic meal there.

What we didn’t know about the Hyatt is that the hotel lobby bar comes alive with Flamenco music on the weekends. A band called Mosaico Flamenco plays there and they are the real deal. The singer and guitarist knows the old school flamenco as well as nuevo flamenco. There is a second guitarist that has a different, less traditional style. There is nothing like the sound of two guitars. They played a soulful Solea followed by Bamblaya, so they cover a lot of ground. About half way through their set, they were joined by a local dancer named Julia Chacon. Julia and her male partner were very good, but the music stole the show.

Flamenco guitars, the moon over the desert. It almost felt like Andalucia. OK, well it really felt nothing like Andalucia but if you closed your eyes ...