citizen of the planet

You know, as I was writing last night’s post I was passing in and out of consciousness.  OK, so maybe that’s making things sounds much more dire than they actually were.  I was just really tired and actually had difficulty just completing the entry.  At the bar, by the third Strongbow Erika was telling me that I had the sleepy eye thing going on.  Yeah, I’ve actually noticed that before.  It seems that when I have alcohol I tend to just look fatigued.  I don’t go Asian red, but I just look like I haven’t slept in 36 hours.  I guess it’s true though: I really was tired.  And walking over to Yonge and Bloor after a long night out probably didn’t help me out either.

Anyway, in yesterday’s post I meant to post pictures of the foie gras poutine as well as the remnants of the Belgian chocolate fondue that we shared. Unfortunately, my sleep baked mind just couldn’t manage that.  So here they are.  Yes, they were both awesome and tasty.

Just a few words on the new banner up top.  Prior to selecting an image I decided that I’d pick out the theme’s blue scheme for the month.  Having decided on that bit, I set out to pick a picture that suited that hue.  Going through my photos I found a picture of Niagara Falls that I had archived.  I have a lot of pictures of the Horseshoe Falls, but for composition I decided to pick this one of the American side.

So, the first thing I did was resize and crop it to an eye-catching portion.  I then adjusted the white balance.  For outside photos, the white balance tends more toward bluer light.  After that I used an automatic saturation balancing tool, which cranked up the blue saturation even more.  The result is the image in the banner, which really does look like a painting; the blueness of the Niagara river is rather striking.

The original image can be found below for reference.

Yes, it’s late. I just spent the last one or two hours creating some new header images for the theme to randomly pick from. It’s been an interesting process because it allowed me a chance to scour through my hard drive of photos to find some candidates for header images. Some of the older pictures from years ago were pretty low-res. You can tell from the results. In other cases, the picture was actually taken with my cell phone creating for weird colouration. There were some photos that looked pretty cool on their own, but lost their impact when limited to a window of 226 pixels. I added descriptions to the pictures I chose. I’m not sure if I’m liking the pixel font I chose. The font is meant to be 7 pixels high, but that was far too small for my liking. As such, there’s some heavy duty anti-aliasing going on.

Right now there are 11 images:

• Niagara Falls, Ontario
• Seafort Square, Tokyo, JP
• Chinatown, Yokohama, JP
• Big Buddha, Kamakura, JP
• Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona
• Fairmont Royal York, Toronto, Ontario
• Old City Hall, Toronto, Ontario
• Wall Street, New York, New York
• Air Canada Centre, Toronto, Ontario
• Yonge St., Toronto, Ontario
• Scarborough, Toronto, Ontario

Let me know if there’s a particular one that’s pretty cool, or if there’s one that just doesn’t work. Any opinion would be helpful. Thanks!

ETA: OK, so after sitting with it for a day or so, I’m realizing that not all images work that well as a header. As well, having a random header can be distracting. So I’m going to pick one header image and stick with it for a month or whatever time period. The first one I’m choosing will be Seafort Square. If you see fire above it’s because I still haven’t uploaded it. Keep an eye out!

So, if you’ve come here before the first thing you’ll notice is that I’ve changed WordPress themes. This one is called Mandigo. It comes from the same author as my old theme, Royale. I must say, making a change like this is rather difficult. I’ve been using Royale for about 2 years. Over time I’ve come to associate that theme’s general aesthetic with my blog. I was pretty fond of its dark background with colour accents. I’ve actually hacked the code a little bit just to get its look more in line with what I wanted. So, as you can see, I have a good history with it.

Over time, I’ve started to wonder if the theme was something that I could continue to use in the long run. What do I mean by that? Well, as time goes on, WordPress just seems to get bigger and better with each release. There are always new features being added in. With each new feature, it’s really up to the theme author to update his or her themes to be able to make the most use out of the newly developed components. Unfortunately for me, the author of Royale seems to have stopped updating that theme altogether. There have been times where a change to WP meant that I had to hack the theme just to get it functioning properly again. Recently, there was a change made to the WP interface that somehow caused me to be unable to change the colour of the accents on the page. If I had time, I could probably hack the theme interface to get it to work, but honestly I just used it as a sign that it was probably time to move on to a different theme.

So, here I am with this new one. I actually came upon this theme from Björk’s Volta Blog. From there, I was led to Royale. Since it’s from the same author I figured that the structure would be similar enough to allow me to make the transition. For me, it’s going to take some getting used to. I have to spend some time tweaking bits here and there to make it more personal, but I think it’s a good starting point.