Last week's mess will soon be just another memory. The insurance company paid off the price I paid for that car almost in full. I'm going to try living without the luxury of a car - using my girlfriend's/my old mazda when necessary. The idea of having no car debt for the next 5-6 years seems awfully nice right now.

I've updated the paginator class in this framework.. There's now a "first/last" link that shows if the first and last pages are not visible in the list of pages between the prev/next links. See a working example, say, here: miklos.ca/?page=7 (scroll to the bottom.) Dagh.net and sncrly.com use the same class, so these changes should be in effect there too.

First things first, I've added a lightbox feature to the main page. Click on any image on the main page to initiate it. You can also select a tag from the tags page and do the same. Clicking the title within the lightbox popup will take you to the permanent link of the photo. Secondly, I separated the portfolio tag and added it to the main menu. I'll be shuffling photos around in that tag to keep it fresh. Enjoy!

I released a new site design today, which has a few sources of inspiration (the front page is very much like www.ricecracker.net for example.) The old site can be found at 2010.miklos.ca.

Here we go again! The 75km fundraising bike ride for Multiple Sclerosis is coming up once again... Please pledge me by clicking here (or the big blue button below.) You can send your donation any time between now and August 22nd.

Pledge Me Online

Cleaned the car today, inside and out. My advice to people wanting to buy brand new cars: do it only if you don't care about winter wear. The car suffered some significant scratches during the past few months due to all the salt on the road. There's also an unusual amount of wear on the front edge of the rear door on the driver's side which I can't explain. I hope the extra money invested in the paint protection will cover the repair. One thing's for sure, I'm going to think twice before putting another brand new car through a Canadian winter, even a mild one like we just had.

http://static.miklos.ca/docs/canada_area_code_map.pdf

Dave and I had an idea years and years ago about a website that would show projects in the Niagara region. This new government site is close to it, but not quite as detailed as what we had in mind.
http://jui.cc/C9

Nikki found her sleeping like this today.

She's been known to sleep in weird positions.

In case you weren't following, Canada just won gold against USA. Our friend Mr. Varga was on the edge of his seat.

I made a bit of a change to jui.cc. When you go to a jui.cc URL, it'll now display a bar at the top of the page with the contents of the URL below it. For example, see the jui.cc URL for my site: http://jui.cc/1

Looks like most of the area is covered now. Drag the little guy above the zoom slider onto Welland.
http://maps.google.ca/maps?q=welland

I bought 2 tickets to Hungary today. They are for April. Apparently weather is nice there late April. Anyway, we're pretty excited! This will be my second visit within 2 years.

You gotta admire this program's Engrish...

I learned something last night.. I had to move a Wordpress site from one domain to another on Dreamhost. I read online that you have to create a fresh install of Wordpress on the new domain, then copy the wp-content folder over from the old domain. Finally you have to reconfigure the wp-config.php file on the new domain to point to the old database. I did all those steps and it was still coming back with a "redirection loop error"; the site caused an infinite loop for whatever reason and was not loading.. I messed around with the .htaccess file, I went in to each table in the database to make sure the old domain wasn't referenced anywhere... no luck. Finally I went back in to the Dreamhost control panel, to the Manage Domains section (https://panel.dreamhost.com/index.cgi?tree=domain.manage&) and edited the Web Hosting options for the new domain..

The solution was on this page. It has a section on there that asks "Do you want the www in the URL?" with the options "Leave it alone", "add www" and "remove www" ... I noticed that it was set to "add www" so I changed it to "leave it alone" and the Wordpress site finally started working.

I tried this one photo a day for 365 days thing but I only lasted 13 days legitimately :) I haven't posted since the 13th... However, I caught up with some random stuff around the kitchen and will try to continue even though it's more like a 363 day project now...

We put the Mazda back on the road. It's such a drastic difference between that car and a brand new car. So many noises, sounds... Poor thing, she's mad at me for having her off the road for 5 months.

I will (try to) take/post a photo every day this year:
http://miklos.ca/photos/tags/365

Peter found a nicer picture of my new watch.

Source: citizenwatches.com.au

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Christmas dinner at Alex's house was a success! Good work Alex for finishing your kitchen in time. (I don't think we said it but we're proud of you.) Thanks to mom and dad for all their help as well. As for presents, there were lots! Amongst all the stuff I got was a Citizen Eco-Drive watch from Nikki. This puts an end to my forever long search for watches... I think! :)

We got a bit of snow this morning... I mean not much, but nonetheless it is a reminder of the long winter ahead of us.
See today's photo archives.

I was browsing eBay for watches (like I usually do) and saw a "Make Offer" button on a watch that I kind of liked... So I bid $10 lower than the price of the watch. The seller accepted. So now I own this:
.

I wish Google Apps had a place where we could change the favicon. The default Google favicon is nice and all, but I like my new M.

If you're in Welland and cross the Lincoln Street, Division Street or Ontario Street bridges often, this year--seemingly more so than other years--you'll see a bunch of Double-crested Cormorants occupying the top of the light posts. Just now on the way back to work after my lunch break I actually had to swerve out of the way to avoid a giant spray of crap that one was trying to baptize my car with. If you look, they have left a huge mess on the ground and all over the light posts. Rain doesn't even wash it away... so imagine that going on your car and being caked on there. Their crap is so acidic that the trees they nest on can actually die because of it. Anyway, I'm glad they found the Welland canal and are providing this city with a bit of excitement.

Went for a drive with Nikki and my sister at 6am and caught the sunrise over Niagara Falls. You can find some photos of it in the archives. Too bad Nikki's camera died and she couldn't enjoy it fully.

I lowered the prices on prints to be a bit more reasonable while still making a bit of profit... I tried chromasia's pretentious pricing scheme initially but that seemed like a bit of a ripoff! So now, coupled with the 25% off the first 100 pritns coupon, you can't go wrong. I know there are over 1800 photos on the site, but there are a few ways of browsing them: tags, random photo, random page, random tag or the traditional chronological archives. I'm sure there's something that I can print for you to fill a space in your house :) You can even send me your ideas of photos you'd like to see on here, and I'll see if I can do it (as long as your request is reasonable of course.)

Browse the photos and if you decide to purchase one, use the coupon code 24CEBE to get 25% off. First 100 sales only.

You can now buy prints of selected photos. Visit the prints page for more information.

The Rona MS Bike Tour is in 2 days. If you haven't pledged me online yet, please do so here. I thank you for your support!