Baron’s Blog

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson endorsed Sen. Barack Obama today for president.

Obama saved his okole during a debate last year.

This quote from Gov. Richardson in the Washington Post:

“I had just been asked a question — I don’t remember which one — and Obama was sitting right next to me. Then the moderator went across the room, I think to Chris Dodd, so I thought I was home free for a while. I wasn’t going to listen to the next question. I was about to say something to Obama when the moderator turned to me and said, ‘So, Gov. Richardson, what do you think of that?’ But I wasn’t paying any attention! I was about to say, ‘Could you repeat the question? I wasn’t listening.’ But I wasn’t about to say I wasn’t listening. I looked at Obama. I was just horrified. And Obama whispered, ‘Katrina. Katrina.’ The question was on Katrina! So I said, ‘On Katrina, my policy . . .’ Obama could have just thrown me under the bus. So I said, ‘Obama, that was good of you to do that.’”

I think in Sen. Clinton’s state of New York Obama would be considered a mensch.

Today was virtual moving day. My hosting plan runs out tomorrow 11/7 for Aplus.net and I’ve been meaning this past year to move the domain and blog to my DreamHost account where I get treated much better. So I was in kinda a rush to get things done having one day to figure it all out. Backing up files, importing MySQL databases, reconfiguring WordPress, changing my email account from a POP Server to an IMAP account, etc.

The docs on the WordPress site were very little help since it’s kinda understood you know a bit about all this stuff. But I figured it out, got the files backed up and moved, installed and now it seems to be running fine again. And if you look closely in this photo you might see a couple of things not normally seen in my blog as I tested the blog installation. Can you guess?

WordPress is a great blogging application and it’s what this blog runs on. One of the great things about WordPress is the ability to modify the underlying code so that you can customize it your needs. Because I like to put photos on this blog I needed to hack the code a little. The problem is that WordPress defaults to 128 pixel thumbnails which is pretty small. (This example is on WordPress v2.3.1)

That’s a 128 pixel photo, pretty small huh? So I modifed the code to create 450 pixel thumbnails.

That’s more like it at 450 pixels.Here’s how I did it.

In your wp-admin folder is an includes folder and inside that is a file called image.php which is the file we will be modifying.

This is the old code that has the thumbnail size set to 128 pixels. It’s on line 153 of the file.

Here’s the file after being modified. It will set the thumbnail maximum long side to 450 pixels. You can set it to anything you want but I found 450 pixels is a good size that fits most template designs.Just modify the file and upload it onto your server into the includes folder. Now when you have a nice detailed photo you want to show-off just upload the image via the WordPress Dashboard by hitting the Browse button in the editor and choose

This will display the 450 pixel thumbnail on the page and link to the bigger original image uploaded when people click on the thumbnail. Like the image below.

Click here for another web tutorial on the same modification, but also for users of earlier WordPress versions than 2.3

*UPDATE FOR WORDPRESS 2.5*

Now you can set thumbnail size via your admin settings just go to:

Settings>Miscellaneous>Image Sizes>Thumbnail Size

Then enter what size you want your thumbnails to be, I set mine to 450 pixels

This blog may look funky for the next hour as I update WordPress. Or a day if I mess it up and if I can’t fix it in a day it will look great as I’ll start from scratch. Check back at 12:30pm HST.

*update* WordPress has been updated to v2.2.1, only took 1/2 hour, and hopefully no more updates soon. Though I do hope it plays better with Safari. Nope, looks like Safari v3 still does a lousy job of working with WordPress in Visual editor mode. Firefox seems to work just fine.

One of my favorite video podcasts just got bought by CBS TV. WallStrip went for $5,000,000 and that’s a lot of zeros for a podcast that didn’t exist a year ago. Entertaining, informative, educational and a sexy host helps too…I’m talking about Lindsay, not Howard. Sometimes it’s like Monty Python or Saturday Night Live is creating the show.

Click on the logo above and learn a few things about red-hot stock market trends and some that have cooled to lukewarm too. It’s not an advice show on what stocks to buy as many of the stocks they cover are at their peaks and may tumble. I don’t care what WallStrip says about the company Crocs, their footwear is ugly as sin.

Some Windoze fanboy illegally used an image from this blog (notice the copyright designation in the sidebar? And I DO send in all my images to the copyright office with Copyright Form VA). They used it to bash Macs about them crashing, yeah, all computers crash.

So since he’s hijacking the image from my server.
Here’s fanboy’s site before.

And here’s fanboy’s site after I changed the image on my server.

Hey, if someone wants to go on a rant about something, fine, I’m all for the first amendment. I’ve bashed both Windows (I own a Dell) and Mac (I own a Mac), but get a life, take your own photos and get your own server space. I do let people use my photos sometimes if they ask nicely first. Like here. And here.

Well, the little Flash set of cameraphone thumbnails i had on the right sidebar is gone. Seems TextAmerica, the MoBlog site, no longer allows free accounts as of 2007. So i’ll just have to update the old-fashioned way though I’ll probably figure out something to automatically post cameraphone photos here. Think they could have at least emailed me ahead of time.