Translating this Oaxacan knicknack would require too much explanation of the ins and outs of Mexican wrestling, but I loves it. “Work hard, play hard” would be near it but doesn’t capture even a fraction of the colour…

Anyroad, just a note to say that any minute now the internets are getting cut off to this here house and we’re moving to NYC, then on Friday, Guadalajara for 6 weeks or so, then L.A. for a week, then back to NY, NY… shall be something of an adventure. My new zip code resolution (to coin a phrase, nay, a tradition) is to update this blog a bit more often. So let’s see how that goes. If you don’t already subscribe by RSS, and would like to be emailed whenever new ramblings find their way to this site, please sign up for email updates here:

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Maine’s been grand. I’m going to miss the folks and the ample, accessible, countryside and coast. We’ll be back… A bientot, folks.

It took a while, but I just got sent a copy of the book where some of my photos are being used. Chuffed is what I am.

Takes me back to the last time I used one of these machines 5 years ago… Wish they were transparent so you could see what’s going on inside.

In brief:

Look it: 25 random images from my photoblog slideshow

Mind you:

It doesn’t work in Chrome or Safari (and probably others…), some images will break (cos they’re too big to be resized), some are pixelated (cos they were too small), some aren’t cropped well (cos they’re square or portrait), and the idea is you have a fairly large monitor to see them properly in the first place.

Techyish stuff

Not sure if this is of interest to anyone at all but I thought I’d post it anyway… I’m coming up to the 300th photo on my photoblog (and just hit 13,500 on Flickr…) I’d have more on there but it takes 10 minutes or so for each new post and I’ve been wondering for a while if there’s a way to do it with the tim-thumb.php script rather than using WordPress’ in-built resizing tool and custom fields. Anyway, that’s an issue for another day which, using what I learnt today, should be fairly simple.

So I wanted it to slide from one post to the next rather than load a whole new page. I’ve made inroads today.

It uses:

• jQuery + jFlow for the slider: http://plugins.jquery.com/project/jFlow
• A new variable for the WP Loop I’d not heard of before: ‘orderby=rand‘
• substr – a php command that lops a given number of characters off a string (such as the URL of the photo), then concatenates the tim-thumb resizing bit on the end.


<div id="slides">
<?php $category = wp_get_object_terms($main_query->post->ID, 'category');
$recent = new WP_Query("showposts=25&orderby=rand"); while($recent->have_posts()) : $recent->the_post();?>
<div>
&lt;a href="<?php the_permalink(); ?>"> <img src="http://agaveweb.com/photos/wp-content/themes/blackcanvas_10/timthumb.php?src=<?php
$string = get_post_meta($post->ID, "photo", true);
$newstring = substr($string, 0, -12).'.jpg';
echo $newstring; ?>&h=750&w=950&zc=1" alt="<?php the_title(); ?>" />
<p class="slider">
<?php the_title(); ?>
</p>
</div>
<?php endwhile; ?>
</div>

And that is what passes for excitement during the week in Brunswick, Maine.

The above’s a short video of the charming little animated ‘green white man’ on all the pedestrian crossings in Oaxaca. I like how he encourages you to run, not walk, the closer it gets to the stop again. I also wonder if there’s a backwards setting in there somewhere…

As you know, no news on this blog means there’s lots of news occurring, but no time to write about it. In brief, we made several gourmet home-made pizzas last night with a couple of lovely folks from Bowdoin. Today’s Wolfe’s Neck with dearest Atticus, picking up Blackcurrant & Apple juice, Twiglets and as many Creme Eggs as I can stomach, from the UK Essentials shop in Freeport. Tomorrow, if the weather holds, tis a Flickr meet in Brunswick of all places… so maybe some more Mainecentric photos will follow soon. And that is the mere tip of the iceberg in terms of current events round our way.

Elias does it again

Guadalajara’s rising multimedia star, Elias Garcia-Ortiz has once again rendered one of my photos in beautiful watercolour. Above is Mitla’s Spanish church built with and on top of the remains of the conquered Zapotec structures.

Mitla, Oaxaca, México

It’s not the first time my photos have got an EGO2005 makeover More here