mahalo.

It’s been burning in San Jose recently, reaching something around 105 degrees over the last weekend. Thankfully that has passed, and equally thankfully, that weekend happened to be a weekend where I didn’t have anything planned. Every other weekend though, something has been going on… and that has been posted in the “Summer Buzz 2006″ gallery.

Over the month of July, I celebrated Tom’s freedom from investment banking, Amy’s birthday, a swarm of bees around Tellme (as one co-worker put it, literally, the “buzz” surrounding Tellme), the company summer picnic at the Boardwalk, and Kelly’s birthday. Also celebrated but not shown in pictures was Sri’s birthday, who happens to fall on a weekend where three consecutive people, himself, Amy and Christina, had birthdays.

And some closing remarks:
(12:05:19 AM) data 797: pimp
(12:05:22 AM) data 797: oops
(12:05:30 AM) data 797: wrong person =P

I redesigned the gallery code a bit to handle arbitrary animations.

I know there are still a few annoying things, like how if an image is currently being displayed, and you moved it while viewing, opening a new image will move the display image back to the upper left corner of the screen. It was a toss-up between doing that, or introducing confusion where pictures that were off of the page never got brought back to the current viewframe without the user actively dragging it down.

Also really annoying Javascript detail.

If you look at the source in the showGallery.php, you’ll notice that I load a bunch of JS classes before the inlined script block.

What you might notice is that the code looks like:

<script src=”../js/Animation.js” language=”JavaScript” ></script>
<script src=”../js/AnimationRunner.js” language=”JavaScript” ></script>
<script src=”../js/ShowEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” ></script>
<script src=”../js/HideEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” ></script>
<script src=”../js/FadeEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” ></script>
<script src=”../js/OpacityEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” ></script>
<script src=”../js/SwitchSourceEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” ></script>
<script src=”../js/SwitchInnerHTMLEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” ></script>
<script language=”Javascript”>
var bIsDragging = false;
var iImageStartLeft = 100;
var iImageStartTop = 100;
var iImageLeft = 100;

Rather than:

<script src=”../js/Animation.js” language=”JavaScript” />
<script src=”../js/AnimationRunner.js” language=”JavaScript” />
<script src=”../js/ShowEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” />
<script src=”../js/HideEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” />
<script src=”../js/FadeEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” />
<script src=”../js/OpacityEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” />
<script src=”../js/SwitchSourceEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” />
<script src=”../js/SwitchInnerHTMLEffect.js” language=”JavaScript” />
<script language=”Javascript”>
var bIsDragging = false;
var iImageStartLeft = 100;
var iImageStartTop = 100;
var iImageLeft = 100;

That’s because for some lame reason, it appears the script tag MUST have an empty text block (as opposed to no text block) or the sourced script will not load properly. How lame is that? Either that or I’m lame and missed something.

Anyways, the framework is there now for me to easily play around with animations in the gallery. Sorry for those opposed to overglorified GUI effects. I’ll try to keep things snappy, but I find all the fade stuff mesmerizing. I can play with it for a couple of minutes without paying any attention to the picture itself… just the smooth fade out, fade in, fade out, fade in…

The date for the start of BSG season 3 is out.

Yes. Soon I will be vegetating in front of the tube (or lcd) again.

Despite the fact that I woke up at 12:30 that day, I was determined to go out and do something for the fourth of July. After quickly taking some breakfast, I was at my desk looking for hikes that led to beaches. After looking for a while, Carl pointed out a beach that I didn’t even have on my radar, which was Waddell Beach by Rancho Del Oso, by Big Basin.

Sri, Carl and I ended up going on this trip. Kelly and Grace wussed out because they were being lazy at some coffee shop in Los Gatos and just otherwise were being uncooperative. I think Grace had some weenie board exam to take the next day or something.

Anyways, in an attempt to recreate the Whole Foods picnic of my previous hike, I had everyone stop at Safeway to grab grub. Except, most everyone had already eaten, and nobody really wanted to bring food. So I ended up slowing everyone down with that trip (it was already 2:30pm) because I still needed to buy water. After the safeway trip, we were off.

I think we ended up at the park at around 4? The short story was that it was a relatively peaceful hike, but like Christina, Sri has this problem where his normal walking pace is twice the normal person’s walking pace. I may as well have been running trying to keep up w/ Sri. The other unfortunate thing about the hike was that there were no significant landmarks we could reach within the amount of time we had, so we basically ended up walking out about 2.5 miles and then walking back. We did cross a creek along the way, which was probably the where I got my nice fat mosquito bite on my elbow.

After the hike, we resolved to cover the beach w/ lots of pictures to show Kelly and Grace what they missed out on. We did take a lot of pictures, but apparently they had already been there earlier in the day, so that was much ado about nothing.

When we got back to the South Bay, we met Allen and Jessie at BJ’s for dinner and then met Steph at my house, from where we walked to Hyde to watch the fireworks show. I didn’t think parking at my house was necessary, but it turned out to be a good idea. The Safeway parking lot across from Hyde was absolutely packed. I had never seen it actually fill up, and the resulting madness trying to get out from the lot after the show was ridiculous - I would have never imagined it.

Anyways, it turned out to be a nice, full Fourth of July weekend. A happy 230th birthday to America.

Went hiking at Pt. Reyes this weekend. Hiking pictures aren’t too interesting, usually just trees and fields and such. Here’s one picture for now:

It was actually a very nice little plan. Grab lunch at Whole Foods Market (otherwise known as Whole Paycheck Market… a joke which I now understand… although to say it’s not worth it is tough… their food really is pretty darn good), drive up to Point Reyes, hike 5-6 miles and go home, have dinner.

The drive up itself wasn’t bad. After crossing the Golden Gate, I got briefly confused because I was reading the directions for getting to Point Reyes from 580W rather than 101, so after driving a couple of miles, I thought I had gone too far, because from 580W, the exit to Sir Francis Drake Blvd is only 2 exits… but it’s actually much further from the Golden Gate. Anyways, I straightened that out and got to Sir Francis Drake Blvd successfully.

Sir Francis Drake goes on for 28 miles before reaching Point Reyes park. A fair amount of those 28 miles go through little towns and just ordinary streets. I told myself on the way back, I was going to stick with Highway 1, because that would probably much faster. Ha.

After getting to Point Reyes, we decided to go for the hike to the Mt. Wittenberg summit. There are actually a lot of really nice hikes at the park which lead to beautiful beaches and such, but they were just too far for the amount of time that we had. The Mt. Wittenberg Summit hike is approximately 5 miles roundtrip, ending with an elevation increase of 800 ft. So we started hiking and sure enough, after 2.5 miles or so, there was a trail was labeled “Mt. Wittenberg Summit - 0.2 miles”. We went up this path for a while, but started wondering, where the heck was the nice lookout where we could see the beach and the rest of the area? Turns out, the summit was not a lookout. It was simply, the highest point on the mountain. That was slightly disappointing because we were looking for picnic benches, or just some kind of area in general where we could stop and eat our lunch (which I had been carrying on my back up until this point).

Conferring w/ the map, we decided to go an extra mile to Sky Camp, which was clearly marked as a camping area, and would probably have some seats. One mile or so later, we arrived, and indeed, there were benches, grills and restrooms there, so we finally got into our lunch. The picture that is posted was taken very near the final arrival at Sky Camp. Additionally, one of the panoramics (not the ocean one) shows the broad view from Sky Camp.

The rest of the hike was pretty straightforward, get back to the car, tend to our feet, go home… Except for the fact that highway 1 was NOT faster than Sir Francis Drake. Holy crap, that drive was beautiful (pictures from the ocean are all from the drive. And no, I didn’t take them while driving at the same time), but highway 1 is not fairly represented on a map as a line. It should really be a long scribble. It was so windy that I don’t think anyone can safely drive that thing at faster than 30 mph. But it really was very serene… as long as you’re not nervous around cliffs and the possibility of driving into a watery death.