kentcowgill.org/blog

So I don't have much other excuse for this than to test out a few more capabilities of Text::Textile, my RSS feed, and I guess my vim wrapper for posting entries to my blog.

Spike and I were walking in the park last night, as we normally do, and again we saw a rabbit. They weren't twitterpated . In fact, there was just one. But I noticed he was fairly bold, and didn't seem to run away as easily.

In fact, the rabbit didn't seem to want to move at all. So it was fortuitous that I happened to have my cameraphone with me. Granted, I take it with me on every walk, just in case. But I thought it would be a good time to test how the "zoom" feature on my cameraphone actually worked. Also, it seemed in my viewfinder that I could hardly tell that the brown lump in the middle of the frame was supposed to be a rabbit.

Short story, it doesn't.

It more or less just "crops" an image. Same resolution, just smaller dimensions.

I was pretty disappointed.

The good news is that I can add images to blog posts fairly easily, and the formatting allowed by Text::Textile seems to be close enough to what it purports it ought to do. Also, the images show through just fine in my newsreader of choice, so anyone reading this via the RSS feed ought to see the fluffy bunnies just fine.

Also, turns out my vim blog post wrapper doesn't mangle intended Textile formatting, at least for images. Woo!

Just giving something a quick test.

The documentation suggests that for centering an image, you should be able to put an "=" inside a set of exclamation marks in order to do it.

inside a table		another cell
short cell	this should be a long cell, hopefully long enough to make this cell be wider than the middle cell in the first row, hopefully so that the above cell will show whether or not its centered. or not.	another cell

If that doesn't work right away, I'll probably fiddle with it a few more times.

Turns out the solution is to have the vertical bar for the table cell the image is to appear in, followed immediately by an equals sign, a period, and a space - then the image.

So it was a little troublesome, but I think it was worth it.

If you look carefully, you'll see (at this point) a single new post from April of 2001 in the archive section, or if you click on "Older Articles" enough times to go back that far.

Just some background for these posts, since I'll be editing them a bit to 1) format them using Text::Textile) syntax, as well as 2) capitalizing words properly⁸. I had just signed up to ride in the 2001 Canada to US AIDS Vaccine ride - 415 miles in 5 days, and was blogging about my training and fundraising. Back then...

1. My wife Lisa was only my girlfriend.
2. My road bike (Univega) was brand new.
3. I was about to be laid off from a startup internet company.
4. Most of the links I've linked to were still active.
5. I had more of my pictures on the site.

In my editing, I will clean up broken links. I'll also try to re-upload all my old pictures to my new photos directory and link to them once I do that. And lastly, I'll remove most of the references to my fundraising activities and pleas for donations, since the ride has been over for almost 6 years. In case you're interested, I raised $7,080 in donations for the cause. I only rode about 245 miles due to overuse injury (RSI) to my achilles tendons. (Note the plural).

Hope you enjoy a little blast from the past. I certainly enjoy the memories.

⁸ I used to refuse to capitalize letters. Partly due to laziness, partly due to an extreme dislike of CamelCased variables, partly due to the fact that humans tend to be able to more easily visually distinguish between different lowercase letters than capital letters (or so I think I read somewhere). Since then, I've decided to drop the convention. I'm not 100% certain why - maybe due to the rest of the world and their treatment of the capitalization of letters :)