Image Issues

If some of you have visited over the last month, you may have noticed 2 things:

1.) I haven't posted anything for a helluva long while.
2.) Images such as the header and post borders were smaller.

I have a sufficient answer for both, but right now I'm going to address the image issue.

Sometime in early December, Picasa changed the default image sizes for photos. This means that if you used Picasa for images on your Blogger website, and did not specify a size within the image link (regardless of if you specified the height and width within the CSS), then your images would display at the new default size.

The way around this is to go to your Picasa account, locate the image, then right click (or ctrl+click on a Mac) and choose to copy the image URL. Paste it somewhere, and change the size value. The size value is specified just before the actual image file name and will have an 's' preceding it. For example, my banner size has a max width of 950 pixels, so the size within the image URL should be 's950'

I'm really pretty pissed about this, but have finally gotten around to correcting the issue here. Now I just have to cultivate the urge to look at and fix some of my other Blogger sites.

Oh, and Happy Holidays, everyone!

Open-Mindedness? Pshaw!

This is a few years old, but I found it recently via a friend. It's a brief 'educational' video more correctly explaining what 'open-mindedness' really means, as opposed to the typical definition as perceived by those who like to lob around accusations of close-mindedness when someone is skeptical of paranormal or religious claims.

It's well written, explained, and animated (1960's-esque cartoon/comic book art, a la 'The Sub Mariner' and 'The Hulk').

Summer Satellites and the Great Scar

Well, Summer is supposedly here, though it's not always easy to tell in Portland. Not that I'm bitching - you can have the heat and sunlight. The only thing that is sort of a downer is that sky-watching is less fun when it's cold and limits the amount of time you want to spend gazing upwards from a lawn chair. That said, last Saturday was a pretty decent night and after BBQing, my girlfriend and I pulled out the tri-fold lawn chairs and watched the sky for a couple of hours.

It may sound cliché, but it's really hard to argue against how well Dark Side of the Moon goes with watching the countless satellites drift through the salted sky, peppered with the occasional meteorite. I wasn't looking for anything in particular and had no hopes of catching anything mysterious -- that's not why I stargaze. But there was one particularly bright object that we caught in the Northwest moving speedily towards the Southeast. It had a brightness of 4 and was quite stunning. After a brief What The Fuck moment, we both realized it was the ISS. We confirmed this later by an online tracker that gave the exact time and location in which we saw the object.

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