My Protanoptic Life

Today is Memorial Day and it will be the most memorable for me because as of today my brother is now out of Iraq forever! He’s finishing his second tour and is now officially out of Iraq, waiting only one day in Kuwait before returning to Germany. So so so stoked about that.

Yesterday I didn’t get to go geocaching with Lisa, she forgot it was her last day at work and had to work until 7, so Donna and I went without her. We went to Golden Gate Park with the intent of finding travel bugs for me to take to Asia. We went to two lakes and a waterfall on an island before heading back to the car with a travel bug and a geocoin. Afterwards we went downtown and wandered around taking photos.

As we were walking down Mission near 5th, a photo in a gallery window caught my eye and we went in to see it. It actually didn’t look like a photo at all, more like a painting, but ended up being a photo printed on canvas which made it look more like a painting. We talked to a man working in the gallery and he told us that the photographer, Patrick Davis, teaches photography at San Jose State. When I told him we had to go he invited us to come back and drink wine or coffee and look around the gallery any time we wanted to.

We crossed Mission and went to visit Lisa at work. That was great, I hadn’t seen her in what seems like ages but is probably only a few weeks. Donna and I got coffee and chatted with Lisa a bit, but she was busy working so we let her be and went back outside. The weather was still really bleak and we were both tired from walking so much so we went and took a nap in Yerba Buena Garden. I nabbed another geocache real quick, but there were no trackables in it. A while later we got up, walked by the Zeum Carousel and ended up wandering around SOMA for a while trying to find where we’d parked the car, taking more pictures down random alleys where we found several hidden bars and restaurants next to smashed car windows and empty graffitied lots fenced off with chain link.

We eventually found the car. On the way home it was still overcast and we were still tired, but the day had been good. We listened to Claude Debussy. His music has a way of making melancholy wonderful, so it was a nice compliment to the wonderful day Donna and I made despite the melancholy weather. In the Sunset district of San Francisco it’s common for people to leave unwanted things on the street for other people to pick up, and Donna spotted a beautiful, dark wooden dresser carved and colored with birds and branches. Piano melodies poured out of the passenger door into the greyness as we tried to fit this piece of furniture among the belongings I was already been carrying with me. We fit it in the trunk and took it the one block back to 4211, our final treasure found that day.

Back at her home we geeked out and I nearly broke my head trying to figure out some some WordPress plugin stuff before realizing I was trying way too hard. WordPress is pretty awesome. I helped Lauren move some of her stuff across the street to her new apartment then drifted off sipping on wine listening to the music Donna had on while she played online scrabble with her friend in Chicago.

The new site is coming along quickly due to the ease of installation provided by WordPress and the awesome extension and theme communities build around it. Open source software is so rad. :)

I just finished integrating Facebook into the commenting system (via the Disqus.com plugin), which lets you comment on posts without having to make an account or anything silly like that.

One thing I have not yet found a solution for is the ability to geotag each post. In LiveJournal, there is a “location” text entry box when you compose a new post which lets you put any type of location data in there, from a street address to a lat/lon waypoint. I can’t find anything like that for WordPress though and I’d really like to show a map or have a google earth page that shows where I wrote blog entries and where I took photos. Does anybody know of something like that?

I already have the geotagging thing down with the photos via my Flickr map, it’s just a matter of integrating it with wordpress.