Rusty's Blog

I’ll be traveling to at least five games outside the state (Amber bought me season UT season tickets!), taking a week-long vacation in October, and possibly taking one or two trips for work this fall. So I don’t know when I’d get the time to run NCAA Picks.

However, if you want to run a picks game and don’t have a place to host it, I’ll give you a login to my blog and you can host it here. Comment or email me at rusty.tanton [at] gmail [dot] com.

I’ve recently had the opportunity to dive into the new custom post types feature built into WordPress 3.0 for a site I worked on. On the whole it’s really exciting because it will allow me to use WordPress as a lightweight CMS for some sites where I may have needed to use the more cumbersome Drupal before.

But there are a few things I feel like still need to be thought through some more. For example: I feel like there should be a menu option, next to where I can specify how many items should appear per page, where I can set which content types appear in the site’s main RSS feed.

Unfortunately there isn’t such an option, so I have to write a plugin or add some code to the theme’s functions.php to make that work:

function mysite_feed_request($vars) {
	if (isset($vars['feed']) && !isset($vars['post_type']))
		$vars['post_type'] = array('post', 'story');
	return $vars;
}
add_filter('request', 'mysite_feed_request');

In this example, we are modifying query variables to keep the default content type for blog posts “post” in the main RSS feed, and also adding a new custom post type “story” to the RSS feed as well.

The reason we don’t want to take any action if a “post_type” is specified is so we don’t break the post type RSS feeds which look like this:

http://mysite.com/feed/?post_type=story

http://mysite.com/feed/?post_type=post

We were in Maui for our honeymoon last week (photos here). One of the things you’re supposed to do when you’re in Maui is drive The Road to Hana, which contains an approximately 30-mile stretch of winding mountain road you must pass through to get to the small town of Hana. So we did.

It’s full of one lane bridges where the car which gets there second is supposed to yield to the car which gets there first. Apparently only tourists follow these rules, as a lot of good old boys with lifted trucks — probably on drugs since lots of people there do drugs, according to the girl who did Amber’s nails at the hotel — don’t stop just because you’re halfway across in a rented Ford Fusion (or Fiesta or Focus or another F-word). I mostly obeyed the rules when we were there, which didn’t make the drive any less terrifying for Amber riding shotgun.

Despite that, the trim is far out and there are surprises along the way which the tourist brochures don’t mention. One such surprise was a guy with a pandemonium of parrots. He said he runs a sanctuary for birds who act in Hollywood movies, and that proceeds from photos with the parrots go toward it. Sold!

(Click to embiggen)

Amber with parrots near The Road to Hana

Amber and me kissing as a parrot looks on near The Road to Hana

Amber and me with parrots near The Road to Hana

This wasn’t my first encounter with parrots in Hawaii. Way back in 1988 — when the Beach Boys’ Kokomo earworm^* was a number one hit coinciding with the dreadful Tom Cruise film^** Cocktail — my brother Chris and I posed with parrots in our awesome jam shorts:

Chris and me with parrots in Hawaii in 1988

This also reminded Amber of a photo I have of my parents from their honeymoon in Busch Gardens in late 1968/early 1969:

Mom and dad on their honeymoon in Busch Gardens with parrots in late 1968 or early 1969

My mom does not look as pleased as Amber did in her photos.

And here’s a bonus non-parrot-related photo from the 1988 Hawaii trip. This is Chris and I with the one and only Don Ho (wrote “Tiny Bubbles”^***):

Chris and me with Don Ho, Hawaii 1988

Because my old man nipple shorts weren’t mortifying enough…

^* - Amber hates this word. Sorry Amber.
^** - is “dreadful Tom Cruise film” redundant?
^*** - I would link to a video of “Tiny Bubbles” I found a while ago but the copyright nazis made Youtube pull it

Our house was built in the 1950s, and we’ve learned lots of quirky things about it during our home improvement projects. For example, when we were mounting a ceiling fan and closet shelving we found out we can drill a pilot hole as deep as we want in the ceiling joists, but a screw longer than an inch will simply refuse to go in all the way. Instructions don’t warn you about that sort of thing.

Yesterday I learned that when one of the people who lived in the house before us owned it and built an addition to the side, they didn’t bother to punch out the walls which would have given us access to that part of the crawl space. I found this out because we have a couple of crawlspace vents where the mesh has rotted out/fallen out/been punched out/decided the pay was better in a neighbor’s crawlspace. I’d been hoping our vents were the type I could unscrew from the back to easily replace the mesh screen, but no such luck.

I also found out that the ground under our house slopes up and that to get to the vents on the other side of the house from the crawlspace entrance, about half the trip ends up being commando-style on my stomach. Actually, I already knew it sloped up from changing the air conditioner filter, but I didn’t know it would be that steep.

I also knew there were spider webs, but I didn’t know that they would get much thicker as I wormed my way over to the crawlspace vent with the missing mesh (thinking it’s not a coincidence that there are more spiders closer to the open vent).

That’s all I’ve got, there’s no real point to this story. Other than maybe don’t touch Gorilla Glue like I did when I was experimenting with attaching a screen from the outside.

RIP Big Red Bastard

The Big Red Bastard — a nickname loosely attached to my old red truck — followed me to college, through all my jobs leading up to my current one, through my relationship with Amber (early on I once drove it pantsless down Spring Street with her in tow, another time on her birthday I told her I loved her for the first time in it), on trips to several states… the list goes on.

So you’d think I’d be weepy about it being stolen last month, but the fact was I would have had to sell it within the next year or two anyway because it doesn’t have a back seat. A baby can’t ride in a car without a back seat. Amber’s not pregnant now, but we’re hoping she will be soon (insert cringe-inducing “trying” euphemism here). State Farm did shockingly well with its end of the bargain, so that also helped ease the pain.

Still, I can give it a proper eulogy. It was a red 1997 K1500 4×4 with the Z71 off road package (Bilstein shocks, skid plates) and a 5.7L Vortec V8, purchased brand new my senior year of high school after I’d beat my inherited 1987 Nissan Pathfinder to hell on the mud and mailbox circuit. I even custom ordered it (more accurately, my mom did) because 1997 was the time when manual transmissions were starting to get harder to find in anything above the work truck trim level, and I wanted a stick shift. I’d spent way too much time playing Ridge Racer at Mountasia Golf for that experience to go to waste.

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My truck was stolen Monday night, but I don’t really want to talk about that right now. So I’m going to post some notes and pictures from my first few days with the Nikon D90 I bought. It arrived Monday, but since the battery needed to charge I didn’t get time to play. No time Tuesday either.

Wednesday I attached the 70-210mm zoom lens (one of four I bought from my dad) and snapped a few pictures in the backyard with everything on auto. While my goal is to be proficient with all the manual settings, it’s nice to know that if I wanted to just set it to auto and not think about it that it would still take really good pictures under a lot of circumstances. Most of my test photos from the first night sucked as I expected them to, but I thought this one was ok (you’ll want to click all the photos):

D90 test photo: Shoe on the back porch

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I got a little happy with the star button this month as you can see…

extraface I have now read the funniest sentence on the internet: “Fast Company believes that the iPad is going to help books ‘go viral.’”

jaseliberty I wonder if @votedeal believes his own lies.

karsh @Maigh You know how Scarlet ripped down the drapes and made a dress? Substitute drapes for an aluminum windshield cover. #pow

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I’ve been locked away in a cave coding a massive project at work that’s supposed to wrap at the end of the month. It’s going to be pretty awesome when it’s done, but damn. I don’t really want to talk about work, so I will talk about other things.

Camera!

I finally am going to invest in a real camera since our bonuses came in this month. When I was a kid I had an Olympus film SLR that was pretty decent as I recall (1970s vintage with a silver body) and I took some photos with it that weren’t bad. Sadly, like many dumbass kids, I didn’t take care of it. Everything I’ve had since has been a low end snapshot camera.

A confluence of several events has rekindled my interest in putting some effort into the photos I take again. I really enjoyed/have been enjoying the great shots Thomas took at our wedding, Garrett’s baby photos, and lots of other people’s. Then there’s the whole “Amber will be getting pregnant sometime in the near future” thing. Whenever the kid comes around, I’d like to have some photos that don’t look like he/she is jaundiced/lit by horrid office building florescent bulbs. I also want better pictures from our road trips. And we have all these awesome birds that come around our back yard, but to date we have not been able to get any good pictures of them.

Fortunately for me I’m not starting from scratch. My dad has been a serious photographer for much of his life, but hasn’t had the time the past few years to pursue it. So he had a bunch of equipment sitting around, and sold it to me for a fraction of what it’s worth. Among other things (including a Nikon F4 film camera body that’s breaking my heart just sitting there), I bought four lenses off him:

• Nikon 25-35mm wide angle zoom
• Nikon 70-210mm zoom
• Nikon 200mm macro
• Celestron 1000mm telephoto

So that’s way more than enough to get me started lens-wise. For the body, I agonized for a little while between a Nikon D60 and D90. The D60 is a fine camera, the one Thomas used to shoot our wedding pictures. The truth is a D60 is as much camera as most people need, and you have to take a whole lot of photos and know an awful lot about photography before you start bumping into its limitations. It will be quite a while before I am at that point.

But I ultimately opted for the D90 because of its built-in auto focus motor and ability to capture short HD movies. The idea of getting video through a 1000mm lens is very intriguing, even if they’re short and I’d have to jump through hoops to get sound that’s worth a damn.

Vacation!

We were going to take our vacation in Cape May this June, but changed our minds and decided instead to go to Hawaii. We’re thinking Maui. I’m not sure if I will (over)write a long ass series of blog posts after it’s done this time, but the new camera will certainly get a workout.

100 pushups … … … … …

So, about that 100 pushups program I started. Did pretty well with it for most of the first week. But the last workout of the first week, every push-up felt like someone was slicing my abdomen open with a machete. Didn’t finish that day, decided to take the second week off, which became a third, and here we are. It appears I tried to do too much at the same time going from nothing to softball practices, the 100 pushup workout and Beltline walks in the span of one week. I think I need to stick with softball and walking for a while, and work my way up to trying the 100 pushup workout again.

I’m directly ripping off Amber and a couple of other people with this type of post. These are statuses I marked as favorites in Twitter in Februrary. SpaceyG appears to be this month’s runaway winner.

reidstott Drinking cheap wine and listening to Foghat. All I need is a single-wide trailer, and this time machine is complete.

FakeAPStylebook “Forbear” is something given to a bear. “Forebear” is the portion of the bear before the main bear. “Fourbear” is a party.

absurdities My peanut butter warns me that it contains peanuts. Archeologists of the future are going to be so confused.

SpaceyG I miss days of yore when social media in Atlanta was mostly just @rustytanton and @amberlrhea writing about having sex with each other.

SpaceyG Just ate bagged salad. Now we wait.

[protected user] I’m drunk and I want waffles. #godscrueljoke

[protected user] I wish I had a straw. I would drink my wine with a straw.

The last two on the list are from separate people, which should tell you most of what you need to know about my friends.