When We Left The Earth
June 22, 2008
For those of you that haven’t been watching the recent Discovery series “When We Left The Earth”, you don’t know what you have been missing. The series has been quite excellent and the high definition images quite stunning.
The series is a cooperative effort between the Discovery Channel and NASA. It chronicles the history of the NASA space program from its inception until current times. The show is very well done and includes tons of footage and interviews that I haven’t seen before.
There was a docu-drama a while back, “From the the Earth to the Moon”, that was also well done, but that series featured actors and interpretation. The “When We Left The Earth” series is all real people and fact based. It includes many interviews and viewpoints of astronauts, NASA personnel, media, family and others. The footage is all genuine and quite riveting.
Its been a series that the whole family, even Savannah, has been able to enjoy together. The kids have never really been exposed to the Mercury, Gemini or Apollo programs and they only know of the space shuttle as our space program that has had a few accidents (ie Challenger and Columbia). Its been a great learning experience for them.
We are actually considering buying the Blu-Ray addition that includes an additional 4 hours of NASA films/images. It was a series that plain and simple was that good. Odds are that we won’t buy it because while a great series, it probably would only get watched every few years.
If you didn’t get a chance to catch this wonderful new series the first time around, Discovery is running the series a few more times over the next month or so. If you can’t get it in HD, I would image it would still be stunning. Even the person with only a casual interest in space would find this series enjoyable. I bet even an avid space aficionado would learn a thing or two from this series. Give it a watch!
Coming Soon – New Gallery Look
June 14, 2008
Well not all that soon to be quite honest. Its going to take a lot of work to convert over all my albums and photos to a new appearance, but work will start soon. If you have been wondering about the lack of activity here at Mr Papa’s World its because of all the work on developing the new gallery appearance. That, plus the work on do on Simple:Press Forum plugin that I am part of the development team.
I used my other sites as test beds for development of the new gallery appearance. I started with some existing WordPress stuff out there and the customized the hell out of it. I have also fed back most of my customizations back to the original authors for their consideration for incorporation into the baseline.
Previously, I had been using Gallery2. To be honest, Gallery2 is a really nice, well done web application. I have used it for many years, well before WordPress. Due to the work of some folks, it has integrated pretty well with WordPress too, but it was really overkill for what I needed.
With the release of WordPress 2.5, they finally added some built in support for photo galleries. I would rather do things using core code with some plugins than use another application. It took several months after the release of 2.5 before the Gallery2 plugin was updated due to the complexity of the WordPress changes.
Anyways, after getting what I wanted working on some of my other sites (ie test beds), it was time for actual deployment on a site that heavily uses my photo galleries. That side would be Cruise Talk Central. This led to a few more tweaks to the code, but more importantly, I had to move all the pictures and then enter in new descriptions and captions (thanks Suzanne!). I also had to make sure that all references to the old Gallery2 images anywhere else on the site (lots of old posts) now pointed to the new stuff. The site is going to take a hit with search engines too because I couldn’t figure out a good way to redirect to the new location of the images. I did at least redirect them to the new gallery instead of getting a page not found error. Some day, I need to learn how to master apache redirection.
With the Cruise Talk Central Photo Gallery now deployed, its time to start thinking about moving Mr Papa’s World over to the new gallery appearance. I have a bunch more photos here though so it will take time, plus Suzanne and I need a break from playing with photos. Stop on by the Cruise Talk Central Photo Gallery and tell me what you think. Still time for me to incorporate any good feedback.
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