I just added my GPS log of what I've done so far on my trip to Singapore. I also took a quick trip up to Johor Bahru in Malaysia, just across the border of Singapore, for a bite to eat for dinner. So far the trip has been awesome and I'm hoping to post some journal entries soon.
I've been recently working on updating my travel page. Part of the reason is that with the old page, everything was done with javascript, and thus was not good for search engines. Plus, it made the page much slower, and harder to work with. As part of the front-end change, I rewrote the back-end. Now, the back-end should be much better than previously and quite a bit faster. The back-end previously was in python, which was running as a CGI script, which took forever. The new version, in PHP, is going to be much more optimized. In addition, rather than loading all the GPX files at once, I now only load one GPX file at a time, cutting down on load time. And finally, now I can link to individual trips.
I've got a new domain! I just secured the domain chrisstreeter.com! Previously, I only had chrisstreeter.net, which was nice and all, but .net just isn't at the same level as a .com TLD. I set up some 301 redirects on my old domain which should make the transition as painless as possible for people.
The only downside is my search engine ranking. I was the number one hit for Chris Streeter on Google and number two on Yahoo. The domain name change will, invariably, affect the rankings, but it is for the best. A temporary hit now to become the number one Chris Streeter now, and hopefully, the number one Streeter eventually.
Below is a copy of an email that I sent out from India on October 18, 2007 about my journey and experiences there.
So it's now my 4th day in India and I thought I should send an email. Plus, I got sleep last night and am not struggling to stay awake during the breaks in my class. This is a long email simply because I wanted to record this stuff for my own records and figured while recording it, I might as well send it out as a status email. As they say: kill two birds with one stone.
I got into India on Monday morning around Midnight after a very long set of flights (~25 hours of travel time from Santa Barbara to India). The best part was that my luggage was not lost! At the airport, I met my driver (who is my personal driver for the week) who took me to the hotel. By the time I got to the hotel, it was around 1am on Monday. After barely noticing how nice the hotel was, I popped half an Ambien and fell asleep... to awake at 5am. I wasn't meeting my driver until 8am. I laid in bed for a good hour before conceding that I was not going to fall asleep. I started watching some TV and got caught up on world events in India, Hong Kong and Australia, the three English speaking places nearby that the English news covered. This was of course unless I wanted to watch cricket on ESPN or the other 5 cricket channels covering a repeat of THE SAME MATCH.
Finally I met my driver and we proceeded to drive the 5 or so miles to the company's office in 30 minutes. This was my first taste ...
Recently, I happened to be going through various boxes at my apartment, and came across something unusual. I happened across a MiniDV cassette. Now, since I do not own a video camera, I had to think a bit about why I had this tape. Then I had a realization. This could be the lost tape from 2002. The fabled tape with the raw footage from my LOP Posse movie I made with Matt Lynch and Amanda Sparks. I haven't been able to find anything from that movie except for the Final Cut Pro project that has been taking up disk space for so long. So now I had a cassette with what I assumed to be the raw footage on it.
Many weeks/months passed by without me doing anything. Then, this past weekend, while at my parents' house, my mom asked me to go through a box of my old stuff and pick out what I wanted. Well, inside the box I found a VHS tape marked SNL. Now, I used to be a master at scheduling things to record late at night on our VHS (this was before the age of Tivo...), and did actually record SNL episodes on tapes. But I had a hunch this tape's SNL contents had been overwritten and the tape now contained the fabled movie from 2002. Upon viewing the tape, my hunch was proved correct. In addition, I was given an additional surprise. Another movie I had written, starred and edited was on the tape, Loo$e Change. I had made the second movie with Dean Eckles back during High School where we had gone to a week long summer camp at Stanfurd. This discovery sparked me into action.
Upon arriving home, I proceeded to borrow a MiniDV camera and ...
Well, it looks like I've neglected this "blog" long enough. It really isn't much of a blog, rather, a place of (not so) periodic updates. I've really just focused this site on my photo gallery. Speaking of the gallery, I did some updating recently. Previously, I hosted galleries for 3 other people: my sister, Amy, and my 2 former roommates, Joe and Marcus. Well, I decided to finally separate these galleries from my main gallery. As such, I've created two new subdomains. My gallery is now located at http://www.chrisstreeter.com/photos/ and the hosted galleries are at http://photos-hosted.chrisstreeter.com/. I really don't know how many people check out the hosted galleries, and so I'll soon get a better idea. Through some apache mod_rewrite magic, I've tried to make the old links backwards compatible, so they do a 301 redirect to the new locations. I did some quick tests and it worked without any hitches... for me. Your mileage may vary.
So that's an update on my site, how about what's going on with me? Well, a little less than a year ago, I moved to Santa Barbara, California and entered Corporate America. Santa Barbara has been great and is such a great place to live. I recently acquired a Hobie 18' from my Uncle and have been working to make it ship-shape as the boat has been sitting for at least 7 years. I've had to do a number of things to get it ready for sailing, but as of this past weekend, it was finally ready to sail. However, the weather wasn't as cooperative. One of the greatest things about Santa Barbara is the ability to get permits to park your cat on the ...
Wow. So Attorney General Gonzales is proposing new legislation that will change how copyright infringement is defined. Current laws state that there has to be infringement that takes place, and the new legislation proposes removing the actual infringement part of the law. In addition there would be added penalties for "intended" copyright crimes. There's more at the original news.com article.
So yeah. I really hope that this ridiculousness doesn't make it very far.
I decided I wanted to do some maintenance on this site, and so updated the design slightly. The updated design fixes some tweaks with the layout that I've been wanting to do for some time. It also moves the sidebar back to the right, where it usually is. In general, the site should be more accessible to all different types of browsers as I read through the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines. I wanted to try to conform to a number of the guidelines, and hopefully made some progress. But in general, I believe this layout and design is a bit more polished as the design continues to evolve over the several years this has been around.
I've been hunting for apartments in Santa Barbara recently, and one of my resources is the Santa Barbara News Press newspaper site. However, there isn't any way to tell new postings. And since there are so many listings, I couldn't remember them all. So I created a script that scrapes the Santa Barbara News Press apartments listings website and then creates a feed of all the listings. I've found it pretty handy to follow all the new listings and maybe someone else will too.
Update: I removed the feed, since it hasn't been updated in a very long time.
So over the past week I've pushed out several updates to this site. First I went ahead and changed the design somewhat. I like it better now, it seems less dark than before. Also, I cleaned up the page generation on the backend by increasing the modularity of all the pages. The CSS also got cleaned up and I've been doing work on the php backend that I hope should make pages faster, not to mention easier to code with.
I also brought back comments but added a captcha to prevent the hordes of comment spam that I was getting before. Maybe we'll see a comment now and then. There's also a pager at the bottom so that past posts are viewable now, as well as permalinks to posts (where you can also post comments). All this also allowed me to get my RSS feed validated (structure wise at least, I still have to edit some posts to validate the feed).
All this is in preparation to rewrite my travel section so that it works with IE, which it probably doesn't do right now. I also need to work making the javascript run faster than slug. So that is what I've got planned in the works. We'll see if I get that done soon as life is starting to become more hectic as I come to the end at one company, and begin the transition to full time at another.
