It’s July 4th, 2006 and boats are huddled in the late afternoon on the Charles River in anticipation of Boston’s Independence Day fireworks display.

Any relation to persons, places, things or actions are purely coincidental. Get over yourself.

Island94.org has undergone some revision today; I hope you noticed. I upgraded Drupal to 4.7 and rethemed the site.

Drupal 4.7 adds a lot of really great features, the main one, from a ‘nifty’ perspective is free tagging. This gives a lot more granularity to organizing posts. There is also a lot of nice stuff under the hood. I had been a little lax in upgrading my old Drupal install, so the upgrade also fixes a couple of security issues as well.

The theme is a major change from the old design. I had really liked the woodcut motif that I grabbed from Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi but it was starting to show its age. Also, looking under the hood I was always reminded of my own inexperience at the time I put it together.

With the new theme I had a couple of things in mind:

First off, I really wanted to better separate posts of a personal nature, from that of a professional or fictional nature. I’m fairly prodigious in creating media, it’s mostly a matter of audience. I don’t want some boss reading a slasher tale thinking I’m a psychopath, or my mom reading halfway through some technical post to realize she doesn’t care. I’m really excited about the hats theme, not only are they simply beautiful, but they help to quickly convey what overall category the post falls into.

Secondly, Drupal’s the standard interface is beautiful and intuitive, but when a couple thousand websites start using it, it has become a little rusty. Much of my time in designing Drupal sites is making sure it doesn’t look like Drupal.

Lastly, I really wanted to fool around with some soft gradients and big bubbly icons. I’ve been pulling from the Open Clip Art Library for the most part and using Inkscape and Gimpshop for editing.

I hope that my new theme is both easy to use and beautiful. At the moment, I’ve pretty much given up on Internet Explorer compatibility. Maybe something to do later, but frankly, I am a little tired of dealing with its nonstandard quirks.

I started work on the design yesterday morning using Luka Cvrk’s Small Studio as a base, and considering I didn’t get a vacation day today (it is Monday, July 3rd), I am happy with the result. I hope you are as well.

Watch the Video

A wedding tribute for Paul and Elizabeth Hansen. With all that was going on at their wedding, they maybe didn’t have time to enjoy all the little pieces. Here is one of them.

Photos from Santa Barbara, California’s Summer Solstice Festival and Parade on June 24, 2006. I was lucky enough to be accompanied by my good friends Elisa and Lisa.

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A very short video of Chase Palm Park across from the beach in Santa Barbara, CA.

music by Reza Manzoori
“Insignia”
magnatune.com

Boston has been bouncing between baked days and drenched nights. I shot this video walking the five blocks home from a Boston Media Makers’ mid-month meetup at Sweet Finnish in Jamaica Plain. music by Drop Trio “Wet Dog” magnatune.com

On Tuesday, my last day in San Francisco, Daniell K., the visionary behind the DigitalBicycle, and I took BART up to the Berkeley Marina where we were met by Scott A. and Kari P., community media heavyweights and experienced sailors. The day started off cloudy with threats of rain, but by the time we had gotten through the pre-launch checklist of our -31- +32+ foot Catalina Magic Moves the sun had broken and was shining brightly down upon the bay.

San Francisco’s cool, cloudy weather and excellent sailing is made possible by the hot, low-pressure sucking of the Central Valley. On this day, a moderate breeze +(15 - 17 knots)+ pulled our vessel out -past the estuary and through strong tides of the shipping channel- +of the Olympic Circle by Berkeley and into the Central Bay+. We -heaved to- +hove-to+ -about a mile upwind of the channel- +in the lee of Angel Island+, ate lunch, and comfortably drifted down towards Southampton Shoal. Once an elegant Victorian house, the pilings now carry a horn, some navigational equipment, a few solar panels and maybe a dozen terns. Lunch finished, we unlocked the wheel -and jibed away, the wind pushing us back toward Berkeley- +and reached back toward Berkeley+.

+(Thanks Scott for the corrections)+