Swiftcurrent Reflections

Give four people a collaboration tool and this is what you get:

So, this happened on the commute home yesterday:

4999.9 miles...

...and 5000.0 miles!

5,000 miles on my LeMond Buenos Aires. The bike computer went on before I took the bike home from the shop and it has worked flawlessly every ride. Never even replaced the battery. The bike has performed very well. It is a comfortable long-distance machine. With the steel frame and Ultegra components, it should be easy to get another 5,000 miles. I figure that 5,000 miles translates into about 300 hours of time in the saddle. Not too bad!

Some of the events that we’ve done:

• Reach the Beach. My first century.
• Tour de Blast. Twice (once fun, once cold and wet…)
• Seattle to Portland. The first time was my first double-century. The second time my first over-night bike event.
• Mid-Summer Duathlon. My first du.
• Monday Night PIR Race. My first road race.
• Lyle Pearson 200. 200-mile relay bike race in Idaho.
• Blue Lake Triathlon. My first tri.

Add to that lots of weekend rides with Meg and other friends, and many miles commuting to work. Fun times! I hope I can get the next 5000 in much faster…

Just over a week ago, Meg and I celebrated our first wedding anniversary. As it is the “paper” anniversary, I wanted to do something cool to celebrate that. With that in mind, I decided to create a photo book of our first year as a married couple. I hadn’t created any photo books up to this point, so I hit Google and did some searching. My requirements were:

• No minimum order (I only wanted to print one for now)
• Great photo reproduction
• Not too expensive

After looking at the options, I decided to go with the Photo Book from Adorama. They basically print everything out on Fuji Crystal Archive paper, just like getting prints from Costco, then bind it. Their binding is pretty neat, as each page will open flat, so you can have an image cross the page fold. Great for panoramas.

Their creation tool is flash based and completely online. It was great and not-so-great. The tool itself worked well. I was able to upload over 350 full-res photos with no problem, then place them on the page, scale, position, and add type without many limits. The only issue was that being web-based, there was always just a little delay in things. Also, to get things lined up exactly at the pixel level took a bit of time. If I were to do this again (and I do think I’ll make a year two book next year), I think I would create large images in Photoshop for each page correctly sized for the book size I’m using, edit things in Lightroom, then place the Lightroom images onto the page in Photoshop. Then just upload the 50 (or whatever) pages and be done. That would give more flexibility, but wouldn’t allow me to do changes from any browser.

The quality is great. Adorama has a color profile for their process, and that was used. Cost really isn’t that bad. The 50-page 8×12 album I got was (don’t look Meg) $77.88. That works out to a per 8×12 cost of $1.56. The Costco (my go-to place for almost all printing) is only $1.49 for a single 8×12. That means for $0.07 a page, Adorama is binding it into a book. I’d call that a steal.

The only other bad thing is shipping. When you go to check out, selecting 2-day or next-day shipping says “in before 1:30PM M-F shipped the same day”. Great, I said, and ordered the 2-day shipping. After a couple days, my order still said processing, so I contacted their support. They said, “Your photobook order is in processing at the moment. Please note that it is a 5 - 7 business day turn around for books no matter what shipping option is chosen.” Keep that in mind…

Here are a couple pictures of the book I made. I just got a bevy of LED key chain lights, so you also to see some of my first “Painting with Light” pictures:

This post is basically for Josh. For those of you who don’t care about the behind-the-scenes details of blogs, maybe go and check this out. OK, for the rest of you….

Swiftcurrent Reflections was started using Blogger. It was quick and easy. Now you can have blogger host your blog, like Meg does (anyone with a name.blogspot.com address does this), they can host your blog with a domain name you purchased (so you could have everything on their server, but instead of using crazyblog.blogspot.com, you could just use crazyblog.com; that URL would just point to their server), or you can do what I did and have your own server, and Blogger would FTP all the files to it. Now, “my own” server is a bit misleading. I bought hosting capability through 1&1. I have been using them for over four years now and am happy with their service. I acutally only have one server space through them, but swiftcurrentphoto.com, billanderson.name, and andersonupshaw.com all point to the same server, they just have thier root in different directories. Sneaky, huh?

OK, so now what about Wordpress? It is designed to run on a web server that has PHP scripting ability and MySQL installed. Almost any web server has this, as does 1&1. Setting it up was easy. Just download the .zip file from Wordpress, un-zip it, use the web-based control panel at 1&1 to setup the MySQL server, update just one test config file from the Wordpress download with the MySQL info, then upload that batch of files to server. Done. Blog is running.

While I did this at a remote server, the process would be the same if you had a server in your house. While I leave a couple of my computers on 24/7, I really don’t want to be worried about uptime. I don’t have a static IP address either. While I use dyndns.com, that’s not the best for a server. And then there is bandwidth. I don’t want to be streaming a movie and then have a number of people hitting my blog at the same time (I doubt that would happen in my case, but still…) and killing my movie. Plus, Comcast has usage caps… I’ll stick with 1&1.

More questions? Comment away!

If this all worked, you should be seeing this on the new website… Please leave a comment and let me know what you think!

…because I am moving to Swiftcurrent Reflections 2.0. Hopefully, everything will stay the same. http://billanderson.name will still take you to the right place, and I hope you wont even have to change your RSS feed, for those cool cats who use RSS readers, but if you don’t see any updates for a week or so, check back here and resubscribe.

Technical Mumbojumbo: Since January 2005 I have been using Blogger, the Google owned blogging tool. It’s easy and gets the job done, but it always had problems FTPing data over to my server. People who host their blog right on Blogger’s servers, like Meg, don’t have this issue.

My solution? Start running Wordpress. This software runs right on my server and has a lot more flexibility and options than Blogger. It’s more complicated to set up, but will hopefully be worth it in the end.

Hopefully, everything just doesn’t explode…

For the family: Rachel and Jeremy are building a house, and are cool/geeky enough to blog about it:

Rachel & Jeremy build a house!

What does one do when they are in Korea for Buddha’s brithday? First, you must get up and get some coffee at your favorite coffee chain

Next, you head over to the temple. Make sure you take off your shoes, and remember where you put them

Then listen to some music while you get your prayer on

After you are on the level with Buddha, you might as well check out the traditional lantern exhibition, as it is right there at the temple

More photos and videos here.

The official post-race photo

The ninth year running this awful race. I got a nice slow time of 2:01:45 (my clock) which is #8 on my nine finishes. Only second time over two hours. Sad, but true: Bill is slow.

It was great seeing Michael, Jennifer, Olivia and the Boise gang. Will next year be my last???

More photos here.
Meg’s blog post here.

This is year 9. Meg and I fly over to Boise for my 9th Race to Robie Creek. Training has been okay, but I was sick on Monday, so that certainly didn’t help. We’ll see how that effects my time. Plus, I’m not getting any younger….

It will be good to see Michael and his family. This year will be a bit different with the absence of Mark. He’s usually the get-sick-right-before-Robie guy, so I guess I had to take up that mantel…