I finally have my photo albums back online. You can see them here. I will add a permanent link to them, or you can always go to the albums by clicking on one of the pictures in the sidebar.

All I have done is post the photos. I haven’t annotated any of them. I’m not real happy with the gallery software I am using. It doesn’t have the strong integration that my old software had. I’m still looking for the ‘perfect’ solution, but until I find it, this will work.

About 2 months ago, I stumbled across the Atahualpa theme. Not only is this them being actively developed and maintained, it also has an appearance dashboard that allows me to change virtually all of the theme’s colors, fonts, layout etc. The other change I needed to make was to my sidebar content. You know, those little entries on the right side. Many of mine were hard coded, that is, I added code to the stylesheet for the sidebar. I wanted to take advantage of Wordpress’ widget capabilities, so I have been adding widgets, and deleting the hard code. Well, yesterday, I installed the new theme for all, and updated to the latest version of WP, release 2.8. Hope you like the new look, although there isn’t much difference from the old.

Well, we made it back to New Mexico last Thursday night. The plane arrived in El Paso on time, unfortunately, my luggage did not. I didn’t really want to check my bag, it was carry-on size. But, I had purchased a cork screw in Paris and although TSA regulations say it is OK to carry-on a cork screw, I was concerned that the TSA toadies would have a hemorrhage when they saw the 1 inch curved foil cutter knife blade. So, to avoid any potential unpleasantness, I opted to check the bag. The bag made it to Atlanta where I had to claim it before clearing customs, but although Irene and I left our bags side by side with Delta in Atlanta, her’s was on the El Paso flight and mine was not.

Apparently Delta was having some issues in Atlanta. Approximately 12 people were lined up at the delta baggage office after we arrived in El Paso. Since our plane was a relatively small MD88, with a capacity of only about 120 passengers, that would mean that almost 10% of the people on board had checked baggage missing. I have come to expect the worst in these situations, however, on Friday afternoon the El Paso Delta baggage office called to say that they had been told my bag would arrive in El Paso at 8:05 PM on Friday (apparently the same flight we took, only 24 hours later) and they would update me when it arrived. On Saturday morning Las Cruces shuttle service called to tell me that they had my bag in their office. They said they would deliver it in the afternoon but I opted to pick it up from their office. When I picked up the bag, there were 10 or more bags in their office so apparently lost baggage is a frequent task for them. Interestingly, just before we left,I watched a 20-20 segment featuring John Stossel, ABC’s self-proclaimed debunker of myths, telling me that the frequency of lost baggage was a myth. Hmmmm, apparently Mr. Stossel is full of bunk!

Sadly, that lost luggage issue seemed to put a sour finish on our trip. In my humble opinion, Paris is one of the most beautiful cities in the world. The museums and sights are beyond description, and the food and wine are marvelous. I did develope a cold on the trip, but thanks to the very helpful employees in the pharmacy, I got some wonderful cold medicine that knocked it out. I’ll go into more detail about the trip in the next few posts, and as I post my pictures.

Finally, let me just say that many Americans (especially those who have never been there) seem to believe that the French arre rude and dislike Americans. Nothing could be further from the truth. We never met a single person on our entire trip who was less than polite and didn’t try to be helpful. Whether they were customs or security people at the airport, working in the post office, at any of the museums, in bars or restaurants spoke English or not, not one single person was ever rude.

Woke up Saturday morning to snow. It wasn’t sticking on the ground, but was accumulating on the plants and grass. When we got up to Dripping Springs, the visitors center looked like it was in the middle of a blizzard. Here’s a picture of it.

Overnite, the temperature dropped down to 33 degrees according to my outdoor thermometer. Almost freezing. There is some snow on the mountains, in the highest locations and the shady areas. And we had the first fire in the fireplace on Thanksgiving day. According to the weather man, it should warm back up this week, with temperatures back in the 60’s. I’ve attached a picture of DSVC on Saturday morning.

Update !!!

Larryc.net is back up!! less than 24 hours and the Email is working, and the url redirects to this web page. All is well.

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Many of you know that I also own the domain larryc.net. I actually acquired it first because larryc.com was not available. I have been using that domain for my email for almost 10 years now. Anyway, I am going to consolidate it with my current hosting provider. Now is a good time to do it, because my contract expires on larryc.net shortly. Also, my email volume is usually low over a weekend since most of my newsletters don’t publish then. Interestingly, my spam is higher on the weekend. Of course it won’t bother me if a bunch of spammers get bounce messages. I intend to submit the DNS change Friday night, and hopefully, we’ll be back up on Monday morning.

After the change, anyone who navigates to www.larryc.net will get to this web site, and email sent to me at larryc.net will get to my larryc.com provider. You never know what is going to happen on the Weird Wonderful Web… after all it took a week to move larryc.com when it should have only taken 24-48 hours. But this is even a more simple change, so I have hope.

Currently I am doing some volunteer work that leaves me without internet access from Friday morning, until Sunday night. So today, Monday 7/16, I finally got things configured so that I could get back online.

I’ve decided to use the “Wordpress” blogging software for the core of my site. I think I can update the site faster, and it will be easier to change things around using Wordpress. Wordpress is the most popular blogging software around today, and it is free to boot. Please be patient, since it is going to take awhile to get all of my content online. But I will be working to reload some of my photo galleries along with lots of new stuff over the next several weeks.

One other reason I decided to switch to Wordpress is that I hope to be able to update the blog (maybe with photos) from Paris when we are there over Christmas.

So, there is lots to look forward to, and I’m hoping you will all enjoy the site.

Larry