The last week was pretty interesting…
Last Tuesday was Dowling’s Graduation Ceremony. I was the lead photographer Here are some pictures: click. While uploading the pics I tidy up the gallery for her final view for now. After the Ceremony we gathered in Bellport, where Mitko lives to celebrate, but because the owners came home, we decided to move over at our place for dinner. There are no pictures from our place, because I was done shooting and people start to get angry when I upload more than 250 images in an album ( originally 370… ).

On Thursday we went to BNL for an imgCIF workshop…

Yesterday we went to Manhattan and we visited the Empire State Building Observatory. After that we went to the Museum of Natural History ( where Night at the Museum was shot as well as some scenes of K-Pax ), to watch Cosmic Collisions in the Hayden Planetarium.

The most important thing from yesterday morning is that we have a new glass…

The services on my home machine for the last 2 days were gone, because I was upgrading OS X from 10.4.6 to 10.4.8. Everything went well except the webcam. I think the problem is in the new usb drivers - which do not support the stream from the camera well and overflow…

The rest of the system is on 6

Because of speed problems with Gallery2 on Dreamhost I had to look for an altermative. I have to admit that I liked Singapore very much but it didn’t scale well. It was slower on the top levels than gallery. That is why I tried Coppermine. I had to go trough every single album and add create it manualy and than add the images. It took some time, but the best part is that with all my pictures added ( more than 6000 ) it works pretty well on Dreamhost. I sat down and created my own template that looks like my blog and I can say I’m happy with it. The biggest problem is that all old links are now dead, but I added a few lines to .htaccess to redirect all old requests to the top level of the new gallery. There are a few more things to be changed ( like font sizes ) but first things first. Now, at least, I don’t have classes so I will be able to tweek it.
Comments and critics are welcome

New Gallery (old url) - Coppermine 1.4
Old Gallery (new url) for speed reference - Gallery 2

Upgraded to wordpress 2.2 a few minutes ago. Here are the steps:
Deactivate plugins.
cp -r diary diary_back
mysqldump [options] dbname |bzip2 -c > dbname.sql.bz2
cd diary
mkdir backup
mv wp-config.php wp-contents backup
cd ..
mv diary wordpress
curl -O http://wordpress.org/latest.tar.gz
tar xzf latest.tar.gz
cd wordpress cp -r backup/* .
open wp-admin/upgrade.php
change cat_id in wp-categoreis to varchar(255) instead of varchar(55) to fit my category names
I fixed the cat names
activate the plugins
All done!
Everything seems to work and it is still valid XHTML 1.1

So, Monday was the last day of the Spring semester. I’m happy with my grades, but I could of asked for A in Economics… But that’s not a big deal.

In Algorithms we did our 2 page notes for The 3 volumes of The Art of Computer Programming and we took the exam. In Multimedia Web Design I did a short animation for www.geodar.com, for the Economics class I wrot two papers. One for the Later Marxism and one for Socialism and Capitalism. For Origins of Human Nature my paper was titled “Imperfections of Natural Selection”

In addition, with the help of Petko, I got myself an Internship at UBS Investment Bank for the Summer; I started to write a little tool but more on that in a few days and a few more interesting things happend…

Now I have to add 1-2 pages to my second Independent Study paper and to finish the first beta of my little tool so that I can announce it.

It can’t be. Bulgaria is now(again) in the PayPal system. Even though it is only for sending money. I don’t know when that happened, but I just read about it in Yovko’s blog. Now bulgarians can shop in the worldwide Internet, as long as the system can ship to Bulgaria and most important, they can shop from ebay.com. It was about time for that to happen, we are in the EU!!!. As we say, congrats to the winers!

I don’t know what you do at night, but for the past few days we play badminton It is quite fun. It is a little dark at night, but it is playable. And while we play, the grill next to us always talks with some meat. This week we did this activity 3 time and here are the “I learned something today”:
Although shrimp look more appetizing when well done, they are much more juicy when cooked just a minute after they change to that pinkish color.
The stakes and kabobs made of chicken thighs are one step better than those of chicken breast, even a little less healthy.
Of all veggies, onion is the best to grill.
Chicken burgers are much better than turkey burgers ( in terms of taste )