gallery2 live

Long-time overt readers will remember when I rolled my own photo gallery using ColdFusion and an Access database. A few years ago I replaced my own software with Gallery, a PHP-based photo album that was way better than anything I wrote could ever be. It had it’s faults, like storing everything in flat files and being kind of ugly, but it was very functional.

A couple of years ago they started on a rewriting of Gallery from the ground up, based on a mySQL backend for speed and all CSS’ed up for prettiness. It’s taken a while, but the code is finally ready for prime-time so I moved overt’s gallery over to the new version. Such excitement! It looks exactly the same! But it should give a lot more flexibility in the future, plus I get to stick these nifty “random photo” blocks everywhere now (see right). Let me know if something looks borked to you. I know that viewing comments on pics still kind of sucks, I’m thinking about writing something myself to fix it up.

berkeley food #6: stars veggie

1805 Euclid Ave.
(510) 548-8895

A lot of interesting veggie food here. The place seems to focus on fake-out meat, like Mongolian beef or philly cheesesteak. I ended up getting the “ham” and cheese crepe and a vegan carrot-cake muffin. The crepe was made while I waited, and the staff seemed very enthusiastic and dedicated. The place was tiny–maybe 8ft wide, so most of the seating was in the back. I settled in with my book and ate. The crepe was great, very fresh, though it was a little sweet which leads me to believe they use the same crepe mix for sweet and savory. I don’t know whether this was a faux pas or a stylistic decision, but I do know that in the joy of cooking, they specify that for savory crepes no sugar be added. Still, it was good if slightly greasy. On closer inspection the veggie ham looked more like pork shawarma meat than anything else; it was kind of salty, which is in character for ham, and the tomatoes and lettuce that flanked it were fresh and crisp.

It was, however, tiny. My stomach was barely primed by the time I finished it, and even after the carrot cake (which was very good for vegan, but no match for real), I was left with hunger pangs. Leslie can attest to my ravenousness last night when I got home. We decided from now on I should bring some backup calories on my culinary adventures in the form of powerbars or somesuch.

I may give this place another visit, but it would cost me $15 to fill up on their crepes. Maybe the rice bowl would be more substantial?

a trip to half moon bay and more

We’ve been taking pictures of this and that for a while here, with nothing really adding up to anything worth a whole album on gallery. Today, though, we took a great little trip to Half Moon bay, a burg out west on the coast. We hit the beach on a cool, cloudy afternoon to watch seagulls and waves, throw frisbees, fly kites, and mutilate washed up plant-life. The pictures from this trip are bundled with some flotsam and jetsam from our lives these last few weeks and stuck up on gallery for your viewing pleasure. Enjoy.

and by SF i mean Ikea

So, we didn’t quite have enough steam after working on straightening up our place on Saturday to go up to San Francisco, but we did decide on a whim to go to the big opening sale at the brand new Ikea in East Palo Alto. In our roles as good American consumers, we spend $167 for four dining chairs ($20 each), three patio chairs (discounted to $10 from $50, solid wood!), an end table ($10), and a really nice bookcase that should have been $50, but they forgot to ring up part of it so it was actually $33. We would have gone back into the store to tell them about the mistake, but it would have cost more in human time and hassle than it would have gained (the ikea was like a human cow corral, and returning would have been like swimming up a very crowded stream).

So, after we assembled everything, we took a few more pictures of the apartment that now include my stuff, and posted them on gallery. I think this makes the apartment more or less done, except for hanging a few more things in the office and the bedroom.

Another week begins. Someday I’ll have a job. No, really. Stay tuned.