I updated my Maps page to include some trails I’ve mapped on a site called Gmaps Pedometer. This site lets to map a route, calculating distance and calories. It even takes elevation into account! This is pretty handy for tracking my calories burned which I started doing on SparkPeople a few weeks ago. I also track my nutrition and calories consumed. At the moment my goal is to lose 10 pounds by the end of the year. My SparkPeople page is BlueValhalla.

We’ve finally moved in to the modern age. We got our first HDTV, a Sony KDL-52W4100 (pictured on left), late last week. To drive HD content, we also picked up a Sony PlayStation 3. I knew it serves as a great Blu-ray player but I didn’t realize how good even DVDs would look. This morning some guys from AT&T came by to install our new U-verse system. Now we have a 6 megabit Internet connection and 200+ channels of digital TV, including a lot of HD. Out TV stand arrived today as well (see picture). Now we don’t have to put the TV on our coffee table. Next up will be an A/V receiver.

Well, it looks like there’s four eggs in the nest box now. One more than last year. I guess Clara and Carlos are going to have a busy time feeding 4 chicks. I’m looking forward to a nest full of fuzzy young peregrines later this spring. The picture on the left is one I took of Clara a couple of weeks ago.

I didn’t make it to the falcon presentation at the library. Mary and I had gone hiking in the Marin Headlands with some friends. Afterwards we had lunch at a Brazilian restaurant in San Francisco. We did stop by the library on Sunday to see the photo exhibit. There are some really nice shots there, and mine doesn’t look too bad.

I’m still working on the Clean Tech company, but I haven’t updated my green blog in a while. I’ve been pretty busy putting together a demo version of the user interface for our energy management product. I’m learning a lot about AJAX web structure and have been using a JavaScript toolkit called Dojo. It’s pretty interesting. Maybe I’ll blog about it in more detail one of these days.

I’ve been playing around with web widgets and gadgets lately. Ron and I created a Google Gadget for the dishAdish “Best of” feature. Here’s what the gadget looks like:

You can add the Gadget to iGoogle or get the code by clicking on the Google button above.

I’ve been using WordPress for this blog for quite a while now, and I’ve been using Gallery for my photo gallery for a very long time. I finally got around to putting the two together. It’s not really that hard since there’s a WordPress plugin for just this function. It’s called WordPress Gallery2 Plugin (WPG2).

The main thing stopping me was the need to upgrade my Gallery installation so it would be compatible with the latest WPG2. This turned out to be fairly painless. I made a backup of my gallery database using phpMyAdmin. Then I downloaded and installed the latest Gallery release and ran through the web setup pages. It went off without a hitch. I installed a couple Gallery plugins to make things work better with WordPress, including ImageBlock and ImageFrame.

Next I installed the WPG2 plugin for WordPress. Basically, you just unzip it in the plugin folder and click on the WPG2 tab in the WordPress administrator page. Once again there was a simple web based setup and I was ready to go. Now you can see my gallery embedded in my blog layout by clicking on PHOTO GALLERY in the dark blue navigation bar near the top of the page. I also added a photo gallery navigator and random picture to the sidebar to the right. Another cool feature is it lets me add pictures to my blog postings directly from the gallery, and I can even enable neat effects like Lightbox pop-ups (click on picture on right).

The only down side so far is that loading my main page seems slower, but maybe it was that slow before. Hopefully all this new technology will improve my blogs more than not.