While in San Diego earlier this month, I visited a Crazy Shirts store. I was a little surprised to see it since I thought they were exclusive to Hawaii. I had seen ads for their shirts in Aloha’s magazine while they were still around, but I didn’t know what the special deal was. It turns out that they have a line of shirts dyed in non traditional dyes like Kona coffee, beer, volcanic ash and wine. Of course, the designs on the shirts have something to do with the dye used. I was going to pick one up, but I decided to wait until we got to the second store in the area, where we were going to pick one up for my brother in a size they didn’t have at the first location. It turned out that we never got to the second store. Maybe I’ll pick one up if I ever get to visit Hawaii.

I’m tapping this out on my iPhone at Grandmarie’s Chicken Pie Shop in Fresno while I munch on two of the world’s greatest biscuits and an awesome chicken pie smothered in gravy. It’s some of the best food on the planet because it’s real. There’s thought and effort put into the production of the food, it doesn’t roll off an industrial production line in an anonymous factory somewhere. As I like to do when I eat somewhere that’s not fast food, I’m drinking coffee with my lunch. It’s one of the few beverages available without either HFCS or Aspartame. Over the last few days, I have been trying to reduce the amount of sugar I take in my coffee, with the ultimate goal of eliminating it completely. I stopped taking sugar in my tea one day about 25 years ago, so it shouldn’t be too difficult. It’s just more honest this way.

This morning, I popped into the Starbucks at the corner of Peach & McKinley - near Fresno Yosemite International Airport, where I work. My reasons for this are threefold - 1. I wanted some coffee, 2. House Blend (which is all they serve at the airport) wouldn’t cut it, 3. I wanted a toasted asiago cheese bagel (also not available at the airport Starbucks).  While I was there, I decided to check my internets for news and twitterings. Instead of the usual AT&T Wi-Fi login tied to my Starbucks Card, I was greeted with a different login screen:

Free AT&T Wi-Fi for iPhone

I inserted my phone number, checked the box and got this screen:

You will receive a text message shortly

I received my text message with a URL to perform the final authentication and get me to my internets. This was much more convenient that entering a username and password into a login box and choosing from a list of potentially confusing account choices. The link is apparently good all day. I have no idea if this is just at Starbucks or if it works at other AT&T locations too. I guess I could always go find a Barnes & Noble and try it out.

Edited to add: I received another text message from AT&T later today:

iPhones get free Wi-Fi at AT&T hotspots

I had intended to get out of work and on the road at my designated quitting time of 1pm, but sadly it was not to be. My parents have already arrived in Roseville and I’ve made a quick fuel stop ($3.099/Gal unleaded for the car and some Popeyes chicken for me) in Livingston. The Seattle’s Best Coffee at the TA is gone with only a chill case left in it’s place. Apparently there was not a huge call for their wares. I guess the standard truck stop coffee is good enough for the clientele here.

Well, almost another month has gone by without me writing anything. The most interesting thing I did was visit San Diego, where I met my parents. I did a bunch of fun things down there and I’ll try to post all of them. My basic idea for all of this is to start some posts, each with a topic I want to talk about from the 5 days and fill them in when I get a few minutes to spare, rather than trying one enormous post that will probably miss something. I’d say the highlight of the trip for me was Legoland, which was completely awesome.

I’ve already gotten distracted from this, so I’ll just hit the publish button and go ahead with creating the empty posts, which I will keep on ice until they’re ready for public consumption.

Mitch Hedberg’s comedy featured a joke about getting a receipt for a donut. He could not think of an instance where he would have to prove that he has bought a donut. I found myself in a situation where I needed to prove that I had bought 24 donuts, or more accurately, I will find myself in that situation when my next round of expenses is submitted.

Speaking of the late great Hedburg, a previously unreleased CD of his work came out recently. I will need to purchase this soon.

I’ve accrued seventy odd hours of my 88 hour allowance, so it’s almost time to cash some of it in. My parents are coming over in October, so I’m going to take 4 days off and make a very long weekend of it. We’re going to meet up in San Diego, which I’ve heard is very nice, but I’ve never been there. While there, Legoland will definitely be on the agenda. I’ve wanted to visit Legoland (either the one in Denmark or the one in California) for somewhere in the region of 20 years, so I’m a little excited. Maybe I’ll finally get myself one of those minifig keychains.

As I played more with ZenPhoto, I found myself thinking about an iPhone specific theme, like the WordPress plugin I use on the site. Theoretically, it shouldn’t be that difficult - all I have to do is use some browser detection logic and write a theme. Basically, I’d model the theme around the photo library on the iPhone and work from there. The structure is already mapped out and it works quite well. I might even add the finger swipe code I stumbled across a week or so ago. Now comes the part where I have the motivation to do something productive after work. That might cause a problem.

I just updated to WordPress 2.6.1 and managed to mess up several times. Firstly, I had the wp-config for another site saved locally, so that got uploaded, handing control over to a completely different site. I found a backup of this site’s config, but it was from a time before I had destroyed and rebuilt the site, so I appeared to have lost about 5 month’s worth of updates. FInally, I noticed that I had another set of tables with a different prefix in the database, so I made the necessary change and the site was alive once more.

On a more positive note, I updated the way I include my  Twitter updates.

A little over a month ago, I mentioned here that having the WordPress app on my iPhone might make me more likely to update this site in a somewhat more regular manner. As you can probably tell, that didn’t exactly happen. For the last while, I’ve been quite busy at work resolving issues, installing systems and planning new installs. By the time I got a couple of free moments, I had so little inspiration that I didn’t want to write anything here.

I’ve been playing with a new WordPress site, The Guild of Saint Patrick, into which I will be integrating both bbPress (once the 1.0 version is ready) and ZenPhoto (almost done, but I have some more CSS to tweak). I’m still undecided as to whether I’ll be installing ZenPhoto here.