Hotel Information:
URL: http://www.hiltongardeninn.com/en/gi/hotels/index.jhtml?ctyhocn=SFOSMGI
Address: 2000 Bridgepointe Circle, San Mateo, California 94404
Phone: 650-522-9000

The hotel is located minutes from San Franisco Airport and across the 92 freeway bridge from Oakland Airport. Less than 30 minutes from San Jose Airport. So going to this location is fairly easy. It is right at the boarder of Foster City and San Mateo. Being situated by the bay, weather there is actually very pleasant with occasion cool breeze during the hot summer days. The surrounding area, within walking distance (approx 1 block), you have the Bridgepointe Plaza where you could pick up a host of items you need. You have Target, being a major convenience store in the area, not to mention a other popular eating location such as BJ’s Brewery. If you are in need of some Asian food, close by you have the 99 Ranch Supermarket, a Chinese popular supermarket chain. Less than a mile away you have fairly decent Chinese seafood restaurant.

As for the hotel itself, as of 2008, it was in the renovation process. The room was standard hotel size room and fairly comfortable. The king size bed I had was extremely comfortable with a bed style similar to “Select A Comfort” where you can dial the firmness of your mattress. The fitness room was a bit cramp with too many equipments in a small area. Internet service is complimentary, which is an added bonus.

Overall, the Hilton Garden Inn is a good place to stay because of the location and services it offer.

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A couple of weekends ago, my wife and I join our friends at Disneyland Resort for a day. I’ve been to Disneyland several times and each time you could never seems to take enough pictures. Each time I come across new angle of things to take pictures of. This time around, since we went with some friends, I decided to go light. All I had with me was my Nikon D200, removed the external battery pack so I could travel light, had my SB-800 Nikon Flash in a fanny pack, and my trusty old Tamron 28-75 2.8 lens. I have to admit, the Tamron lens is the best investment for this D200 out of all my lenses.

All of these pictures were taken hand held, even the night shot. Let me know what you think of them.

More could be found at http://gallery.knguyentu.com

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Earlier this month, Nikon annouced the “mini me” of the popular D3 camera, the D700! It tout the similar “full frame” CMOS sensor, in a much smaller body. More like it took the D3 functionality and put it in the D300 to produce the D700! Holy Cow Batman!

I will be release late July 2008 for approx tag of $2999.00

Key Features Include:

• Nikon’s original 12.1-megapixel FX-format (23.9 x 36mm) CMOS sensor: Teamed with Nikon’s exclusive EXPEED digital image processing, the D700 delivers breathtakingly rich image quality.
• Broad ISO sensitivity up to 6400 and incredibly low noise: Super low-noise performance from 200-6400 ISO, with the added versatility of Lo-1 (100 ISO) Hi-1 (12,800 ISO) and Hi-2 (25,600 ISO).
• Continuous shooting up to 5 frames per second: Shoot at up to 8 frames per second with the optional MB-D10 Multi-power Battery Pack.
• Three-Inch, super-density 920,000-dot VGA color monitor: High resolution with
  170-degree wide-angle viewing, calibrated color and tempered-glass protection assure confident image review.
• Two Live View shooting modes: Choose from hand-held or tripod modes to suit shooting requirements.
• Rugged magnesium-alloy construction: Along with extensive dust and moisture protection and a durable shutter mechanism tested to 150,000 cycles, the D700 merges pro D-SLR performance with expanded agility.
• Fast, accurate 51-point AF with 3D Focus Tracking: Exacting autofocus precision, plus three Dynamic AF modes.
• Dynamic Integrated Dust Reduction System: Effective quad-frequency, ultrasonic sensor cleaning minimizes image degrading dust particles.
• 1,005-Pixel 3D Color Matrix Metering II: Legendary Nikon exposure accuracy aided by an onboard database of over 30,000 images.
• Nikon’s exclusive Scene Recognition System: SRS further extends auto-exposure intelligence while also advancing white-balance detection and autofocus performance.
• Nikon Picture Control settings: Advanced color control with 9 customizable settings and 4 preset options allow fine tuning of image appearance preferences.
• Active D-Lighting with NEW Auto mode: Unique three-phase dynamic control to capture previously lost details in shadows and highlights while maintaining normalized contrast.

You could read more on at anyone of these sites:

• http://www.dpreview.com/previews/nikond700/
• http://www.kenrockwell.com/nikon/d700.htm
• http://www.nikond700.com/
• http://www.nikonusa.com/Find-Your-Nikon/Product/Digital-SLR/25444/D700.html

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Bill Gates stepped down as CEO and standing at the helm of Microsoft, leaving it to Steve Balmer. He will still be involved on the board and certain key projects.

No matter how many people say they hate Microsoft or how crap their project is, you can’t deny the fact it changed how computing is for people today. Microsoft Windows is on almost everyone desktop globally and their product change the face of computing.

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Usually a simple query against a category would like something like this:


<?php query_posts(showposts=5&cat=$category);
while(have_posts()) { the_post();

}
?>


Basically all this is doing is show 5 posts for the category, where $category is either one or more categories depending if you have a outter loop or not. What if you have a lot of posts per category and want to only show 5 per page. Plus you want to have the previous page and next page button. That would be cool huh?

You can easily do that. Using the above code as example, you can easily transform it to look like this.

<?php $paged = (get_query_var(’paged’)) ? get_query_var(’paged’) : 1; ?>
<?php query_posts(”cat=$category&posts_per_page=5&paged=$paged”);
while(have_posts()) { the_post();

}
?>

Somewhere else on that same page, you need to call the function code that handle the previous page and next page logic. They look something like this

<?php next_posts_link(’« Next Page’) ?> || <?php previous_posts_link(’Previous Page »’) ?>

What you’ve just done essentially is use the get_query_var to capture from the url string what page is it currently on and pass that to the page. At the bottom, it detect what page is next and previous.

You can see a sample in action from the SAPHELPBYKEVIN page link above.

Additional References:
Wordpress Query Post: http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/query_posts

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http://laffers.net/howtos/howto-redirect-blogger-to-wordpress

Thanks to laffers.net for putting this together. It was extremely useful!

Here are snip of what he presented there. All credit goes to him and those who supported him on this.

set up redirects

I’m assuming that at this point you have imported your posts to the new blog at Wordpress.com (if not, go to “Manage/Import”, select the obvious choice and do what you’re said).

Log into your Blogger account and click your way through the awkward navigation menu until you are at the “Template/Edit HTML” page. To redirect visitors from the main page, insert the following between the <head> and </head> tags:

<meta content='6;url=http://yournewblog.wordpress.com/' http-equiv='refresh'/>

Number 6 means that the redirection will take effect after 6 seconds. Replace the url with your own.

The tricky part comes now. We want to redirect users from individual post pages to the corresponding post pages on the new blog. For that, we need a piece of JavaScript spiced with Blogger proprietary tags. Insert the following right after “<b:section class='main' id='main' showaddelement='no'>” in the template:

<b:widget id='Redirector' locked='true' title='Blog Posts' type='Blog'>
<b:includable id='main'>
<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "item"'>
<b:loop values='data:posts' var='post'>
<script type='text/javascript'>
var new_page=&#39;yournewblog.wordpress.com/&#39;;
var permalink = &#39;<data:post.url/>&#39;;
var timestamp = &#39;<data:post.timestamp/>&#39;;
timestamp = timestamp.split(&#39;/&#39;);
timestamp = timestamp[2]+&#39;/&#39;+timestamp[0]+&#39;/&#39;+timestamp[1];
new_page = permalink.replace(/youroldblog\.blogspot\.com\/2007\/[0-9]{2}/,new_page+timestamp);
new_page = new_page.replace(/\.html$/,&#39;&#39;);
document.location.href = new_page;
</script>
</b:loop>
</b:if>
</b:includable>
</b:widget>

Don’t forget to enter your new blog’s URL at var new_page = .

Important note! For this script to work, all your posts should have been imported to Wordpress.com using their Manage/Import function. The creation dates of all posts must match, because they are part of the permalinks.

 

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http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_dropdown_categories

You can use the code snip they’ve provided

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
var dropdown = document.getElementById("cat");
function onCatChange() {
if ( dropdown.options[dropdown.selectedIndex].value > 0 ) {
location.href = “ ?>/?cat=”+dropdown.options[dropdown.selectedIndex].value;
}
}
dropdown.onchange = onCatChange;
–></script>
</li>

Parameters

show_option_all 

(string) Causes the HTML for the dropdown to allow you to select All of the categories.

show_option_none 

(string) Causes the HTML for the dropdown to allow you to select NONE of the categories.

orderby 

(string) Key to sort options by. Valid values:

• ‘ID’ (Default)
• ‘name’

order 

(string) Sort order for options. Valid values:

• ‘ASC’ (Default)
• ‘DESC’

show_last_update 

(boolean) Sets whether to display the date of the last post in each category. Valid values:

• 1 (True)
• 0 (False - Default)

show_count 

(boolean) Sets whether to display a count of posts in each category. Valid values:

• 1 (True)
• 0 (False - Default)

hide_empty 

(boolean) Sets whether to hide (not display) categories with no posts. Valid values:

• 1 (True - Default)
• 0 (False)

child_of 

(integer) Only display categories that are children of the category identified by its ID. There is no default for this parameter.

exclude 

(string) Comma separated list of category IDs to exclude. For example, ‘exclude=4,12′ means category IDs 4 and 12 will NOT be displayed/echoed or returned. Defaults to exclude nothing.

echo 

(boolean) Display bookmarks (TRUE) or return them for use by PHP (FALSE). Defaults to TRUE.

• 1 (True - default)
• 0 (False)

selected 

(integer) Category ID of the category to be ’selected’ or presented in the display box. Defaults to no category selected.

hierarchical 

(boolean) Display categories in hierarchical fashion (child categories show indented). Defaults to FALSE.

• 1 (True)
• 0 (False - Default)

name 

(string) Name assigned to the dropdown form. Defaults to ‘cat’.

class 

(string) Class assinged to the dropdown form. Defaults to ‘postform’.

depth 

(integer) This parameter controls how many levels in the hierarchy of Categories are to be included in the list of Categories. The default value is 0 (display all Categories and their children). This parameter added at Version 2.5

• 0 - All Categories and child Categories (Default).
• -1 - All Categories displayed in flat (no indent) form (overrides hierarchical).
• 1 - Show only top level Categories

n - Value of n (some number) specifies the depth (or level) to descend in displaying Categories

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 The RSS engine I used there is RSS Parser for PHP5+ (http://rssphp.net/).

Downloaded a total of 18 times

Download this RSS file and place it in the same folder as the theme files you are using. In my case, I’ve placed inside ./wordpress/wp-content/themes/(theme name)/… In another words, in the same location the theme index.php file is located.

Once you’ve place the RSS file there, you will need to setup a page to use as a template for your rss. You can easily make a copy of the page.php provided by your theme. Let’s copy it and call it photographs.php.

Now for the fun part. Edit the photographs.php and place the code in here, somewhere towards the bottom before the sidebar and/or footer calls.



<?php

$html = ”;
foreach($items as $index => $item) {
$html .= ‘<h3><a href=”‘.$item['link'].’” title=”‘.$item['title'].’”>’.$item['title'].’</h3>’;
$html .= ‘</a><br />’.$item['description'].’<br />’;
$html .= “<br />;
}
echo $html;
?>


This will loop through the RSS code and strip out the the RSS feed file and present it as your see int he example. You could wrap some HTML in the “$html” section in the code above to make the box look fancy and colorful if you like.

To be a bit more creative, with how the code is now, it will RSS pull all items in the RSS feed. You could add a simple loop around the code and limit how many items to pull per feed. See the code snip below. In BOLD is what was added to accommodate that.

 
<?php

Now all you need is to create a new page, using the photographs.php template.

In the Custom Fields, use custom field “photoRSS” tag and place the URL to your RSS feed and away you go!

Let me know what you think and what alternative you are using?

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