Art photography

I took this with my iPhone last night at the Xmas Event at Hole’s. There aren’t usually lights in the greenhouse–these were strung for the tours– so this is a unique perspective on our Christmas crop.

Sometimes I love my job…

IMG_0807

Time on my hands

Arrive in time
Time travel
When are you here
there

Time loops
Replaying all the time
We’ve been here before
So many times

Last time
The final time
Before I go forward
In time

On occasion of mulling over time travel, again

WordPress flv players

I came across some really powerful typography-based videos the other day and thought I wanted to steal one to post on my site.

First up was to download the .flv file. Easily accomplished on a Mac by using Safari.

Open the page with the movie and press Command-Option-A, which shows the Activity window. If you’re also loading other sites, you’ll see a list of them: scroll until you find the YouTube page and click on the arrow to show details about what is being loaded.

You will certainly notice an element whose size is over 0.5MB (most of the time, over 5MB). Double-click on it (even if it is still loading), and Safari will download it. When the download is over, navigate to the file in the Finder (which will probably be called get_video) and add the extension .flv to its name.

Next up was trying to get a an flv plugin so I could easily run them on the WordPress site. I heard a lot of good things about FLV Player Plugin v2.0 but in the end I couldn’t get it to run. I have no idea why. One of things that I had to do was edit the php file to correct the location of the swfobject.js. Default expects it to be placed in the plugins directory – but the file exists in plugins/flv-player. Modify line 20 to update the correct path to swfobject.js or the “Get Flash” icon will show up.

Still it wouldn’t play the flv and I have no idea what I did wrong. While cruising the WordPress site I came across ZD YouTube FLV Player which offeered more options and actually worked for me (other than the autoplay switch which still won’t work…). Anyway here are the usage and attributes:

Usage:
[zdvideo]url[/zdvideo]

‘url’: This is the URL of either a youtube video or flv video file. Example – http://in.youtube.com/watch?v=7HdJgf3yXM0 or http://www.yourdomain.com/videos/myvideo.flv

Attributes:
width – Default is “425”. This is the width of the player including border.
height – Default is “349”. This is the height of the player including border.
align – Alignment of the Flash Player. Default is “center”. Available Options: “left”/”right”/”center”
border – Show/Hide Flash Player Border. Default “yes”. Available Options: “yes”/”no”
fullscreen – Show/Hide full screen button. Default “yes”. Available Options: “yes”/”no”
theme – Name of the theme you want to use for the Flash Player. Default “dark”.
autoplay – Set video auto play On/off. Default “no”. Available Options: “yes”/”no”

Themes:
Dark
Glossy
Gray
Simple 1
Simple 2

Luck. I has it.

There was never a person born since Adam who’s been luckier than me. Nothing has happened to me that hasn’t been perfect. And I’m not being facetious. There’s never been a time when I was penniless and down, when something wouldn’t arrive. Over and over and over again. Enough to make you superstitious.

Cormac McCarthy

From an interview with the Wall Street Journal