kahunaburger

Haven’t posted a photo of little Pia in a while. Here’s a shot from a few mornings ago. Queen Pia is relaxing in bed watching an episode of Maisy. That hair is always out of control in the morning.

Morning Hair

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The Lightroom team has just posted the latest Beta release for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Win/Mac on Adobe’s Labs site. I’ve seen this application develop from early Mac-only internal Alpha releases to this public Beta 4. An amazing amount of feedback was received from external and internal testers and it’s good to see how much feedback actually made it into the application. At times the beta discussion list was one of the busiest mailing lists in my inbox. Grab your copy today.

PS: Garret’s post reminded me that I did not get the name right either … sorry.

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First fire this season

Pictured above is the fireplace in the kitchen. Yes, we had to start a fire yesterday evening, because it was way too chilly. I think it started freezing later that evening and when I let the dogs out this morning (6am), they returned within 1-2 minutes which is quite unusual for them.

At 10:00am we went to the local Transfer station to dump our trash and that was the first time I got a view of the Sangre de Cristos. Sure enough the Ski Basin is covered in snow and Pia is all excited that she will be able to go skiing soon. This is happening way too early for my taste. Hope this was just a temporary lapse and that summer is making a short return soon.

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A few weeks ago I ended up watching “Karaoke A-Go-Go” at Dave’s house in the middle of the night. He showed it to us, because he actually stars in the movie. It was hilarious! I told him that I would upload the stuff to Google Video and YouTube for him. Back home I converted the DVD to a DIVX-AVI file, checked with Ursula & Clara that it was ok to upload the files and then transferred 180MB to Google Video and YouTube. Had to split it into two pieces for YouTube, because they only allow for 10mins per clip at a time. The results are here:
Google Video, YouTube part 1 and YouTube part 2.

Be warned: you either need to be a Karaoke junkie or have some appreciation for Santa Fe local scenery, otherwise this is not going to make too much sense to you.

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A few weeks ago I looked through my server’s log-files and was almost a bit shocked to find out that a hell of a lot of traffic is generated by just a few images on my site. Most of those images are hot-linked into profiles on myspace.com. There are also a lot of forums and other sites where references to images on my site appear.

I tried to contact a most of the places where my images were used and asked them to either remove the link or at least make a local copy of the image so that it would not affect my bandwidth. I did not get a single response from those people I contacted and decided to make changes on my end to work against the hot-linking.

Since last week I have the following in several places on my (Apache) server:

   RewriteEngine on
   RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI}  !.*images/moron.jpg
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://(www\.)?kahunaburger\.com [NC]
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://images\.google\. [NC]
   RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^http://images\.search\.yahoo\. [NC]
   RewriteRule \.(jpe?g|gif)$ /images/moron.jpg [R]

Those are mod_rewrite rules that examine incoming image requests. For each request we check if the HTTP_REFERER (in what context was the image requested) is a local page. We also check if it is one of the image-search-engines that requests the file. If it is, then everything is fine. However, if the HTTP_REFERER is something else (an article on impactlab.com for example), then instead of sending the requested image, we send something else. The replacement image still consumes some bandwidth, but it is fun to watch it pop up on external sites. The RewriteRule above could also be changed to not send anything back at all. Should I ever have serious bandwidth issues I just change that.

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Rarely do I miss Bavaria and most of the time it has to do with eating and drinking. Tomorrow morning the Oktoberfest in Munich is going to be opened. 18 days people from all over the world will flock to one of the massive tents, trying to get as drunk as possible . I used to live right next to the big square where Oktoberfest is being held. Amazing how many friends I suddenly had during Oktoberfest-season.

A “Prost” from Tesuque to Munich …

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… not on a plane! Pia returns to town and the critters seem to have missed her. Yesterday afternoon it was nice and sunny and this little guy was sitting on the wall on the terrace trying to warm up. Provided 15 mins of fun for Pia and me. Poor guy was probably scared by the two humans staring down at him …

Snake on the terrace

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Today is the first day where I can see significant signs of Fall all around me. This morning it was really, really cool and I had to put a second blanket on me at about 4:00am (the windows are open the whole night). At 6:00am, when the dogs went for their morning ritual outside, I detected some moisture in the grass outside (yes, we do have a small grassy area and no, it was not raining last night). At noon I went to town quickly for some food shopping; on the way back I looked at the Sangre de Christo mountains and you can see that the Aspens are beginning to turn yellow. Then later this afternoon I went to the gym and most cars I passed had their lights on. Now it is 7:30pm and I need to switch on lights in the house.
This is a bit early this year; would have loved to have a longer summer. But then our cleaning lady from Espanola predicted that it is going to be an early and strong winter.

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I just dropped two ice cubes on the floor in the kitchen. Max came over and chewed them down in no time. Had I done the same, I would be sitting there in severe brain-freeze pain. He did not seem to mind at all. Wonder if dogs are affected the same way as people are?

By the way I read somewhere that pressing your tongue against the top of your mouth while in brain-freeze pain will make the effect last a lot shorter.

Max from below

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