Some Blog Site

It’s March, the start of the spring quarter. I didn’t have any good ideas that related directly to spring, so here’s a painting-related WordPress theme.

As is usual, it’s not really a new theme – all I did was replace the images. It’s supposed to look like paint dripping.

Anyway, here’s a slightly new look. Expect some tweaks in the days to come.

It’s December, the start of the winter quarter. We don’t have snow here yet, but I decided to make this quarter’s theme a snowy one.

It’s not really a new theme – all I did was replace the images.

Anyway, here’s a slightly new look. Expect some tweaks in the days to come.

That’s some web theme there.

Or rather, here.

It’s the change of seasons again, which means it’s time for a change of my WordPress theme.

It’s not really a new theme – just changing the backgrounds a bit and tweaking the layout.

I will be fixing some small things as we go along here, but I can already tell this one is going to be much easier on the eyes than that last one.

It is now the start of the summer quarter, so I am changing my WordPress theme. Normally I change just the background photo to reflect the season, but this time I made a whole new theme.

It looks like a Lego WordPress theme. You might be tempted to refer to it as a Lego theme for my blog. It is, in fact, a generic brick-based building-system theme (compatible with all major brick-based building systems – Lego, Mega Blocks, umm…Lego, etc.).

I am still tweaking things, so you may notice things changing slightly over the next week or two.

Today’s post is a little quiz to see if you know the common names of large numbers.

I’ll start by stating that 1,000 = 10³ = one thousand.

Quiz

(hover the mouse over the blank lines to get the answer. Users of iPhone/iPad/etc. will have to click.)

• 1,000,000 = 10⁶ = one
  million
• 1,000,000,000 = 10⁹ = one
  billion
• 1,000,000,000,000 = 10¹² = one
  trillion
• 1,000,000,000,000,000 = 10¹⁵ = one
  

That’s the end of the quiz. If you haven’t taken it yet, don’t keep reading, as the next paragraph will spoil the quiz for you.

_{For those who don’t get it: Jillian Michaels is one of the trainers on the Biggest Loser. So 10¹⁵ = a Jillian. There are some people who think that a jillion is not a real number. Maybe they’re spelling it wrong and it should be a jillian.}

This post is split into two parts. Read one or both or none, depending on which blogging platform(s) you use.

Blogger.com Users

Hey all you Blogger/Blogspot users: are you tired of people on WordPress who don’t show your profile picture next to the comment you left? Do you want that profile picture instead of the default or randomly-generated icon?

The reason your picture doesn’t appear is that you are using only Blogger.com and not Gravatar.com. Now Gravatar is supposed to be a Globally-Recognized Avatar (where “Avatar” is an icon or small picture, not the movie with extra special effects to distract you from the lack of a good plot). But it requires people to sign up for the service and a bunch of people, mainly blogger.com users, have not done so.

You have two options:

1. Sign up for Gravatar.com

2. Tell the person who uses WordPress instead of Blogger.com to install Grab Avatar. Send them to the Grab Avatar page for details.

I recommend step #2 because if everyone does step #1 then I’m out of business.

WordPress Users

Hey all you WordPress users: are you tired of people on Blogger.com who leave comments but don’t have a Gravatar so you can’t display their profile picture? Now you can please everyone. Grab Avatar finds a person’s avatar whether it is on Gravatar.com or Blogger.com.

It is a simple process and doesn’t require any code editing. Just install the plug-in and it magically starts working. Visit the Grab Avatar page for details.

I like using GIMP for creating and editing images. I was playing around with the auto-generation of images and just thought I’d share what I did, in case anyone else out there is wondering what the Swirl-Tile option does.

My goal was to generate some background for a website. I wanted the background to be interesting but not too distracting, and the seams between tiles shouldn’t be noticeable.

Setup: Find the option to generate swirl-tiles.

Step 1

It will have some defaults. These are the default settings:

And this is what the default settings will generate:

And here are a few of them put together. The seams aren’t too bad.

I’ll cut off the post here for the general blog readers who don’t care about web page background images. But those who are interested can click on the link below to continue reading.

(more…)