Often, I feel sick for long periods of time.

When I do, I try to understand what is hurting me, brooding gently the disease to observe it better.

I can pass days like that, silent and steady like a boa constrictor digesting his pray; or wandering around my dark house like a sleepwalker.

Often enough, I arrive to the conclusion that there is just no answer to the question.
Of course if there is a question.

So, I pass some time watching myself in the eyes, through a mirror.
That’s not the answer, but it’s enough for me.

Asking myself, what I really want.
Is enough.

How long is the road, how much time will it take, where does it leads up?
And when, is the moment to turn?

A man should pass his entire life to hunt his dreams …
… isn’t that the only way to live a dream life?

Once again, life it’s like photography:
to be,
in the right place,
at the right time,
ready to shot.

Today I added a new plugin in my roster: AStickyPostOrdER.

AStickyPostOrdER, a plugin created by AndreSC, is a powerful addon to WordPress to touch it’s categories handling without messing up with the code.

Still in developement, the plugin augures well, thanks also to the interactivity of it’s developer that helped me to help him to resolve a problem in less than 24 hours.

As he asked, I’m writing that post to help people to see an example of the use of his plugin in a huge website like this with a lot of categories and sub-categories and a complex structure.

Actually, AStickyPostOrdER is helping me in the Music section…
But let’s start from the beginning:

• my target was to keep the musical group always the first of it’s category, and to put the posts after it
• after some googling I installed AStickyPostOrdER, easily like every other WordPress plugin
• After that, I went on the easy-interface that AndreSC did, giving a “1″ to the weight of the Pink Floyd post
• Now the Pink Floyd post is the first of it’s category, even if the published songs of the category are newer than it
• that works, of course, without messing up with any row of code and without making the Pink Floyd post the first of it’s mothers categories, the blog category, the I like category, and the Music category.

What else to say…?

Thank you AndreSC !

In the previous review I wrote some technical first-touch tips about my new Nikon Coolpix P5100.
The best bridge camera by Nikon.

Now, after more than a month of use, I want to complete that review.
I tested the camera a lot, in night, fog and rain situations, and I’m really satisfied.

I bought also a tripod (gorillaPod) to make some photos of Venice in odd and hard places.
Very funny.
I will talk about him later.

The Coolpix behaves very well.

Let’s begin with the sad part… the macro.

I did a lot of tests between my new Nikon Coolpix P5100 and my old Samsung digimax i6, and I can say that the Samsung Digimax is insuperable.

Here are some… examples…
A spider web with some crap behind it:
Nikon: Samsung:

And another spider web with some free space behind it:
Nikon: Samsung:

Focusing with the Nikon is very hard, and the 4 centimeters of limit don’t helps.
I will still go around with both of them, for a while…

The manual modes features up to 8 seconds of exposition, and a lot of interesting options.
That allows to do very bright photos, even in very low light situations.

Indoors, the camera is definitive, cause every kind of light is well compensated, also neon flickering light.

For example, look at this photo did with the programmed manual mode and 8 seconds of exposition:

That light was hurting my eyes: low, and blinking very slowly.
But that was nothing for the camera.

After that I did some very bright photos of Venice…

This is a bit exagerated (I over exposed it on purpose):

And that is really cute:

I did also one without tripod, just taking the camera in my hands, obtaining a nice result:

I love Venice in the night:

• gloomy
• no tourists
• a lot of colors

Every photo you do with the Nikon Coolpix P5100 you can be safe that she did her work, always on focus, always good quality.

So, let’s round off with a pros and cons list:

• STRONG POINTS
  • Awesome quality (12 mega pixels, all in their place)
  • VERY LOW rumor (I still have to see any red-blue-green pixels)
  • Compact size (98 x 64,5 x 41 mm) and a light weight (200 g)
  • Well working functions and automated modes
  • the battery really endures a lot
  • Manual functions comparable to a reflex digital camera
  • The quality is the same of my father’s Nikon D70, a very expensive reflex.
• WEAK POINTS
  • Not good for Macros… it tries to imitate the reflex cameras inheriting this flaw
  • I had to buy a case for it, buyng a too large one.
    Was it too much expensive to gift one in the box?

Sometimes things happens fast,
so fast that you can’t handle them.

Life is slippery, and it’s hard to catch the occasions you would need.
That task, requires
the speed of the snake,
the stealth of the jaguar,
and the patience of the spider.

It’s hard, to fix a moment.
Like a snapshot of life, itself.
And, even if you do, in the meantime things are changed again.

The only solution is… to anticipate them.
One would need a prediction to keep it up.

But if you keep your eyes on the future,
at the same time,
you can’t keep them on the past.

What does it mean to walk a road without knowing from where do you came from?

Tonight, like many other nights, I didn’t sleep.

Heavy, huge, thoughts.
Numerous, like all the things I should do an rest undone on my desks.
Tonight, I thought such strong that blood came out from my nose.

Nigthmares are scary when they catch you in the middle of the night.
But what you will do if they take you when you are awake?

You can’t wake up,
you can’t fall asleep.
You can’d do nothing,
but cry.

The past is still hunting me.
And I’m out of breath.

I wish I would be like the air.

I worked a lot on this theme, but honestly I don’t know how to describe it.

WordPress is an amazing publishing platform, and the more I use it the more I know it.
Customization is the key of the modern business, expecially if we talk about the web.

A WordPress theme should provide some features that the other themes don’t provide, but cause the customization of a WordPress website is strictly connected to the plugins you use, I’m a bit stuck on what to do to make this theme downloadable by other people.

The best theme I saw until now, browsing the deep web of WordPress, is SandBox.
SandBox embraces completely my filosofy of web… to change behaviour of a website just changing it’s stylesheet.

I think that I will publish my theme when it will be completely SandBox-compatible, cause it is a (small) standard and I like standards.

However, this theme haves also it’s features, so I will need to extend SandBox someway.

Features of this theme actually are:

• The possibility to create a multi-menu with categories and pages in the same branch.
  For example, my album galleries 2007 is a page, and it’s in the same branch (photography) of camera reviews that is a category.
  The trick is done with the plugin “top-level-categories” plugin and with a xml reading-parsing of the menu, that is doable by the user in the administrative panel.
  So, the user can create it’s own menu that is called with a WordPress-like function inside the theme itself.
  My structure for example is “post-category-page” so I have the posts links, the category links, and at the end all the pages of the same branch.

  This feature comes also with a widget (menu) that displays “on request” in the sidebar the same menu I’m using on the top.

• The widgets contains more than one widget each, that is more a customization than a feature, my problem was that the single widgets (searchform, category listing, display recent images, ecc.) wasn’t enough for me cause they would have produced a lot of html code and I liked the actual “navigation-look-menu-links” structure of my sidebar.

  In the future, I want to provide a “widget-group” plugin for everyone that accomplishes this task.

  At least it’s in the wish-list.

• Also a stilesheet switcher (that you can try in the “look” menu) allows the final-user to change and select the style he prefers.
  That was always been a mine fad, and now I fell comfortable with that solution.
  The secondary style that I actually provide sucks, but it’s here just to show-off it can be done.

Be patient…
One day I will publish that theme, in the meantime, if you’re interested in having it, you can contact me.

In this week-end I improved the general accessibility of the website, for non-compliant browsers like Internet Explorer 7.
Honestly, I don’t have the time to make my theme visible by older versions of Internet Explorer cause they simply suck.
That is just a personal website, so I do things in my personal way.

As I already said elsewere, I suggest you to use Firefox.

I did a lot of things in the photography section, and to list them I created a new category: the photo news.

There I will keep you updated about interesting photos or other photographic works I did.
I also started to put names and comments in some photos, please be patient until I find a good way to emphasize the named and commented images so you can spot them without opening them.

Comments are so important for me to make people understand the objective I tried to accomplish with each picture.

I also started to re-arrange the old California category, in wich I tryed to report the things I did in my holiday.
I published only 4 days of 21… that takes me a lot of time cause I’m using a lot links and images to describe my experience.
I think that is the best way to communicate… in a modern world… Describe things with the frequent use of images and links.

What else to say… this website is giving me a lot of satisfactions, I will keep it updated the more I can.

In this weekend I heavily reorganized my published photos, adding some and removing other.

I leave there a little explanation about the changes.

• I discovered (and that surprised me) that for some reason I forgot to upload some photos of my holiday in California… so if you want you can spend some time to watch them again in my California (2007) Personal Gallery.

• I increased the size of the thumbnails for a more pleasant navigation.

• I published some galleries from my old google picasa account, that I wasn’t sure to publish.
  They are the House & Family personal gallery, the Me & Friends personal gallery, and the Photo Editing gallery.Please visit the personal galleries only with the awareness that you’ll find photos I did during my day-to-day life, few of them are well-done photos and most of them are just jokes.
• My “best photos” are now in the Galleries page.
  Please keep in mind that this is my first year of experience as a photographer.Don’t forget to leave comments if you like them.
• The Photo Editing gallery contains pictures heavily photo-edited with Photoshop and other post-production tools, I’m really satisfied by some of them, less by others.They are just experiments, but I got big projects for 2008 …

Stay tuned …