McGillveray Studios

It has been cold here now (and the rest of Canada) for about 3 weeks, ranging from -20 deg C. to -40. That is without the wind chill. Today you can see the wind is not to bad. If the wind is not blowing, it can be nice outside even at these low temps. as the air is dry and crisp. But still should have gone to some tropical country. If the stock market never crashed.

Looking Out My Front Door This Morning

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Reckitt Benckiser Plants Trees In Fort St. John

I recently did a photo-shoot for Reckitt Benckiser Corp. at Cecil Lake, 60 Km NW of Fort St. John. This international company, based in England, produces fimilar brands such as Lysol, Dettol, Calgon, Vanish, Resolve, Spray ‘n Wash, Woolite, Electrasol, Airwick, Clearasil, Strepsils, Veet, French’s Mustard, Frank’s Redhot, and Cattlemen’s. I think I have used every one of these products at some point in my life.

RB is in Fort St. John planting trees for their Trees For Change program. They will be planting more than 2 million trees over 15 square Km. Most of that amount right here. The tractor trailer in the picture was delivering 200,000 trees, and the company doing the planting is North Eagle Reforestation out of Chetwynd B.C.

It was very interesting and informative shooting this documentary for a project that is good for us all.

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Cambodia

I wanted to show some of the pictures my daughter, Kristine, took recently in Cambodia. She was taking a break from teaching English in Thailand.They will have to go to my Gallery 2 installation as explained below. Click-Here There is some good shots from a young lady and a cheap camera, post processed by dad.

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I am having a heck of a time running Wordpress. I had my host switch my server as I wanted to get php Exif going, so viewers on my site could see the photo meta data. They could not get it running on the server I was on, and offered to switch me to a different server, I said OK. On the old server I could at least up load pics to my posts but not on the new one. I can upload to Gallery 2 and my Coppermine Gallery, but not Wordpress. I installed a fresh install of Wordpress at a different location using my servers Fantasico Installer and cannot up load to it either. I uploaded this pic using ftp and linked to it.

Update May 4 2008 – I got the Wordpress file up loader working on the new server! I found on the Wordpress fourm a temporary fix. I have to insert a .htaccess file into the Wordpress directory, with a mod to the way the mod_security function works on the server. Go figure the same host with their servers all configured differently. No wonder why we all have different problems. Now if I can get the Wordpress to place thumbnails and galleries.

A Clean Creek

Wordpress Version 2.5 is new and a new add galleries feature is built in. I am not the only one having problems with it, but my problem seems unique. The gallery will only add the full size images I upload and will not add the thumbnail, or medium size images it generates. When I select add gallery it adds all the full size images to the post. They are stacked up on each other. I posted these pics with the NextGen Gallery plugin and the Flash Viewer plug-in for that. PicLens plug-in does not add the pictures loaded into the NextGen gallery folder. I get no response in the Wordpress forum to my question. I hope that it gets fixed in the next release. I would like to find a theme that I can post larger images to as this one is limited to 550 pixels wide. This theme is widget ready which I also want. This theme does everything except is to narrow, and I do not know CSS enough to make it wider without messing it up. Anyone Know?

Update May 23, 2008 Anyone having trouble uploading images to Wordpress 2.5 (html error) see if this post on Wordpress.org forums will help. After I changed servers I could not upload to Wordpress image library. The mod_security thing did it for me.

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Tuxpan Pool

When I was in Cuba I stayed at the Tuxpan Hotel. It is an all inclusive only hotel as are a lot of resort hotels in Cuba. The pictures show that it is a nice but older place and kept clean. I am a one language person and found mostly Europeans there, which can be a bit frustrating when you see someone you want to talk to. Where 35% of the tourists in Cuba Canadians I found this a bit odd. It had two restaurants and a large buffet with 2 grills and cooks. The restaurants were good and the buffet very borring. You were given 4 tickets per week for the restaurants and had to make reservations in at 10:00 AM. Not so good. I read on another review that the hotel will be closed in May for a revamp, including the buffet, so this may change for the better. They have a very nice cabaret that opens at 11:00 but mostly no one goes there and many nights there is no one there. How ever, the bartenders are willing to sell you a bottle of rum for $2! Going on tours I heard talk about how good people were treated at other hotels and felt that I could not say the same for the Tuxpan. When I was on an early morning tour I was told to go to the pool restaurant for an early breakfast. When I got there the attendant said that it was shift change and no breakfast. He went and got me a stale sandwich from the main kitchen. Other people on the tour said what a good early breakfast they got at there hotel. I could not stay the same. There was a good show every night provided by a show company that circulates the other resorts. The pool bar was said to be 24 hrs, but in the early AM they would only get you a drink if they felt like it. Mostly though the staff was friendly and accommodating. I had a good time with the bar staff, especially one night when I was trying to recruit them to start a revolution. I am sorry but I would not recommend to a friend to stay there.

I have another post of what a nice place Cuba is to travel Click Here.

To see a PicLens enabled gallery of photographs I took in Cuba Click Here.

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Long Beach - Pacific Rim National Park - Vancouver Island

Wow! What a great new plug-in for Wordpress. It will basically work with Flash, but to see the great effects you have to install the Piclens plug-in into your browser. You will be given an opportunity to install the plug-in when you first start viewing the gallery, then click on the view in 3-D icon on the top right of the page. After clicking on the install button close the thank you for installing Piclens window and your browser back button will start the show. I installed it into Firefox with no problem and it is only a 1 Mb download. It also works on major web sites like Fickr, and makes looking at photo galleries a gas. The menus disappear when you move your mouse away from the bottom of the page, click on the thumb nail to view, use your mouse wheel to zoom in and out, and you can watch a full screen slide show. This is a beta thing yet and has a way to go but it can go a long way also. The only problem I encountered was when you go to view the show a second time it displayed at a to high a resolution for my screen, and I have to close Firefox and restart it again to view the show again. (I just tried this on my PC running XP and no problem, it only seems to happen on my laptop running Vista (surprise!)). You can hit the escape key at any time to get back to this page. I hate to say it but it makes my Lightroom and Next Gen galleries look lame.

For all you Wordpress bloggers, it seams that every photo that is on your front page after you install the plug-in will be included and every photo uploaded and posted after will be added to the slideshow.

After you install the PicLens plug-in to your browser, an icon will appear when you mouse over thumb nail. Click on it to start the slide show.

Click on the link www.piclens.com to be taken to the PicLens site, see a demo movie and install the plug-in.

Update March 7, 2008. – The PicLens team sent me an email with a link to the latest test version of the plugin. I downloaded an installed to my lap top that is running Vista. Both Firefox and IE plugins now are working on my Vista machine just fine. They fixed it! I wish I could put the link here but they asked me not to. Still working on it I guess, but the release must be soon.

Update March 9, 2008 – The new plugin is released.

Update April 10, 2008 – The plugin only works on the first page of the blog. To Bad.

Update April 23, 2008 – I installed a flash gallery with the same pics as PicLens only works on the main page.

Do not get me wrong though, I still love PicLens for my galleries on my main site. It is the best.

Update Sept 26, 2008 – The Piclens plugin for Woordpress has stopped working since Wordpress 2.6, and no update yet. A few plugins have had issues since WP 2.6.

Update Dec 28, 2008 – CoolIris (the old PicLens) works on Wordpress still (V 2.7), it is the Podpress plugin that I am using that messes up the CoolIris plugin. Podpress also messes up the Gallery feature in Wordpress. Something to do with the Wordpress Data Base.  Alas I think Podpress died.

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