Things are starting to resemble normalcy for us.  Email and blog are back up.  If you sent us important emails, we may not have gotten them, so please resend.

It's been over a month since we've posted any new pictures, until yesterday.  Check out the new photos in our gallery.  We should be posting a bunch more with school starting tomorrow.

Just in case you're not following along, we've posted 29 new photo albums since February 1.  We're also now hosting the photo gallery for Trey's Cub Scout Pack.

You'll be able to find pictures of Trey's Cub Scouting activities at http://www.lobrecht.com/gallery2/key/Pack414

in addition to whatever the pack has displayed at their official site http://www.pack414.com/.

I updated my blog software to dasBlog 1.9.7174.0.  Its not the latest (they just released a 2.0 that runs on .NET 2.0), but it has some interesting new features.

I haven't yet installed the 2.0 Framework on my blog server, so I'm going to hold off on this update.  It looks like there aren't any new features anyway.

Our website is getting to be back to normal.  I couldn't manage to revive the old machine at all, so I'm taking the opportunity to rebuild parts of the site.  The Gallery is a little sparce right now, but I have loaded all the latest pictures.  If you find links that aren't working, please let me know.

The server hosting our website died a painful death yesterday.  Ok, so its really just a DIMM or two which has failed, but you get the idea.  I'm going to take this opportunity to turn off a machine in my office, and move our site to a web host.  Things will be back to normal soon.

If you're subscribed to our Gallery updates feed, you may have noticed a bunch of old albums showing up as new or updated.  Apparently Gallery thinks that changing the keywords on an album constitutes a change.

Pictures for Silverlake Elementary, Mrs. Bonner's Kindergarten class can be found at http://www.lobrecht.com/gallery2/key/Silverlake%20Elementary.

We added a Google map to our Photo Gallery.  Check it out here.

I use underscores when naming our photos, but this has one side effect, when I upload them to our Gallery, the title automatically gets set to include the underscores.  I know I could manually set the title for each photo, but I just don't have the time.  I just quickly hacked my gallery to replace the underscores with spaces whenever an item is created.

In gallery2/modules/core/classes/GalleryItem.class I changed

function setTitle($title) {
$this->title = $title;
}

to

function setTitle($title) {
$this->title = str_replace('_',' ',$title);
}

It seems to be working pretty well.

I just upgraded the dasBlog version of my blog, and now I'm having problems posting.  It seems that the web interface won't post, unless I go to the raw Html part of the editor after writing all the post.

I've posted an entry in the support forums.  I'm also having some issues with adding hyperlinks, although I forgot to mention that in the support post.

We updated our photo gallery to the latest version, and turned our theme back on.  Please let me know if there's any problems.  I also updated the front page of our site to include a picture of Trey's basketball team.  Mary says she's going to pick something, but at least this is updated.

The "big storm" hasn't even hit yet, and we've already had two over five minute power failures.  This should be fun.

I just loaded over 5000 pictures to our photo gallery.   I haven't done a lot of things such as setting the thumbnails, album dates, etc.  but the pictures are there.  Everything July 1 and later.

Enjoy.

I posted a ton of new pictures to our Gallery.  To be informed of all changes to our Gallery, subscribe to the RSS feed.

I'm having a heck of a time with our Gallery.  All the old content is working fine, but if I attempt to add any new content, it won't create thumbnails, unless I add the pictures 1 at a time (not exactly an option.)

Hopefully someone on the Gallery forums can help me.

I finally got most of our webserver back.  Gallery seems to have made some major changes, so our theme and local printing support don't work with the latest version.  I guess I have even more to work on.  One new feature that I'm really excited about is RSS support for gallery.  If you haven't discovered RSS yet, try reading Wikipedia.  RSS will allow you to automatically know when we've updated our Gallery (as well as knowing when I update my blog.) 

Yes, I know that our photo gallery has been down for ages.  I actually almost had it up, but SUSE and Gallery just wouldn't get along.  I've just started building a new CentOS based machine that will hopefully behave a bit better.

Our Linux box decided to die today.  It doesn't seem to want to find the disk (the BIOS won't detect it.)  I stuck the disk in a USB case, and it was detected just fine.  I'm copying the contents now.  My blog content should still be available, but none of our other links will work.

I may be ordering that new machine even sooner.


Update:
My tablet will boot from a USB hard drive, so I attempted to boot using the disk from the Linux box.  It brought up the Grub loader just fine.  Hopefully the gods will smile on me, and the Linux box will be happy with me tonight, but I'm not terribly confident.

Christmas Day
December 26, 2005
December 27, 2005 to January 6, 2006
The Houston Zoo December 30, 2005
Kayleigh's First Birthday Party January 7, 2006
Model train show at GRB January 8, 2006
January 15 - 21, 2006

If you came here via the main page, you probably saw the new front page, and our latest big news.  Our son Victor is engaged to Stephanie.

New photo albums:
Christmas Eve
Trey's kindergarten holiday party
November 29 - December 18, 2005

October 20 to 29, 2005
Fall Festival
October 29 - November 9, 2005
Carving pumpkins
Halloween 2005
Chuck E. Cheese November 2, 2005
Sea World

We posted a bunch of new photo albums.
Jax's Fourth Birthday Party
October 11 - 13, 2005
The Houston Zoo
Evelyn's 80th Birthday Party
October 4 - 7, 2005
October 1, 2005
September 2005

I'm in the process of building a new Gallery for our site.  One of the features that we had on the old version was a Local Printing option.  It opened the large size image in a new window, so it could be printed to your local printer.  Gallery 2 is much more complex, but I've modified one of the other modules to give you the same functionality in the new gallery.  I should be opening our new gallery soon.

Downloads
localprint.tar.gz (2.88 KB)
localprint.zip (4.08 KB)

I started a thread on the Gallery forums.

The Gallery I'm using has just released version 2.0. Its not quite as feature rich as the old version, so I'm going to have to compare and decide.

I received some really cool weather photos via email.  They claim to be from Hurricane Katrina coming in.  Check them out.

I finally ended up following the Postnuke upgrade instructions to the letter (which includes the terrible step of deleting all the content from your Postnuke directory.  Probably easy if you don't mix your content, but not really a good option for me.)  Well, any way, things are back, and I'm directing this site back through the Linux box.  I'm still contemplating ditching Postnuke, or at least hiding it (maybe keeping it around for the old links, but creating a new homepage.)  All its really doing now is providing a theme anyway.

I started to rebuild my Linux box.  Unfortunately, I didn't get nearly as far on it as I had hoped.  I have gotten far enough to realize there is something wrong with my restored PostNuke installation. My first bust was trying to get MySql databases restored from a "cold backup."  My final solution was to create a new database with the same name, copy the files from my backup into that database, and set the permissions and ownership.  This allowed me to log into MySql directly as a client, but not from the webserver.  Turns out Fedora doesn't install MySql support into PHP even when you install both of them together.  yum to the rescue.  One I had that all working, my sitebar started working again (yeah, access to my bookmarks.)  But PostNuke is still dead.  I've been pondering ditching it anyway, since I'm no longer using it to blog, but I do have a lot of good content in there.

I just looked at the blog layout in IE.  Oops.  I went through and found all the non-closed TD tags, but what's up with everything being centered.  I've got to figure that out.

Did this work ok? Too bad w.bloggar doesn't support uploading images via anything besides FTP.

No, this isn't some lame slashdot story, its my first real post in my new blog.  I just set up dasBlog.  I haven't done everything (like set up an offline posting client, and finding a free POP3 account I can use for mail based posting) but I'll get there.  The online form for posting is actually pretty good.

Welcome aboard.