This morning I found Steven Sande’s article, “Looking for free iWeb hosting? Here’s how to use Dropbox as your host“, at TUAW and thought, “Hey, I can use this for our solar system!” I got iWeb (even though not the ‘09 version as described in the article), I got a Dropbox account, and I got all the statistics diagrams ready! Let’s do it!

Steven’s instructions are pretty clear and easy to follow. After an hour or so, I got the site up and running! There were some weird problem regarding to loading my updated pages, but I’m not sure which party is the guilty one. Anyway, give it a shot if you are interested.

I guess that I could’ve hosted it at my Google Apps (not GAE), but then it would’ve take me much longer to manipulate all the UI components and the navigation flow. Even though iWeb ‘08 is not as powerful as iWeb ‘09, it’s enough to get this little project up and running in an hour. And that’s impressive!

Of course this is too manual intensive and clumsy for my like (although the UI is very cute). I want a solar website that is fully automated like its counterpart (the backend system that we’ve been working on). Hmm… Did I find myself yet another project to work on?

You can click on the following thumbnails to see more screenshots:

I’m famous! I’m famous! I’m the “Student of the Month” (“Miss November“? ) at O’Reilly School of Technology (OST), thanks to my instructor Josh! This is too amusing to keep all the fun to myself!

I started taking OST’s Database Administration Certificate (DBA Certificate) at the end of September, because somehow I had became obsessed about everything data-related about a month earlier. (I wish I knew where and how I caught that bug!) I figured that it was about time to get database under my belt, so after doing some research, I decided on OST. And the rest is described in my “success” story in the above post.

One minor correction: Even though the photo was taken when I received my DBA1 CEU letter, I actually finished DBA2 2 weeks ago and am on DBA3 right now. I think my photo comment might have confused the OST staff. Anyway, while the first 2 courses were a smooth ride, DBA3 is more challenging and demanding due to the unfamiliar subject, data warehouses.

我出名囉！
我當選 O’Reilly 科技學校的 “本月最佳學生“（Student of The Month）呦！

Have you seen pomegranate flowers（石榴花）? They are surprisingly elegant! We didn’t know that we had a happy pomegranate bush in our front yard for years until we saw our first baby pomegranate, it was because we had no idea what its flowers look like. We just thought that that anonymous bush bloomed those vibrant red flower like crazy every year.

And of course we can’t talk about our pomegranate crop without showing you a photo of our pomegranate. Unfortunately, ours are for decoration only. They never grow bigger than a tennis ball and taste acidic (although very pomegranate).

I took those two photos at my new camera’s Intelligent Auto (or iA) shooting mode. It sounds quite a mouthful, but what it really means is that all you have to do is to focus on your subject and shoot. That’s it. It automatically calculates where the target is, and it picks the best mode and shutter speed and all that. I’ve been testing its limited manual settings at its Normal mode, next-to-zero-manual-control scene selection modes, and the iA mode, and I think that it’s safe to say that you can just leave it at the iA mode for most situations (even for video shooting!). And with its powerful lens, everyone can be a good amateur photographer without any assistant software.

This diagram sums up the daily power generated by our solar system for the first two months of her life. You can pretty much tell our micro weather just by looking at it, except on three days.

As you can see, three power readings are missing. Before Oct. 25, David didn’t have his fslurp package ready to automatically read data from the inverter. Every morning he had to remember to go to the garage and write down the previous day’s power reading. As being a normal human being, he forgot about to do that a couple of times.

On Oct. 25, we lost power shortly after 5:40pm, the last recorded reading. This little incident was enough to made our inverter lose her memory on how much power she had generated that day… So David decided to throw away the previous day’s reading to avoid seeing an erroneous zero reading in the middle of diagram.

So there, now you got the full picture of our solar system’s performance and our local weather. Oh, yes, our power bill has dropped down significantly, even though we won’t break even in another 9 or 10 years.

I’ve shown you that my new Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 (It’s quite a mouthful!) does decent HD shooting (including zooming) and its Food and Sunset mode fulfill their duties. Today we’ll take a look at its incredible lens — from 25 to 300mm!

With its 25mm wide-angle lens, I’m finally able to take San Francisco, Alcatraz, the Golden Gate Bridge, Marin, and SF Bay all in! I had wanted to do this for years, but now I’m finally able to do it!

And its 300mm telephoto enabled me to present you the famous Golden Gate Bridge here! Doesn’t it look like the eyes of Cheshire Cat from “Alice in Wonderland“? The cat has disappeared into the night, but his grinning eyes are still on the canvas for my camera.

After 5pm, the sun had set and it was getting dark. I took a few shots but didn’t expect any of them to be bloggable. Well, was I wrong! David fell in love with this Jupiter-like sunset and insisted that I post it. Yes, Sir!

Remember our beautiful tomboy girl Irene? She’s not only pretty, but also very talented! She’s been learning ballet for years, and she loves doodling whenever she’s not busy playing her computer princess games. In this vivid painting, she combines both her interests and shows us her happy class — The teacher enjoys teaching those little future ballerinas, and the students follow diligently of the teacher’s instructions. And you can even see a couple of students in the back flexing their muscles.

This painting can only be done by a good artist who is a keen observer and enjoys the ballet class.  The judges must have felt the same way, because Irene won the No.2 spot of the eastern Taipei school district for the first two graders! Now her teacher submitted it to attend the national competition, and if it makes it to the top 3 spots, then she’ll be placed in an art school and all the way through “college” (This is my own interpretation of Irene’s mom’s vague email). Not a bad deal! Let’s hope that our little Irene’s painting will help her dream come true!

Irene 的媽媽, 晴意, 寫的原稿：“靖雯（Irene）這幅畫獲得台北市東區國小低年級組第二名,學校老師要把他再送去參加全國性比賽,如果得到前三名就可以保送美術班,請幫靖雯加油!“

Jennifer 的部落格, “Irene 學芭雷舞“, 有更多中文解說。

David’s old friend, Jerry, was performing at Ashkenaz Music & Dance Community Center tonight. I filmed this little clip with my new Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 camera. Yup, you heard me right! You could probably tell that I hadn’t got the hang of it yet. But this little one was impressive! The zooming in and out during my filming was really smooth! However, this transformed YouTube version couldn’t do justice to the original AVCHD one, which was crystal clear.

Oh, Jerry is the one on the right playing the guitar. You can hear his beautiful solo in the following clip.