Weekend, parents, etc. Posted February 7, 2005 at 12:01 pm

My parents were in town this Saturday searching for home improvement ideas from the local speciality shops that only a sizeable city like Atlanta can provide (or so you’d think). From what I understand, they didn’t have much luck finding anything. Regardless, I got to enjoy some fine meals from Chin Chin V and Ray’s on the River. A made a point of taking them to our Fry’s; I don’t think they were impressed. I also wanted to take them to Jillian’s since it was in the same area, but the place was just packed.

Mom and Dad left on Sunday and I turned to web design and personal development. I reworked the integration between blog entries and gallery images such that the inlined thumbnails have been replaced with a simple image count (similar to how comments are handled) that will link to a full thumbnail gallery. The reasoning behind this is to save people page load times an generally improve the look of the site. Later on, I plan to make a full gallery where you can just browse pictures.

Along these same lines, I’ve started remastering pictures from my trip to China and I’ll eventually be removing all the old images and replacing them with the new. The new images benefit from common tweaks like auto-leveling that I never used when I originally posted the images last summer.

Finally, I’ve decided to pursue learning .NET. My initial project will be to create a Windows application that will set different wallpapers on each screen in a multi-monitor display. It’s a need of mine and I haven’t found any good applications for it yet. It should be a good learning experience. In the spirit of things, I downloaded and installed the Microsoft Visual C# 2005 Express Beta and made console and GUI "Hello World" applications. It’s ridiculously easy to do.