I finally spent a couple hours tonight upgrading Wordpress to the latest version and picking out a much nicer theme for Piqued. A much-needed change I think…hope you like it! Props to my friend Marcelo for inspiring the change, since his theme put mine to shame 
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I apologize that captcha is now required for commenting, but the comment spam I had to dig through was getting pretty overwhelming.
As you may have seen from other recent blog postings, I’ve recently been checking out epicurious.com. I happened to check their blog a couple weeks ago when they had a brief posting about aquaponics. Aquaponics refers to the growing of plants in water (hydroponics), together with fish (aquaculture) in a closed system, where the fishes’ waste feeds the plants, which in turn clean the water for the fish. It struck me as a pretty nifty idea, not to mention a fun project and practical justification for having a fish tank and fountain (both of which I like).
So I began shopping around for kits and such, but eventually realized that it shouldn’t be too difficult just to make my own. After reading up quite a bit, I finally came up with a design idea, bought the parts, and in a week’s time went from buying the first parts to adding the fish and plants. The system has been running for a few days now and both plants and fish look healthy, so no disasters yet. Time will tell if this turns out to be a productive herb garden (moreso than my traditional attempt which was rather unimpressive).
The boring old Worldview.BrianFrantz.com page has been redesigned and reorganized. I’m still working on the final video, but at least for now the existing videos should be laid out better!
You may have noticed that several of the links accessible from the drop-down menu above have gone to placeholder pages with estimated times of completion that have already passed. Well, I’m happy to say I’ve gotten back to working on this site, and the first addition has already been rolled out.
Feedback.BrianFrantz.com is up and running and ready for users to register. I don’t expect there to be a lot of commotion on the forums right now, but the registration is for more than just the forum. The login scheme that used to exist on the Photography Portfolio site has been replaced with the Feedback login, so in order to download the larger wallpapers, you’ll need to register at Feedback. It doesn’t require any more information than the old registration scheme, and is more secure and feature-rich.
I’m also planning to make blog comments only available to registered members, to get rid of the comment spam that comes in waves every couple of weeks.
Now that I have the feedback forum in place, I’m hoping to tackle the Worldview site soon, as well as finish the final video in the How Great Thou Art series. Once that’s finished, I hope to finally put together the Reaching Up Productions page, though that may be a while.
As someone who uses his bicycle almost every day to travel to/from campus, I’d like to offer the following observations and recommendations to those who, as a bicyclist, I interact with while making my daily commute, regardless of whether you are a pedestrian, another bicyclist or driving a motor vehicle.
Pedestrians:
Generally speaking, it’d be best if you ignore us bicyclists, or at least pretend to ignore us. When riding a bike, we are generally anticipating where pedestrians will be if they continue on their present course, not assuming they will stop to let us by. Thus, stopping suddenly or taking a step “out of the way” when you see us is generally more hazardous than helpful, no matter your intentions. If you are heading across my path, I will plan to either head you off enough so that I won’t hit you even if you continue along your present path, or I will plan to bike behind you. If necessary, I will slow to allow you to pass. But if you start across my path, see me, and then stop, I have to suddenly change my plans to take into account that you’re no longer going to be where I expected.
