ChrisBunting.com

As mentioned in this comment, Rafael Palmeiro has been suspended for 10 days for testing positive for steroid use. Palmeiro had testified to Congress back in March that he has “never used steroids. Period.” Yet, the news was announced Monday, and the Orioles are now without their star first baseman. It couldn’t have come at a worse time, too, as the O’s have lost their last eight games straight, and the last thirteen out of fourteen. I’ve been hoping that Raffy would open up more about the situation and what all of the facts are, but he has remained silent, except for a statement that was released claiming that the ingestion of the illegal substance was “unintentional.” Now, Congress members are requesting the documents related to the failed drug test, possibly in an effort to see if Palmeiro committed perjury when he testified. I’m still holding out to see what Palmeiro’s side of the story is, but it’s hard not to be disappointed, especially since Raffy seemed to be one of the “good” guys, and a champion of the game.

The gallery is back up. I’ll go into the details at a later time as to what happened, but for now I was able to use the installation of the Coppermine Photo Gallery that I still had available from earlier testing. I’m actually quite impressed with it now, and will most likely leave it in place. There’s one other option I’m considering, but that’s going to have to wait a few weeks anyway.

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Meg and I had another checkup today with our obstetrician, and we were able to hear the baby’s heartbeat! The doctor let me record the heartbeat using my cell phone, and I transferred the audio to my laptop. Here’s an .mp3 and a .wav file of our baby’s beating heart:

.mp3 file (1oo KB)
.wav file (464 KB)

NOTE: You may have to right-click and Save the file to your computer. Otherwise, most browsers will allow you to “stream” the file over the internet to play it.

Nick would go crazy if I didn’t post this. Things have been quite hectic as of late, so I haven’t had time to finish up on some of the posts I’ve had in “draft” mode for a while. I do have some things I’d like to do to the site (still), and more discussions regarding the gallery and some fantastic looking alternatives out there, but no real timeline on when I’ll get that done. Stay tuned…

Meg mentioned to me about a website that you could use to produce a customized counter for various occassions, including when you’re expecting a baby. So we went there, she made one for her email signature, and I made one that could be displayed at the top of my blog. It’s so cuuuuuute!

One of the topics I have talked about a lot on this site (and regarding this site) is the gallery and the software that powers it. Not just in regards to the current software that is being used, which is Coppermine, but also the many, many, many other software alternatives that I have tried and tested. Prior to using Coppermine, though, I had found a little-known solution called Plogger. Even though it was still in beta (being developed), I was extremely impressed with it, but ended up having to move away from it when I began having problems with the database because my hosting provider does not offer support for the InnoDB database type, which Plogger uses. I had communicated with the lead developer, Mike Johnson, on several occassions, mainly to provide feature suggestions or bug fixes, so I regrettably sent an email to let him know that I had to make a switch because of the database problem. Therefore, I was on the hunt again, looking for another gallery alternative. That’s when I stumbled upon Coppermine, and decided to give it a shot, to see if I could integrate it easily with my site. I was also pretty happy with the features that Coppermine offered, and very happy with the ease of uploading large groups of files into the albums (a huge plus for someone that is starting from scratch with putting a large amount of images online).

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