I’m using Piwigo to build out an archive for a nonprofit I’m working with and wanted to log down some issues and observations:

• Piwigo is an open source platform. Open source software is not always the most user friendly or polished, but Piwigo is OK.
• Installation was actually pretty straight-forward.
• Really important to check plug-in compatibility. Several of the plug-ins I had hoped to use unfortunately have not been maintained. One plug-in I tried caused major headaches–I later realized it wasn’t expressly compatible with the version of Piwigo I was using. I’m not sure if the issues were because of compatibility issues, but it’s something to note.
• I’m not sure what the issue is, but so far, PNG uploads have given me major problems–slowing the software to a standstill (other parts of the site that aren’t reliant on back-end server processes were seemingly unaffected by the uploads), even though PNG files are purportedly compatible with Piwigo. When I deleted the PNG files and switched to only JPGs, the issue went away.

About five years ago, I wrote a post on this blog listing the oldest cruise ships serving at the time at the world’s major cruise lines. I published the post on March 6, which was five days before the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus disease to be a worldwide pandemic. A lot of ships were sidelined and scrapped as a result of the pandemic, but the industry rebounded and there’s been a round of new ships that have entered service in the past couple of years.

In this post, I am reposting the list with relevant updates, mostly for my curiosity. Keep in mind that I am getting most of this information from Wikipedia so there might be some errors. This time, the table is arranged in order by the age of the cruise line’s oldest ship.

[M]odern life has a pacing problem. Middle age is uncomfortably crammed with career and caregiving responsibilities, while many older people find themselves with neither enough purpose, connection or income to live comfortably.

Corinne Purtill, NY Times, “As We Live Longer, How Should Life Change? There Is a Blueprint.”

In the first weeks after Kabul fell to the Taliban on Aug. 15, a coalition of nations conducted a colossal, if often haphazard, airlift to extract tens of thousands Afghans suddenly in grave danger because of their work for foreign governments or Afghan security services. But without the U.S. security blanket — the last American C-17 cargo planes left at the end of August — few countries have been willing to hazard their planes and their people to continue evacuations, leaving thousands of at-risk Afghans with few options for escape.

Enter Ukraine, a small but battle-hardened nation after years of war with Russian-backed separatists. After Kabul fell, Ukraine’s giant Ilyushin military planes were among the first to arrive to help with the evacuation. At one point, a group of Ukrainian G.U.R. officers left the security of the airport and, firing their rifles into the air, cleared a path for a pair of buses transporting journalists to safety.

Michael Schwirtz, A Nervy Trip to Kabul: How Ukraine Negotiated With the Taliban and Rescued 96 Afghans, New York Times

I love this story, especially because all of this unfolded just a few months before the Russian invasion.

I strongly recommend reading the whole article if you have a New York Times subscription–given everything that was thrown at the Ukrainians, it’s amazing that this evacuation happened at all.

Former U.S. Senator Mike Gravel died on Saturday, June 26. He is most notable for being a U.S. Senator from 1969 to 1981, but I remember him best from his unsuccessful run for president in 2008, which turned him into an early YouTube viral star. Here’s a quick overview:

The Rock

Let’s start with the “Rock” video, for which he is probably most famous. In 2007, Gravel posted this…unorthodox 3-minute video of himself on YouTube. He stares into the camera for over a minute, then, without a word, turns around and threw a rock into a lake. According to Gravel, this wasn’t an ad but a “metaphor of an ordinary citizen who acts in an unusual and extraordinary way.” The rock-throw represented a person starting a revolution.

Weird, yes, but Time Magazine later included it in its list of Top 10 Campaign Ads of all time.

(By the way, Gravel posted an updated version of the video when he made another run for the presidency in 2020.)

Lobbying the Obama Girl

Gravel was competing in the 2008 presidential campaign against, among others, Barack Obama, who had some viral moments of his own up his sleeve.

In June 2007, the YouTube channel Barely Political hired a model to play “Obama Girl” in a video in which the character expressed her crush on Barack Obama.

In a subsequent video, Barely Political posted this video of Gravel trying to recruit the “Obama Girl” onto his campaign. It featured Gravel singing (for real, which was better than the actress playing Obama Girl, who was lip syncing), rapping, and trying to impress her with the Crank That Soulja Boy dance. The result was hilarious:

Power to the People. Give Peace a Chance.

Just watch the video. It’s worth it.

A year and six days ago, I wrote a post on this blog listing the oldest cruise ships serving at the time at the world’s major cruise lines. I published the post on March 6, which was five days before the World Health Organization declared the novel coronavirus disease to be a worldwide pandemic. The world, and the cruise industry, has changed a lot since that time.

In this post, I am reposting the list with relevant updates, mostly for my curiosity. Keep in mind that I am getting most of this information from Wikipedia so there might be some errors. As a note, the statement “no other changes in fleet” means no other ships were retired or sold or scrapped, from what I can tell. It does not take into account the transfer of other ships into the fleet.

Cruise lines with at least 0.1% of global passengers, per Wikipedia, as of today:

This essay by T.L. Knighton is well worth the read.

I came across it after googling the name of the narrator of a ridiculous “documentary” series on Netflix. In fact, I hesitate to call it a documentary because it wasn’t a documentary — the series consisted of a person (who was not qualified to talk about what she was talking about) who spent several hours perpetuating ridiculous fringe theories, pseudoscience, and “OMG GOVERNMENT COVER-UP!”-type things.

These quotes from his post sum up the problem with these faux documentary series:

They all present it the same way.  A bit of pseudoscience, an “expert” presented as the definitive source, and a bit of rebuttal over conventional wisdom, all without really presenting the facts that lead to conventional wisdom being conventional. […]

They present someone as an authority, then present a one-sided version of the discussion as if it were the complete and total truth.

T.L. Knighton, ” Why You Should Never Take It At Face Value”

The point, he says, is that documentaries that present facts in this way are problematic because the damage they cause is very real. By presenting fringe theories as fact, fallacies get perpetuated. Then you get the general population believing that vaccines are dangerous, or that a particular virus was bio-engineered to kill the population.

Treat things you are unsure of or unfamiliar with with skepticism. Don’t take things at face value.

Just some reference for myself. This list is derived from information on Wikipedia, so take it with a grain of salt:

• American Airlines Boeing 767-300ER (by end of 2020 or 2021)
• American Airlines Embraer 190 (by end of 2020)
• Delta Airlines McDonnell Douglas MD-88 (by end of 2020)