Going Back for More

We had such a good time at Carnaval this year that we are already signed up to go again in February. This time we are heading to Mazatlan on the mainland of Mexico. The Carnaval at Mazatlan is supposed to be the third biggest in the Western Hemisphere with half a million people in attendance. The carnival lasts from February 15th to 20th this year so we are flying down on the 14th and back on the 21st to make sure we get it all in. We have rooms booked at a beach front hotel a 20 minute walk from the parade route.

Can't wait!

Carnaval in La Paz

We visited La Paz in Baja California Sur (near the tip of Baja) and enjoyed ringside seats for their Carnaval. The Malecón, the broad street along the bay front, is the site, and by blocking off traffic every afternoon at 4 PM they have a mile-long party that is packed with people from all over.

Carnaval is sponsored by the three major beer breweries of Mexico, so naturally you don't go thirsty. A 1 liter cup of great tasting beer cost about $1.80 US. There are food stands of all sorts and you can buy lots of stuff from decorations to pots and pans. The Mexican blanket vendors are a show in themselves hawking their bundles of blankets.

There are band stands set up about every 50 meters blasting out tunes. If you think that's too much interference, the bars right across the street from the bandstands have their own bands going with the whole front of the place opened up. We sat on the balcony of our hotel, seen above, and enjoyed the show.

The real treat was the parade. There are four parades on four consecutive days, but we were only there for the first one. It might not be as spectacular as the one in Rio, but it blew me away that a small city in Baja could mount such lavish display. If that wasn't enough, the crowd came armed with eggs full of confetti and spray cans of Silly String and some sort of foam. The police cars, beer trucks and all the people in the parade were fair game. Of course the paraders were free to retaliate, and they did!

Adding Letters With Foreign Accents

Notice in the post below I added some accent marks to the name of the hotel called La Mansión de los Sueños. I'm sure there is some magical incantation involving multiple keystrokes to invoke those accents directly in the Blogger.com compose window, but I don’t like doing things the hard way.

One way to do it is to use the Insert/Symbol feature of Microsoft Word. Then cut-and-paste the symbol into the compose window.

An even easier way is to just compose the whole post in Word, then cut-and-paste the whole thing into the compose window.

Exploring Mexico Without Leaving Town

Time to take a break from Geek work and have some other kind of fun. My wife and I attended the 1st Annual Mexico Travel & Real Estate Expo in San Diego. There were lots of people selling beach-front properties and condos in Baja, but there were some interesting people there too. One of the interesting things we found was this town in Mexico called Patzcuaro on a lake of the same name. Here is a URL to see more for yourself:

http://www.patzcuaromexico.com/

We met the owner of a small hotel there that is in a 350 year-old house. That’s a picture of it above. We don't think of Mexico being old, but it has more early history than the US. Strangely this hotel called La Mansión de los Sueños is not listed on the Web site above. Here is the URL for it:

http://www.prismas.com.mx/

I finally got rid of the green band across the title. It turned out to be a graphic. I was looking for a background color command and never found it. I used the trick of commenting out blocks of code to see what effect they had. It worked!

It also turns out that the green bands down the sides are graphics also. It's a very wide and short graphic that is repeated many times down the page. It has the green fade so that the original had a three dimensional look to it. Since it's too much green for me I'll have to either delete the graphic or replace it with a blue one.

You have probably noticed that the color scheme is kinda funky and things are shifting around a bit. It used to be all green and now a lot of blue (my favorite color) is showing up. That's because I'm experimenting with tweaking the HTML template that defines things like the background color and the default font.

The vast majority of bloggers never fool around with HTML code and their blogs look just fine. You have a lot of control over the content and format of your posts, but the template is the only place you can control the background and the overall arrangement of content on your blog page.

Since the purpose of this exercise in blogging is to learn all the nuts and bolts I'm going to mess with all the details of the template and see what comes of it.

The first thing I did was dump the olive green background in favor of medium slate blue. I used to have a bedroom with the walls painted that color and I find it very relaxing. Let's see what else I can customize.

HTML Text Post

This time I'm going to use some of the features of HTML. I can set the font to something fancy.. Exactly what font comes out on your screen depends on the fonts you have loaded in your machine. I purposely picked a strange font to see how it comes out.

Even a simple bold helps emphasis a point. Then you can change the text color! It helps to make the colorful text in the bold style to make it stand out.

How you invoke these text features depends on your e-mail client.

Posting Via E-Mail

It's not hard to post to your blog via e-mail. Suppose I'm at my Mom's
house where only a dial-up Internet connection is available and it's really
slow going through all the Web pages to make a post via the Web interface.
Mom has her e-mail client going so it's a snap to zip out an e-mail message
that ends up on my blog.

First I had to set up e-mail posting via the Web access. My blog site has a
Dash Board that controls all the settings. One of the settings is the
e-mail access. I filled in the blanks, which created a special e-mail
address for my blog posts. I have to keep that special address secret so
others can't mess with my blog.

Now I'm at the fringe on the Internet hanging by an e-mail-only thread. I
just type in the special address. The Subject line becomes the title for
the post. Now I just type in the post itself.

I'm using plain text for this post. You can turn on the HTML feature of
your e-mail client, if it has one, and add formatting like bold, fancy
fonts and colored text.

This is a post from

This is a post from my Verizon cell phone. It's a bit slow typing on the phone keypad.

Update From Anywhere

One good thing about a Web-based blog interface is that you can update the blog from any computer that has access to the Internet. I can remember the URL (www.blogger.com) and my username and password and I'm in. This post is coming from my computer at work.

I can only update my Web site from a single computer at home that has my Web authoring application (Microsoft FrontPage) on it. Of course that's OK because our Web site is largely focused on photographs and that's where I have the photo files stored and the photo editing application (Adobe Photoshop).

Blogging is just more free and easy.

I just discovered that I can add an image right into my blog post. Let's give it a try.

How about that! I can even format the post so the photo is embedded in the text. This is a portrait of my wife Nancy Moon and I taken at the local Sears store just before Christmas.

I'll have to add some more photos as we go along.