Darice de Cuba

After almost three years of no traveling I took a last minute vacation back home on Aruba. A lot has changed on the island, the city is decayed, screaming economical recess. But then again in the hotel area it’s blooming full of restaurants, shops and malls. Tourist have no reasons to leave the hotel area other then exploring the island nature.

And Aruba keeps getting more American, we now have TGIF, Quiznos, Hard Rock Cafe. Starbucks is opening soon at Seaport Market Place. Plus all other fast food joints we already have of which all have several locations on the island. You know this 30km long island, and they all get more then enough customers.

In any case I’m enjoying the restaurants more, I went to this place Mathew’s at Casa Del Mar Beach where I had a delicious chicken quesadilla. I like the Mexican food here better then in the Netherlands. So I try to eat the food I don’t get there. Tomorrow I’m hoping to go to a seafood restaurant for dinner, Caribbean seafood that is.

I went to the beach also after my lunch at Mathew’s, the water was heaven, just the right temp. It has been such a long time since I took a swim in the sea. And to think when I still lived here going to the beach was as normal as grocery shopping.

The weather is another thing, global warming sure is evident here on Aruba. 12 -15 years ago it was hot, but the wind was cool, when the sun was at it highest it would be around 31 degrees Celsius. But now the high is 33 Celsius everyday, the low is around 26. The wind feels dry and warm, it’s just unbearable. It rains more often then before but it adds nothing to cool the atmosphere, but at least the nature is always green while back then in the summer time it would be brown due to no rain.

When I’m back in the Netherlands and it’s winter I hope I don’t have to get complaints that is warm(because I’m always cold) and they want to open a window. Because that ain’t nothing, if you are warm in the winter you haven’t felt what warm is like.

Hopefully I will have some decent photos soon to upload on Flickr. I only uploaded photos taken with my iPhone so far. I have the Nikon D70 and the Ricoh GR with me. But no Photoshop on my netbook so I will only upload low quality photos edited with Flickrs online tools.

Well like the saying goes “the shit has hit the fan”, I’m getting errors on the admin back-end of Simplelog, I can’t view my posts and comments nor edit them. I can only adjust the site preference and add a new post. You can see the error I’m getting. I saved it as a plain page.

It just stopped working one day to the other, my host looked into it and they say it’s a problem with Simplelog and not their server configuration. And seeing Simplelog is no longer actively developed and it’s user group is almost non existent I’m on my own on this.

I’m seriously considering switching to the newest weblog app Chyrp. It’s done with PHP using a MVC design pattern. Since it launched I’ve been dropping in once in a while to follow updates. Up until now development on it is steady and it has an active user group in the forums.

So these coming days I’ll be running Chyrp locally learning how it works, importing my current site design in Chyrp format. I’ll have to reset my host server settings making the root PHP again, and installing Chyrp online. All content I made with Simplelog I’ll will pull with a simple PHP script from the database and keep them under archives, unless I manage to import them in Chyrp.

Lots of work ahead and not really motivated to get started but I’ll do my best. If anyone knows why I get the error mentioned above in Rails using Simplelog please let me know at darice at darice dot org I’m guessing they updated the Rails or Ruby version of the server and the script being more then a year old stopped working, or at least a part of it.

I’ll keep comments closed considering I can’t edit them so I can’t remove spam. So email me if you have advice or something to say….I’ll keep you posted on the switching progress.