It seems like almost every golf course I play on a regular basis has at least one nemesis hole where I never score well. At this point, screw ups on these holes are almost all mental (although some holes are just plain hard). I imagine the pros have a similar feeling about the seventeenth at TPC Sawgrass – you know it’s coming, you know all the details of the hole, yet it still has the all-too-frequent ability to mushroom into a dreaded “other.”

Today’s lovely round at Willingers Golf Club in Northfield had two current nemesis holes for me: the par three seventh (which I don’t think I’ve hit in years) and the par four sixteenth (pictured above). I doubled both today in different fashions:

• Hit the left bank of the seventh green and ricocheted directly into the marsh. Dropped, chipped on and missed the putt.
• Pulled my drive on sixteen into the trees on the left off the tee, dropped and punched out to about 115 yards. Hit a perfect pitching wedge that landed just short of the hole, bounced up, hit the flag stick and rolled long. Missed the putt.

Golf for me really isn’t about scoring these days – I play primarily for the social interaction, being outside on a beautiful day and getting in a good walk. There is still the opportunity for a decent score each time I tee it up, though, so it would be nice if these nemesis holes would give up a par every once in a while…

With the new work site about to come online, I’ve been experimenting with various options for displaying photo galleries in WordPress. I’ve used Gallery2 with the WPG2 plugin for quite a long time on many of my sites, but it’s getting a little long in the tooth. Gallery3 hasn’t seemed to get a lot of traction yet and I really wasn’t too impressed with the other WordPress gallery options I tried.

There is a Lightbox plugin I’ve been using for a bit on this site called jQuery Lightbox For Native Galleries. It works with built-in WordPress galleries, which I also didn’t really like much. After reading more about them, however, I’ve decided to migrate from Gallery2 to native galleries and use the Lightbox plugin for all of my images.

There is another plugin out there that’s supposed to help automate this conversion, but I have so many images and albums, that I really want to do it manually. I’ve already culled some albums and might decide to only repost the best images in some of the larger albums (especially with golf and hockey shots).

I still need to research a way to replicate the random photo in the sub-footer (and not include private photos), reload several photo categories, decide how best to handle URL re-directs and/or 404 issues with the old Gallery2 URLs and decide if I want a better way to deal with titles, captions and EXIF data.

So far, though, I’m pretty happy with how things are working. Here is a sneak peak of the new look – feedback is always welcome.