Makin breakfast

Makin breakfast

Will and Rachel came over for breakfast this morning, and I took some pictures.
As you might notice, we eat breakfast at noonish in my household

Add comment September 23rd, 2007

HR Geeks

This morning, I launched a new version of the HR Geeks website.  I’m proud to say we now have the only non-hideous, non-1995 website of any geek group in Hampton Roads

The site is running WordPress, with a highly hacked up GridFocus theme.  After much debate, and a not-insignificant-delay, I determined that I didn’t have the free time or energy to maintain the site using a custom CMS, or even a pre-built ‘framework’ like Django.  The big scare over a ‘public’ CMS, like WP, is security issues.  Luckily for me, I use WP on a number of other blogs, so keeping track of upgrades and the like is fairly easy to do.

As part of the migration, we also dumped the old PHP Webcalendar system, and moved to a public Google Calendar for all event tracking.  PHP Webcal was a very non-elegant system to use, while Google Calendar provides a superset of the features, with nearly 0 effort on our part.  There is even the possibility that we could grant access to the public calendar for certain groups to modify their own dates.  I’m not sure how access controlled Gcal is  currently (I know you can have multiple editors, but is it free for all for them?), but it’s worth a look.  Having iCal support, now that I’m using OSX full time, is incredibly useful.  The HTML output is substantially prettier than any of the other PHP web calendar’s that I’ve seen so far.

2 comments September 19th, 2007

Giving in

I’m giving in to iTunes.  It’s becoming to much of a pain to fight against it.  Maybe if I let it do all it wants, it will stop requiring my computer to beg and plead for more power…

Add comment September 18th, 2007

Old, but excellent, Esquire Article

These are impolite questions. Nobody asks them here by the cool pond tucked into a gentle hillside. Increasingly, nobody asks them outside the gates, either. It is impolite to wonder why our parents sent us all to college, and why generations of immigrants sweated and bled so their children could be educated, if it wasn’t so that we would all one day feel confident enough to look at a museum filled with dinosaurs rigged to run six furlongs at Belmont and make the not unreasonable point that it is all batshit crazy and that anyone who believes this righteous hooey should be kept away from sharp objects and his own money.

Read the rest here:  http://www.esquire.com/features/ESQ0207GREETINGS

Add comment September 17th, 2007

The Social Network

The last few days, I’ve spent cleaning out, updating, linking, fixing my accounts and profiles on countless social networking websites and services. I really wish the industry had come up with a federated account system - it’s a real pain in the neck to change your registered email address at dozens of different websites!

It’s also eye opening to see how many sites you’ve created accounts on, but haven’t used in months (or years - Orkut, for example).

So far, I’ve updated twitter, linkedIn, last.fm, del.icio.us, facebook, flickr, orkut, and bloglines.  I feel like I’m missing some…

Add comment September 13th, 2007