On the Inside

Check out this news post for a few more details:

http://www.ubercart.org/news/oct-09-2007/vote_ubercart_coolsw

Basically, Intel made a Digg-like site for cool software projects, and I firmly believe that's Ubercart. I'd love it if everyone here would go take a moment to register and vote us up to the top of the list.

Go Ubercart, go!

Click here to vote!

Well, I'm speeding off on a plane to Barcelona, Spain (where it hopefully won't rain). But I've got no more time to make up more rhymes... just a quick announcement for you. I'll be keeping the Drupalcon Womblog going at my new site, By Wombats. Be sure to check it out for my reports and pics from the conference and the city. Can't wait to get there! (But I have no clue what I'll do once I get there. I have no clue how I'll get around or how I'll pay for anything. But some details are less important than others. I DO know Drupal, and I'm pretty sure my wife will be with me. )

Well, I just got back from seeing the movie 3:10 to Yuma with my wife and the Hedricks (friends from work/church). I really enjoyed the movie... a great Western, but quite a sad story. I can't help but feel like it shows the futility of nobility, but it does it while glorifying nobility. Without giving away too much, there is a man who is doing the right thing because it is the right thing and he needs to prove that that is good to his son. To reach his final goal, he has to accept the help of a man of dubious character... but that man is only motivated to help him because he is inspired by the noble man's desires. It seems like being noble doesn't quite cut it, but then again nobility may inspire even the least likely persons to contribute to the good cause.

Now if only you all had seen the movie already that wouldn't have been so confusing.

(Good performances from both Christian Bale and Russell Crowe, by the way!)

Also thanks to Google, space exploration and moon travel will get one step closer. Check out the following article to see why:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6993373.stm

If only I could take part in the competition. Unfortunately, I imagine any moon rover I'm able to construct would only make it 400m across the surface of the planet, so I'm not even going to bother entering.

Google was a life saver when we needed to rebuild the Ubercart site. I should've checked it for my original "I now pronounce you..." post, too! Anyways, here's what it said originally:

I now pronounce you...

Man and wife! That is what Christina (see her bridal portraits) and I are. We were married on August 18th, 2007 and had an absolutely wonderful honeymoon. We've been showered with blessing over and over. All our friends and family who came to help and to celebrate with us were incredible. Everyone who gave a gift or a card was sooo generous. The wedding was perfect, and my pastor preached an encouraging sermon that helped me think about the way I tend to enjoy things given as gifts and lose site of the joys of heaven. We were upgraded to an incredible suite in the Hyatt in downtown Greenville by family to enjoy the wedding night. We spent a week at David Bailey's unbelievable mountain home for free and got to tour the Biltmore Estate two days. We stopped at my grandparents' on the way home and got a free recliner and hedge trimmer. And we made it back to Louisville on August 25th to spend our first night ever in our new house at 528 Camp St. (updated pictures to follow as soon as we can get them).

Now we've been trying to get things in order at the house and have been using plenty of Target gift cards and will continue to use some other gift cards, certificates, and wedding money. Oh! Did I mention my boss is sending us to Barcelona, Spain!?! Basically, that's the icing on the cake for an incredibly blessed marriage. I don't think we could've possibly had a better start as a couple.

We'll be flying to Barcelona on September 17th where I will attend and hopefully give some presentations at this year's Drupalcon. I plan on presenting several Ubercart related sessions, or at least holding impromptu coding sessions with other developers. We're really hoping to bring in some new talent and spread the word about Ubercart to the Drupal community at large. Christina and I are of course going to take some personal time to explore the city as well. She's been there before and is fluent in Spanish, so we'll have no problem making our way around. I just setup our accommodations yesterday, and we'll be staying with four other Drupal developers in an incredible apartment close to La Sagrada Familia, an incredible looking Gothic cathedral that I hope to explore.

So... I was using the bathroom downstairs, and I believe that because of its close proximity to the basement (and a ventilation fan that actually blows down into the basement when the light is on) there are spiders in this bathroom. Most of them are small, but every now and then one that might have a centimeter leg span can be seen crawling around. Today I watched as a bigger one crawled all over the place looking for prey or a place to call home. (I always wonder as I watch them what exactly they're looking for...)

This particular spider ran across a few other spiders' webs, but those were itty bitty spiders. I couldn't tell if he was trying to score one of their pre-built webs or just feed off them. They would always run away speedy quick on their little webs and the big spider would move on. Now, believe it or not, I believe he got caught in one of the webs! The little spider is probably greedily biding his time until the big dude is sleeping to go inject him with poison and wrap him up. It's incredible the things that happen once you buy a house!

I'd like to call this display of awesome spider mortal combat pesticide, bringing a new meaning to the word that for some people is synonymous with carcinogen. Pesticide is the killing of one pest by another pest, in this case spiders. Now I just need to get another mouse...

So, Christina and I were taking the trash out yesterday and ran into a spot of trouble. It's a big affair at our house currently to take the trash out, because our back gate is locked with a lock to which we have no key. We have to either throw the trash over the fence and get around to put it in the can or just drive it around in my truck. We chose to drive it around.

Unfortunately, when we got there - to her partial dismay and my somewhat delight - all we found was a charred pile of melted plastic and metal. Apparently someone decided to torch our trash can, and they got it good. There was nothing left! Eventually we'll replace that lock and keep the can inside. I don't know if I should bother having the city replace the can until then.

Man and wife! That's what Christina and I are as of August 18th, 2007. I posted recently with my thoughts and feelings, about the incredible blessings we've been receiving and are continuing to receive from family and friends, and about our upcoming journey to Barcelona, Spain for this year's Drupalcon. Unfortunately, the web host I use had a crash and had to roll back to a backup version of the databases. Good for me I don't update very often. I only lost one post!

I'll try to get it back up as soon as possible, but that just doesn't happen quickly when you don't have an internet connection at home!

Well... and now I post.

I've been dealing with rebuilding the Ubercart site for the last week at work. Unfortunately, we had an embarrassing backup solution (read, none) that led to us losing our website's database when our RAID system went yonkers. This means all our forum posts, contributions, live site listings, documentation, users, etc... the whole shebang... went the way of the dodo. This has given me a good opportunity to rebuild everything "in the know" so to speak. I've been able to avoid some of the failures of our previous systems with the benefit of a year's worth of hindsight. So it has been all bad... just mostly.

Oh! I finally got a closing date. This means I'll be moving into 528 Camp St. early next week before heading down to Greenville, SC for the wedding. Talk about cutting it close... closing on the house not even a week before getting married! But at least I'll have a house to bring my lovely bride to be home to (even if our bed won't have any sheets and the shower curtain won't be up!). I formally invite you all to come help with the moving and sprucing up of the property.

Finally, this evening I was reading the gift I got one of my groomsmen. (I hope he'll be alright with a slightly used copy of The New Evidence that Demands a Verdict by Josh McDowell.) It's sort of a collection of apologetics outlines by McDowell that touches on any and every subject you might want to read about. Well, I started by reading an essay included in it by C.S. Lewis which was stellar. Feeling like I was cheating a little I turned to a chapter written by McDowell and read a bit about defenses for the deity of Christ... and I realized it was an approach I'd never read before. I found it to be quite encouraging!

I just wanted to post a link here to a radio show that is once again available from Michael Card's website. This is a rerun, but it's some of the best teaching and music I've ever heard from the book of Jonah. I invite you all to listen to it and post your thoughts!

http://www.michaelcard.com/radioarchive/show275.html

(This show won't stay up forever, so you really should try to check it out soon.)

No time to talk, but you should probably check this out if any bit of you is a geek like me. It's an interesting article (a rant by a big geek, really) about the possible future of computing. It's about time for some radical changes in the way we use these things!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/6225398.stm

Seriously, is there no end to these new extreme sports? At least they're branching out to allow folks with disabilities participate. For example, check out the following article:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6732003.stm

One word... awesome.

http://www.starcraft2.com

Anyone that wants to can buy me this collector's item.

Ok, I found Scratch and toyed with it yesterday for a bit and vowed not to stay up as late tonight dinking around with it. Well, I'm heading to bed a full hour earlier than yesterday...

I made an actual game this time, and I encourage you to check it out, beat my high score, and favorite it. The challenge was just too fun... create a game in a limited system with a language that functions differently in your test environment from the production environment (as in, some code just breaks and the speed is all wiggedy-whack when you upload your projects).

Check it out! http://scratch.mit.edu/projects/rszrama/3338

So, seriously, I was headed to bed after talking with Christina when a BBC news headline caught my eye. I don't remember the exact words, but it said something about programming. I guess it could've said "You're stupid for reading articles about programming" and I still would've read it, so the actual headline isn't important. What is cool is that it was just some little announcement/interview about a project MIT has had going to broaden the field for programmers and game creation. To be clear, I don't think this is really a good idea. I remember the old days where Klik 'n Play games were a dime a dozen and worth every penny... this doesn't promise much more yet, but it sure has potential. At least it's got staying power if MIT is behind it. They just might do something nice. And judging by the timestamp on this post, they've already done enough to keep me toying with it for 2 hours and shamelessly putting out sample code for how to make a platform game character jump. See the project by clicking here, and forgive me for how stinking difficult it is. The timing is different between testing on your computer and playing online.

This post is somewhat of a Google experiment... The word, glarlbesle, originated in the office when Lyle (for reasons most likely only known to him and at one time known to me though I've forgotten...) decided to type some gibberish. I thought it would sound good in a piratey voice, so I said "Glarlbesle!" with a sinister, piratey theatrical flourish. And that is the origin of glarlbesle.

I've had folks asking me what it means, wondering if it comes from some fantasy book or another. Is it a word in an ancient tongue? It very well may be... but as far as I'm concerned, "Glarlbesle!" most likely just represents what is missing from your work day to make it less monotonous. Perhaps it may soon show up on a search engine near you!

(If you have photos on Flickr, can you please tag pirate related photos with Glarlbesle? Feel free to link back to this post from the description!)

This is a letter to the global church from the Protestant Church of Smyrna, a story about the recent martyrdom of three men who were teaching the Bible to people in the province of Malataya in Turkey. I encourage you to read it, observing the confidence of men who were slaughtered while believing in the resurrection of the dead and the difference between a religion that justifies such slaughter and one that makes it bearable. I know these Christians aren't the only people in the world suffering, and they aren't even the only people in the world suffering for the sake of the name of Jesus, but their tale is sad and heroic, unfortunate and yet triumphant.

Click the Read more link beneath this description to read the letter.

Take me to the moon in 2024, to Mars a few years later, and once propulsion technology catches up to the current Science Fiction, how about Gliese 581 C? Apparently, an earth like planet has been found 20 light years away that could indeed host human life sometime in the future.

Seriously, how cool would that be? Sign me up for the second mission! (Since all the people on the first mission will be eaten by alien wildlife and we'll learn from our mistakes.)

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/6589157.stm

Most of you have properly at least caught wind of the scandal at Duke University last year where the lacrosse team reportedly gang raped a black stripper. All charges were eventually dropped, and that's all I ever heard about the case until this evening. I came across a blog called Durham-in-Wonderland that is an incredible, incredible piece of investigative journalism. It was written by a history prof in New York who rose to the defense of the lacrosse team and showed time and again how horribly this case was executed. I read through it and can hardly believe he's talking about the United States. The errors, presumptions, and illegal actions described in this narrative I'm linking to are inexcusable. This is a clear case of "reverse" racism, a man mobilizing a black community to vote for him based on his defense of an oppressed (and innocent? how? ) black woman who can't tell a story the same way twice to save her life... or make a case.

Check it out: http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/2007/03/overall-case-narrative.html

Link to the blog: http://durhamwonderland.blogspot.com/

This guy's incredible. I hope he's there to help me if I ever get falsely accused.