On the Inside

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, 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!

One word... awesome.

http://www.starcraft2.com

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

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!)

I just thought I'd post a quick entry about other February events of note besides the engagement. First of all, I was made Geek of the Month of the Intuit Developers Network for some work I did integrating QuickBooks accounting software with our e-commerce system at work. If you'd like to read the article in all its geekiness, check it out at this site: http://developer.intuit.com/developer/newsletter.asp?id=530. Also, I turned 24 on February 15. Woohoo. Somehow those things just pale in comparison to one of the most amazing things to ever happen to me.

I wrote the following story to propose to my fiancee, Christina. If you haven't read it yet, you should start with the story of the engagement by clicking here. Our relationship began with stories through a reading program I was doing for children in the park near my house. We both love fairy tales, and they have constantly been a part of our relationship and a shared pleasure. This seemed like the natural way for me to form a proposal! There is plenty of symbolism in here for the engaged (hah) reader to find, and I'll be happy to post a follow-up explaining some of it at a later date... when I've had a bit of sleep to refresh my mind. :)

Enjoy!

Oh my, what does the title of this post say? Engaged to be married? Could it mean that a wonderful romance has entered a new stage? I think it does... and I'd be happy to tell you all about it!

Over the Christmas vacation I shared with Christina, we talked a wee bit about the future of our relationship and my desire to pursue engagement. After shipping Christina off to Italy to get cultured, I had a nice little chat with her father on the phone about asking his daughter to marry me and desiring his blessing on the relationship. I believe I told him, "I'd like to know you think that's a good idea." He said he'd get back to me... and I think he forgot to call back until he was on a cruise ship heading out of the country. He did call me back, though, and briefly described the ship before assuring me that he and Karina do in fact think it's a good idea for me to propose to Christina. Phew... good news... now three weeks to find an engagement ring...

So, I'm kind of curious if heaven's going to be a never ending worship service where we just all sit around and shout out favorite songs we'd like to sing. I was thinking about this while driving home from a Bible study tonight with my friend Coshack. He absolutely loves the song Beautiful, Scandalous Night by Smalltown Poets. It's a wonderful song about being washed by the blood of Jesus and drinking deeply from the waters of salvation. You probably don't know Coshack, but he's been ransomed by that blood and brought into those waters from a life that had him on a hospital bed not just half dead but dead. He had to be resuscitated, and this I tell him is the kindness of God. It doesn't look very kind, but it brought Coshack to repentance, and the Bible tells us it is the kindness of God that leads men to repentance.

Thus begins the first of the Italian flavored blog posts. I was priveleged to listen to a pair of precious voicemails from Venice on my way into work this morning. Unfortunately, I was actually awake but not near my phone, so I didn't actually get to talk with the Maiden this morning. She arrived safely and is of course very tired. She slept a little on the flight over, but since she's now 6 hours ahead she had to stay up essentially another day. And all that on little sleep and an infected lung. We can continue to pray for her health.

I was able to get in touch later, but not by calling her. Apparently the front desk at her hotel didn't like my English or something, because I just got hung up on twice. I'll try again tomorrow... maybe brush up on my Italian "Room 119, please" in the meantime. She called me later in the afternoon before turning in and we got to chat for about 15 minutes. It was wonderful. She's still the same Maiden after all... a continental divide just can't change her. (Happily for me!) She's rooming with a Christian named Jen, so you can join with me in praying their time together is mutually beneficial as Christina already reported it is.

That's all for now... Ciao.

This is a wide ranging blog post of a few topics on my mind with no necessary or imagined interconnectivity. However, there is a certain tendency toward insufferability that begs me to try to draw connections for the sake of it... (For those of you who don't know, you can click the read more links under my blog posts to view the whole thing!)

First, I'd love for you all to check out this news story: Amazon boss shows off spacecraft. Ahh, my ticket to the moon. It even has a video you can watch of this cone shaped spaceship lifting off and floating back to earth. Solid ground. Land... oh, I'd love to leave it and lose myself (and hopefully not my lunch) in the weightlessness of space. The other article I have for you isn't as cool, but it's interesting nonetheless: Black hole found in ancient lair. Makes me think a black hole is like a dragon... hoarding its wealth, the glory of the stars.

Ahh... 172 hours with the Maiden, give or take a little while. I met up with her in Atlanta the evening of December 26th and dropped her off (sadly) in Lexington (very sadly) on January 2nd (it was sad). I shan't be seeing her until the middle of February when she returns from Italy, so I hope my distress is understandable. I have plenty of good memories, warm fuzzies, hugs, and kisses on the cheek to hold me over, though. I couldn't have asked for a greater vacation or more wonderful partner in time for the week after Christmas. And I let her know it. And I let everyone else know it. I am absolutely in love with this girl and find her to be delightful, beautiful, charming, smart, and funny. And she smells nice, too.

My love for her has only been increasing, and I hope to make her my wife.

Well, I have several things I want to post, but I have to start somewhere. So, for tonight, a quick anecdote from last week's lesson in children's Sunday school...

Having read this article, I thought I must share it with you! Nasa is apparently planning to establish a base on the south pole of the moon by the year 2024. The goal is to get 6 month residential visits by astronaut crews by the end of that year. Incredible! I'm sure they'll need a chaplain eventually, and you can bet I'll be the first to sign up.

Well, for the second time today, I browsed away from a page in the middle of editing it and lost my work. This should motivate me to develop an auto-save module for node forms. In fact, I really just might make that... Earlier I browsed away from a page I was editing at work for a new module I'm developing (read about TAPIr here), and just now I browsed away to Gmail while posting a new blog entry.

When you're at a place where your prayer life is suffering, I've found you don't need to go to another prayer service. You can reinvigorate it just as (if not more) easily by taking your Cuban immigrant friend out for driving lessons... without even knowing if he can drive... through some of the worst streets in town. Oh man, have I got a story to tell.

I received both tonight and enjoyed them. The tea was a nice minty tea from Starbucks they called "Refresh." I'm not sure how much it refreshed me, but it certainly tasted good and felt nice on my sore throat. I'm a pretty big weenie when it comes to hot drinks, though, so I actually had to take the top off the cup and let it cool for about 45 minutes before it stopped burning my tongue. Good insulation on those cups...