Mobile Hippie

I am fully into day three of a Southern adventure. Some may already know of my illustrious heritage. I come from a family of self-proclaimed rednecks. (Well, the men are rednecks. The women mostly just put up with the men.)

Day one we flew out of Portland to Nashville via the Chicago Midway airport. We had enough time to stop at the Haray Caray’s restaurant—not a single microbrew available on tap or in a bottle. (This is going to be a recurring theme.) Regardless of the limited libations, it was nice to take a breather and enjoy a sit down lunch. The food wasn’t anything to write about.

Food worth writing about would come later when we finally arrived at my parents’ house in Smyrna, just outside of Nashville. Mom is a great cook and had a full meal of German noodles with pesto (fusion cooking at its best), oven-roasted vegetables, fried okra (damn, I love that stuff), and baked chicken. It is great to see my family after such a long time. We only get together a couple times a year at most. This is the first time in nearly four years that I have traveled here.

Day two, we rolled into in Jackson, Tennessee—the place of my birth. We are staying at a Holiday Inn where my dad’s side of the family has joined us.

Holiday Inns in the South don’t have the same amenities I have come to expect. Where the heck is the WiFi? And Diana and I are suffering through the lack of good coffee. We are kicking ourselves for not packing some Stumptown Hairbender.

Last night’s dinner was at a Ryan’s in Jackson. Nothing like a buffet restaurant to remind you of the weight problem that plagues the United States in general and the South in particular. All-you-can-eat is not a good idea people! I was also a little disturbed by the dental health of our waitresses—almost comically crooked and gold teeth abound. Really, it was weird. I’m not being mean; I was just freaked out by it.

Day three, we are going to my great-aunts 90th birthday party. This will give us a little more time with my aunts, uncles and cousins. It has been a little confusing and overwhelming for the kids. There are a lot of faces that they’ve never seen before. Not too mention the fact that some of my relatives talk a little “differently” than what my kids are accustomed to hearing.

Below is an example. Please note, this is not an actual relative. This guy works in the warehouse at the company where my dad works. I’m sure I have an uncle that has attempted something similar at sometime—it just hasn’t made it to YouTube yet. Enjoy!

YouTube - Grasshopper vs Redneck

UplinkEarth managed to make an enemy out of me today. I don’t use them for my personal blog or any new sites. Frankly, I’m not using Coldfusion much anymore and I don’t particularly care for Windows servers. I rely on Dreamhost and Media Temple for my hosting needs these days. (Yeah, I know that Dreamhost decided to charge me for 2009 a year in advance a couple of months ago, but they fixed the issue and my site was never down—just my available balance on my credit card.)

Hey UplinkEarth, I know it can be hard work to provide good support for a cheap price, but what the heck! Today, I was treated to the following issues:

• The database does not reflect the data that was present as recently as last week. All event data is gone for the moment.
• The files seem to be at least a month old—I had recently updated a couple of files with new code, so I know what they should have looked like. 
• Several files were not restored to their proper directory outside of the webroot (www). My site relied on that data as it was written in Coldfusion and used an application.cfm file, components, custom tags and a bit of magic to serve up a pretty decent custom app.
• Also the “shared” folder is no longer mapped to the shared SSL cert that was related to the authentication scripts on the site.

My resumé is very much out of date. For those of you wondering, I now work for The New Group. (Don’t hold our website against me—I would use a lot less Flash. It is getting updated soon.)

It has been a crazy first month at a company that is in the midst of some interesting changes and rapid growth. I’m really looking forward to the ride, though I can’t say I felt that way two weeks ago.

For those of you in the midst of change, give it a few weeks. It is amazing what you will learn if you allow yourself to go through at least one month worth of change with a group of people. I am really impressed with the team I am going to be working with. I can’t wait to see what we create.

I just completed a nearly painless upgrade to WordPress 2.5. I say “nearly painless” only because I managed to trigger a page error when attempting to upgrade a couple of plugins. (Apparently you have to deactivate a plugin before you upgrade it, which is a reasonable requirement, but it doesn’t say “deactivate first” anywhere.)

Technically, the actual 2.5 upgrade went off without a hitch thanks to WordPress Automatic Upgrade. Everything in my template just worked, which I couldn’t say after the 2.3 upgrade earlier this year.

So what is my favorite new feature? Well, so far it has to be the automatic plugin upgrade, but I am looking forward to using some fo the media features and the media browser is a clear improvement.

Treehugger is touting Permablitz: Near Instant Permaculture for the ‘Burbs. I don’t live in the ‘burbs, but I do live in a high density Portland neighborhood. My goal by the end of this summer is to have a highly productive front lawn. The first step in that plan is the walkway seen in this photo. Next is a rock retaining wall so that I can level things out and start planting.

While speaking with Jon Maroney at the last Mobile Portland event, he mentioned that he was hoping to get a rickshaw or similar pedal-powered vehicle for picking up clients from the airport. Jon, I think I’ve found your transport. The highly convertable Cycles Maximus Trike seems like the perfect fit for bike-friendly Portland.

Now who’s going to import it? Clever Cylces? This seems right up their alley.

According to some wacky scientists out there, there is a possibility that turning on a really powerful nuclear device could have unexpected consequences. Pbbwfff!

[via TreeHugger]

In the course of handing off a project to another company, I just had the opportunity to say “just build them Boxes and Arrows on Drupal and they’ll be thrilled.” While I was merely using hyperbole to make a point, it got be thinking. What do they use to deliver their content?

The answer is PublicSquare. This is a subscription-based service for creating an online magazine with a community component. I’ve always like the layout and general functionality of Boxes and Arrows and now I know what they use to serve up their content.

I plan to look into this a bit more as the idea of a subscription-based magazine CMS intruiges me. I would have signed up for an account today, but it turns out that they have an expired security certificate on their account sign up page. I wonder if they know that?  (It expired on December 6, 2007.)

Flock Browser - The Social Web Browser

Flock bills itself as the browser for people who like to be connected. Really, I just wanted a browser that I could run the Web Developer Toolbar in now that Firefox Beta 3 has disabled that valuable add-on.

• Grouply
  Grouply is a tool that aggregates Yahoo and Google Groups into a daily digest.
  (tags: groups aggregator yahoo google grouply competition)