Archives for December 2004
And BTW
Merry Christmas!
We’re alive!
Wow, what a past couple of days it has been. The icy winter storm that coated the east side of Columbus had a death sentence for many of the trees around here. Of course this also means a death sentence for a lot of the over head power lines. I believe it got upwards of 300,000+ without power. Although I can not complain as much as others around here; our power was restored in around 24 hours.
Let me tell you, it gets very cold with out any heat. Because I am a lucky homeowner with a finished basement, I hung out at the house to man the generator which was running our sump pump. Renee and the kids stayed in a hotel.
Updated theme
I switched themes yet again; but this time is different. Using the excellent, and semi-legendary Kubrick theme which has been ported to Drupal. Woot! Made a couple of tweaks so far.
I was wanting to change to a fixed width design, but you know me and time. This will make for an excellent base, which I can expand upon. 
Gentoo’s Guide XML in Drupal
I’d like to see the ability to use Gentoo’s Guide XML documentation standard in Drupal. For what I’d like to do with the site, this would really kick ass. While Drupal’s article module is nice for presenting guides on the web, the data is pretty much stuck in that format. Using XML to markup the data would allow tons of flexibility in how it can be rendered.
I’ve been trying to figure out how this could be implemented. I think it would be best as a module. As I see it, it would probably be either a new node, or a some kind of input filter. Maybe both. Unfortunately, I’m not too knowledgeable on XML or creating modules for Drupal. Either of them can not be that hard to learn though.
Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…
Just in time to put you in that Christmas mood: Genitals caught fire doing surgery. Ouch! Would suck to be him…
Damn spammers
Well, I’ve temporarily turned off the comments module due to fucking spammers. Looks like the other day I was hit by some online casino, which posted lots of “comment spam”. This is a new form of spam which has come about due to the increase in popularity with blogs nowadays. Until I can figure out a way to prevent A) that particular spammer from hitting me again, or B) all spammers from posting, no one will be able to post comments.
Damn spammers; they ruin it for everyone.
Rather humorous
Ran accross this while googling for clonch: blogshares. Here you can buy/sell weblog shares in a fantasy stock market for weblogs. Of course, everything is governed by the BSEC, that is the Blog Securities and Exchange Commision!
[EDIT]: fixed my missing verb in the second sentence. 
Mozilla’s Thunderbird
Discovered Mozilla’s Thunderbird this weekend. I really, quite enjoy it, if an email client can be enjoyed. I have a fairly exotic email situation where I have multiple accounts. Not to exotic about that, right? Well I wanted to be able to receive email to its own “.pst” file (thereby showing up in the root listing of my mail folders) and send from multiple smtp servers. This would allow me to send email using each account using their SMTP server, thereby keeping the reply-to addresses correct. In Outlook, the closest I could come to this involved profiles, which works, except you can only have one instance of Outlook open at a time. For me, it is easier to leave my email client open all the time. Then I simply have to log in to check my mail. I’m bad about not checking my mail, so I need all the help I can get; people can attest to this!