Blogs

A couple days back, I sat down to do my Christmas shopping. I'm not a big fan of shopping, but I do somewhat enjoy doing shopping for this one occasion, if only because I know I can it all in one place: Amazon. Plus, I've put in time over the preceding months marking off ideas for what to get people. This means the process should be relatively quick and painless. I went about gingerly putting items in the basket, along with my co-worker who decided now was the time to get hers done as well. I decided to get a Kindle for my aunt (shh...) and there was a checkbox for getting the power adapter and a $10 gift card for books for it so I went ahead and got those as well. We were going along at a good pace, and my co-worker finished up her shopping before I did. Finally, about 3 hours later, everything was ready to go with about $500 of gifts in my basket ready to be bought and sent. I put gift notes on each item, and proceeded along to what I thought would be the finishing step.

"We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature optimization is the root of all evil" - Donald Knuth

So, the new Drupal Answers site on StackExchange has been getting tested out, and I wanted to share with the greater community that I think it's a good idea. So far, there has been some good questions, even better answers, and most importantly there has been easy and effective moderation of content by some dedicated users. Plus, there is karma! And everybody loves karma.

One of the great things about Drupal 7 is the ease of rolling out new sites, especially in combination with Drush. I recently rolled out 3 sites with a total cost of my time of 3 hours, about 1 hour for each site to register the domain, setup the credentials and database, install Drupal, and pull in the content from the previous static site. So cost to me is minimal to perform those requests from friends/co-workers/family to roll out sites for them. Plus, with the ease of use of D7 I now don't have to worry that they won't be able to figure out how to maintain their site.

Well, I haven't broken my Mac yet, though turning on Voiceover by accident and not being able to turn it off was found amusing by all. Now, the first thing if Mac and I are to get along is remapping some keys. Apple, in all its wisdom, has of course apparently changed the location/names of these settings a number of times. Fortunately, the fix for me was offered up by Richard P. Stillane: