Tarn Aeluin

Whew - I made it. Its been about 7 years since we had to move and I guess about 15 years since we crossed a state line when moving, but this little trip takes the cake for the most arduous process I hope I ever experience. 5 days of packing and loading and then a day lay over then two days of unloading. Our movers were probably just as sick of us as we were of them Seriously though –> 3 guys to move a whole house! We had more guys to move our 1 bedroom apartment from Queens to Manhattan.

I got my new internet service up and running 5 minutes ago - still no TV (I’m going back to DirecTV) - but at least now I can get some news.

My next challenge will be learning the nuances of PA beer laws. I was not allowed to buy 2 twelve packs last night in a “beer take out” store. What the heck! Well anyway - I have to locate a “beer distributor” and get some brew.

We’ve lived in New Jersey since about 1993 starting out in Hoboken and moving several times westward to Neshanic Station and then Lebanon Borough. It is with a lot of sadness that we are leaving the Garden State, our great little town of 1500 people (yes there are towns in NJ with only 1500 persons!), and our friends as we head west into Pennsylvania.

We’ll miss our cool Victorian house that we’ve worked hard to restore. I feel that we have definitely left the house in better condition than when we moved in. My favorite contribution to the house is the rebuilt front porch. The custom railings are milled in solid cedar and the floor is tongue and groove mahogany finished with timber oil.

I’ll be off the ‘net for a while as we get packed, moved, and unpacked. We’re looking forward to our new house and I’m sure happy about cutting 2/3 of the distance off my daily commute.

Drupal is a very powerful and flexible framwork for web site and applications. You can do some really amazing things very easily. However sometimes the opposite is also true - simple thing can be seemingly impossible or annoyingly complex. Like many people I like to post personal pictures of vacations or other stuff to my web sites. Drupal’s capabilities for easily publishing a set of pictures, having them auto-scaled, and then visible in a gallery seem to be crude.

What’s up with this? I’ll examine some of the tools available for Drupal 6 and give some examples for exactly how to make a couple of the these work. Maybe in the end we’ll see things aren’t so bad afterall. Read the rest of this entry »

I just passed 1000 miles on my Saab Turbo-X. I’ve been doing a lot of back and forth driving around the Philadelphia metropolitan area. This has given me a great opportunity to break-in my car, learn how to handle it on both freeways and country roads, as well as how to operate the controls.

To start off with the car has had no mechanical issues - a good start. The interior and exterior of the car is exactly what I wanted - elegant, but simple and functional. I’m extremely impressed with the quality of the materials and the fit and finish. The paint is amazing. Read the rest of this entry »

Drupal 6 has been out for a while now and modules are getting ported to the new version. For those of us that are relatively new to Drupal it has been a long slow wait - but the benefit is that we have a bit of extra motivation to learn and do “stuff” for ourselves. Read the rest of this entry »

UPDATE 22-may-2008: Hey I broke 1000 miles - so here’s an update.

Last summer I started looking for a new car to replace my 2003 VW GTI VR6. Some of you might have read my “Two Germans and a Swede” post that talked about my decision. I placed my order for the Turbo-X on the first day possible and since then it has been many months of waiting. Yesterday I headed over to Saab of Hunterdon and picked up the car. Read the rest of this entry »

For my friends and family sick of my constant “Saab” story about my car not being here, finally the end is near. My dealer gave me the word that my dark Swede is here after many months of waiting (I ordered on day #1 last November). Now of course the only problem is that I’m away for a few days and you are getting as close to my car as me! Although I might just have to sneak out of my meeting to get a peek!

Here’s a great shot of my ride sitting at my dealer - I can’t wait to get in this rig and kick up some pavement.

Many thanks to Scot and Saab of Hunterdon.

I’ll post s full review after I take possession and get some time behind the wheel. I’ll also post a few more pics and closeups. Scot took a bunch, but I”ve got a 12 mpel Cannon that will get some good details. I’ll also try to post an audio of the exhaust note.

You can check out more pics on TrollhattanSaab

beren

I’ve been spending a lot of time with PHP lately thru my Drupal module work. Durpal modules are really an interesting way to learn about the good, the bad, and the ugly of PHP since there are a ton of techniques and varying qualities of code in the modules on drupal.org. I’ve updated my article on key things to remember about PHP based on some of these.

beren

I’ve seen two sites lately that really speak to the power of open-source CMS frameworks. One is based on Drupal and the other on Plone. Both are very nice and really show that these tools are serious power-houses for building sophisticated, modern, and very sexy websites. Enough drool, here they are:

• http://www.myplay.com
• http://nasascience.nasa.gov/

Lots of people don’t like these frameworks citing memory issues, scalability, etc., but I think these sites prove this isn’t the case.

I’ve learned quite a bit about how Drupal works with styles and how pages are rendered. Now I’m looking at how to build modules. What I would like to do is create a few custom modules that can “suck in” and combine information from other sources into a master feed - a feed aggregator on steroids. Similar to a “mashup” server of some kind. This is still a little fuzzy in my mind, but my intent is to look at ways to process and combine data streams from various sources into a “master view”. Read the rest of this entry »