Tim better be careful. Samantha’s going to be a handful. That’s a “take no crap from nobody” face. Hide the guns and your little boys!!
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Officer of Election
Guess who’s going to be an officer of election this year. Yeah, that’s right. It’s me! If you live in Loudoun County, you can be one too. They’re apparently short this year (which is kinda surprising), so go help out. You get a hundred bucks, and all the “I Voted” stickers you can stuff down your pants (OK, I made that last part up).
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The Windowsill Garden Goes Crazy
The Windowsill Garden Goes Crazy
We have five baby tomatoes, an infant pepper, and the vine is taller than I am. I think it’s a success!! In sadder garden news, I think our cilantro plant has gone feral and I’ll have to put it down. Let’s all take a moment of silence and mourn him. He made many a meal better.
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A Little Love Song…
I just plain love Drupal. I know, it caused the downfall of our little project (OK, not really, but it’s such a cute fallguy), but it’s working like a charm as our pirate ship. I’ve finally figured out the taxonomy stuff, got all the users lined up and put in their roles, have people submitting content left and right, and it just takes it all, keeps running and keeps us all organized.
I love being able to see who all the new users are, what the popular nodes are and move stuff around easily. I love the flexibility of it, and its hackability (even though I’m no PHP guru, I’ve already hacked the webserver-auth, weblink, node and user modules without breaking anything).
So, if you’ve got a community site you’re planning, definitely consider it!! It makes starting up so much easier, since all the tools you need are right there to start. OK, so it’s still a little tough to get all configured the way you want, but it’s not impossible. It just takes a little patience, and a willingness to experiment.
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Four Years and Counting
This blog is four years old. It’s not as old as Max, but a lot older than Brian. It’s been here through some pretty crazy stuff. It survived two years of Blogger, and two more years of Movable Type. It’s been my space to keep my journal, my little signposts along the way because I know I’ll never keep a real journal. This is it. Even though my posting has been more sporadic recently, I think I’ve become a better writer through sharing my idiocy.
I would say more, go deeper into why I blog and what I’ve learned after posting 1,340 entries, but I have to get to work.
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I’m Somebody!!
For the longest time, Google thought I was a typo. When you searched for “Kevin Lawver“, it used to tell me that I was nobody. It used to tell everyone that they really meant “Kevin Lawlor”, whoever that is. But, no longer!! I am somebody now!! We’ve been using me as the spellcheck query at work long enough that Google’s figured out that I really exist, and “Lawver” is spelled correctly (how sad is it when the entire world, including major search engines, misspell your last name?). Now, when you search for me, I am me, and Google doesn’t think you’ve made a mistake. Heck, if you misspell me, it tries to point you back to me! How cool is that?
This totally makes my day. Thanks to Franco for pointing it out.
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He Should Work For A Campaign
And after the Bush/Hitler ad from last week, this almost sounds reasonable.
I still can’t believe John McCain would do an ad for the Bush campaign. After the lies they told about him in SC in 2000, and after all the issues he’s had with the GOP in the Senate, and with the Administration. What happened, John?
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Playtime!!
To sum up Working out our Play Muscle: play for thirty minutes a day. Yep, gotcha. How about play for eight, nine or ten hours every day? That’s what me being a pirate is all about. I play almost all day, every day. A couple years ago, I figured out that work is a whole lot more manageable and livable if it’s a game. I make up games during meetings, I turn stupid tasks into something subversive or silly. I make coding into a puzzle or a race. I see how much faster, better, smaller, neater, more complete I can make something than some mythical villain I pick out (look out, it may be you). I turn a gigantic task like getting an entire company to embrace web standards into a game of pirates…
I may be crazy, but it keeps me sane.
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What I Wish I’d Written About F9/11
Steven Johnson puts it better than I did:
What the film makes clear — without ever coming out and saying it — is that for those victims destroyed and dismembered, the horror was just as terrifying and brutal as what happened here on 9/11. The motives behind the violence were different, of course, and in fact they were better. But the motives behind the violence don’t matter when the bombs are dropping on your family.
This is exactly why I needed to see the movie, and think other people should too. I agree with the rest of his observations about the movie. The first paragraph especially mirrors my disappointment in parts of the movie.
As uneven as it was, it was still my first exposure to the real cost of the war. If you can get some idea of the price our soldiers, the people of Iraq and the other civilians over there, are paying for our attempt at “liberating” Iraq, then don’t go see the movie. But, we all need to let sink in the fact that more than 60,000 people have been killed and wounded; whole families have been lost or torn apart, and countless lives have been destroyed. We may never know how many, but all the families that have lost a father, mother, sister, brother, son or daughter are never going to be the same, no matter where they live. Those people lost will never fulfill their potential.
To quote Mr. Johnson:
To that I say: if we’re not grownup enough as a nation to confront these questions and still “support our troops”, then we’re not grownup enough to be starting elective wars in the first place.
