WhoIsKevin

In my continued quest to increase my Drupal 6 knowledge I picked up this book on module development for version 6.

Over all this is an excellent book. This is definitely targeted more at a developer which is probably why I liked this book. I think the author does a great job of explaining the basics of how Drupal works and specifically covers a lot of information on hooks which are key to understanding how to accomplish most any task in Drupal.
The modules that are developed through the book are well chosen because they cover the essential pieces of module development and at the same time allow a little time for some more advanced topics. I was surprised at how well the theming code was covered in this book. Most module development books usually leave all the user interface development out but this book shows how you implement your module in a way to take advantage of the theming capabilities in Drupal.
Over all this is a great book and if you are familiar with Drupal a great way to either learn about module development or get up to speed on some of the Drupal 6 changes to modules.

People waited since midnight to get .99 cent gas with a limit on 15 gallons. Would you wait all night long in order to save fifty bucks? That is assuming you of course could use the entire 15 gallons which means your tank would have to be very close to empty or large enough.

If you do the math that works out to about 8 dollars an hour to spend the night on the side of the street while waiting for the 6 a.m. start.

Just finished reading While America Aged by Roger Lowenstein. While this book can sometime drag with large numbers of details about various players in past pension negotiations I can still highly recommend this book.
If you think the failures of large American car companies are an isolated incident then this is a must read. Mr Lowenstein describes how these events repeated with the New York Subways and the City of San Diego. Unfortunately for all of us this paints a sad future for most governments and of course the biggest pension system of all Social Security. The last chapter hints at some easy ways to help prevent this but those methods are easy just difficult in our political climate to make happen. He mentions the push to Government supported healthcare as well as an attempt by President Bush to stop borrowing against Social Security. Of course both these measures have never achieved support.
A good informative read that I can highly recommend.

Just finished reading “Building powerful and robust websites with Drupal 6” by David Mercer from Packt Publishing.


This is a general beginners book for Drupal and web development in general. Overall I’d say it is a good book for those wanting to learn about Drupal. My biggest issue is with some of the more generic advice on how to develop a site or how to decide about what you want your site to do. These are just extra elements that I think should be left to a different book.
Still I’d recommend this book if you are interested in learning about how Drupal works and whether you can use it for your site. Combine it with a book on module development that I am currently reading and you have a good round view of the basics of Drupal.

Last month I was planting a tree in the back yard. Nothing big just about 8 feet tall. I dug the hole for it and this is the all the stuff that came out of the hole I dug for the tree.

Can you believe that? Looks like left over building material and this was 50 yards out in the back yard.

Just keep noticing that despite high gas prices people continue to speed. Coming out of downtown today in a 55 mph zone people were passing me doing 75 mph. Anybody that remembers their physics knows that this is eating up gas. I did some surfing around to get some more precise data. So on average you can think of every 10 mph you are losing approximately 4 mpg in efficiency.

So speed on as long as you are not one of those complainers about gas prices.

Stop broadcasting twelve versions of shopping channels and get rid of the countless Spanish channels. Put these things on some sort of subscription service and you will free up a ton of bandwidth on the wire.

After some research and a few emails with Panera and then SonicWall it is definitely confirmed. Tinyurl is blocked by Panera. They are using SonicWall and tiny url is rated as (27.IT/Computers and 28.Hacking/Proxy Avoidance).

So I exchanged email with Panera customer support. They referred me to SonicWall and I put in ticket to change the rating on tinyurl. Well that was like talking to a brick wall. I requested it be rated as IT related only and removed as a hacking site and this is the response.

Dear Customer:

You submitted the following rating request to SonicWALL CFS Support:
Rate tinyurl.com as “27.Information Tech/Computers” at 2008-04-18 15:25:00.277

The request has been reviewed and rated as:
“27.Information Tech/Computers, 28.Hacking/Proxy Avoidance” at 2008-04-18 15:26:00.447

You should see this rating change reflected within 1 to 3 business days.

Thank you for your request,
SonicWALL CFS Support

This mornings earthquake (5.2).

And the second one (4.5) from a short while ago.

Just a bit more info. Little story on Wired about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. According to this story that earthquake occurred just about 25 minutes before the one this morning.

This morning we had an earthquake. It was actually centered in Illinois but we got a good little shake right here in Louisville. Ironically this is the same day that the 1906 earthquake destroyed San Francisco. This one tied our biggest ever and it is the 3rd earthquake I can recall. There was one in 1986 that tied this one and another around 1988 I think and then today.

5.2 magnitude earthquake felt across Louisville | courier-journal | The Courier-Journal