AddingUnderstanding

A year ago we were about to set out on our family version of Travels with Charlie. At the time our thinking was that we would be looking to move out of Southern Nevada in a couple of years. On our return to Southern Nevada we talked and chewed on the options. Finding no great reason to wait we packed up and moved north. Along with the move came a change in my focus. I made a great move from the world of running an information technology department to running a small Drupal shop. Along the way I've had many great experiences. From traveling to Drupal camps to having visited Boston for the first time for Drupalcon last spring.

While the moving van was hauling our worldly possessions down the road something else was happening on the other side of the country. A couple of really smart folks were starting Acquia a company providing commercially supported Drupal. Drupalcon in Boston brought more information about this startup. Beyond the uber-cool launch party at Felt the community also got a glimpse of what was to come next. The Drupal community was getting a company that could help all manner of Drupal shops, from small to large, provide support. The end result was certainly clear... it is a great time to be a part of the Drupal community.

Boise had a devastating fire on Monday evening. When all is said and done a woman died, ten houses were destroyed and many more damaged. The Idaho Statesman has very good coverage. This post is not, however, about the fire but is about the coverage of the fire. Lacking a TiVo in our current setup I wasn't able to do a comparison between the different networks. As such this is then a critique of the coverage done by KTVB. One word sums it up.

Terrible.

However stopping there wouldn't do this story justice. At the same time KTVB is producing content that is embarrassingly bad they are bragging about it not just on the air but on Twitter as well. More about that in a bit.

Moving is again in our future. We moved last December into a house we planned to stay in six months. Well we've stayed on past that and are now ready to find the next stop on our journey. It will be nice to finally unpack some of the boxes we've left packed knowing "we won't be here long".

One of the things we had intended to do before we moved last time was get rid of the file cabinets. We have lots of papers to keep and that we need access to but hauling around file cabinets doesn't seem the best solution. However with the rush that comes with moving it did not happen. This time, however it will get done. To that end I picked up a ScanSnap S510M Instant PDF Sheet-Fed Scanner from Amazon today.

I'll be the first to admit that it took me long enough to get around to doing it but now that it's done you should too. What is the wonderful "it"? Voting to get some great looking Drupal panels in the lineup at SXSW 2009.

The good news is getting it done is simple. All you need is an easy to create account and then visit the pages for the panels and give them a high five (stars that is). And to make that easy here's a handy list of the panels being offer:

The Idaho Statesman ran a story yesterday asking suggesting the housing sales numbers might indicate a bottoming out of the market. There are several problems with this sort of story. From start to finish the story bears a strong resemblance to the blogs about Boise real estate which have been trumpeting the return of a healthy market for at least as many months as the market has been in a spiral.

Though it wasn't in blog form I remember being told nearly nine months ago by an agent how prices had "recovered" and sellers were getting asking price and higher for their places. The message then was that we needed to act quickly and buy now. Oddly those same houses, still on the market, are now priced lower than they were last winter. In the last month Boise has been struck by the loss of several hundred jobs. Although some of those jobs will actually be cut over the next few months it is still a blow to confidence in consumer's minds. Yet the article in the paper would have you believe that a 3% decrease in available housing is a significant indicator of a bottom in the market.

One of the problems with working on a great web framework is one makes assumptions about where the bugs lie. It is much easier to believe that the code I've written has a bug than that framework has a bug. Compounding the problem when you check out a website like Drupal.org and don't find a mention of the problem that perhaps you're the only one who has ever had the problem.

Such is the way I spent the morning. Working on a site and watching chunks of hair turn grey while searching for my mistake. Then in the latter stages of testing, having eliminated my code and all the modules that one starts to look at Drupal Core with a questioning eye. And that is when I found the bug, with comments and all, hanging out in the node module.

A busy night in Boise tonight. So many great meetings and opportunities to choose from. The Idaho Press Club has a forum on the impact of the internet on television. Meanwhile over here at the Washington Group building the Boise Web Technologies meetup is hearing about PHPUnit testing and Zend Framework from Brad Benner and Rich Benton.