Parazoid.net

I am not at work this week, being out in Illinois for Jasig’s Fall 2009 Unconference. If you’ve glanced at my twitter feed you can tell I enjoy collaborating with people in this group.

Mostly for myself, but my goals for the week are:

• get some fixes to CAS out for testing
• start playing with CAS 3.3.x
• personally implement uportal
• work on the Glade presentation for next week’s LUG

I’m sure there was more but I am at a conference, and between that and flights that’s still an aggressive list.

I finally moved my main site to a server in New Jersey (thanks Linode), which took me way too long to get to. Other sites will just have to wait.

Along with the move, I finally got up to date with Wordpress too. With so much change I felt it time to get a new theme as well, so enjoy.

I was listening to my iPod at work today when Sevendust’s cover of Nine Inch Nails’ “Hurt” came on which started a good run of Wikipedia crawling….which resulted in Sad Kermit. While I am a Muppet fan, I thoroughly enjoy this parody. Check it out when you get a chance, you can see the video here.

Side question, what covers of “Hurt” do you like? I heard Johnny Cash’s version before all versions of the song and still love it, but many bands have covered it (Wikipedia has a good list here). So far I’ve only heard the versions by NIN, Johnny Cash, Sevendust and now Sad Kermit, but need to hear more. I wonder if Cake will ever cover it…

Have you ever have one of those weeks where at the beginning you thought everything was going to be reasonable and time would just pass quickly, but then you run into a wall and everything falls apart? Why can’t this week just end? To make it worse, I was on the way home I was thinking about how it is supposed to snow late this afternoon and how that might mean not going to Poughkeepsie Friday, but now I don’t see how that helps at all.

On a brighter note, here’s a great reference for any How I Met Your Mother fan.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/How_I_Met_Your_Mother

Doing these quizzes isn’t my normal thing, but this had some odd questions and pegged me pretty well. It helps that I did not feel like even attempting to catch up on anything tonight.

Find your own pose!

What’s this? Another post? That’s right, 5 this year. There are reasons for tonight’s post. Here is what’s going on:

• Moved to WordPress. I finally did it. I had planned on doing a lot of testing and making the whole thing smooth…didn’t happen. I can say that the Serendipity (s9y) to WordPress Importer I got here worked well. I found out while testing the RSS feed however that the import task set the guid in the database to the test domain I was using which led to problems. Over all I’m liking WordPress, I just need to find a theme I like.
• Post #100! Evidently this is post number 100, nothing too special. However with #100 marking my fifth post of the year and noticing that Bruce only has four, I’m declaring war. I kind of wanted to participate National Blog Posting Month (NoBloPoMo) just to get me to post more often, but challenging Bruce is a more obtainable goal.

I had more to post, but between problems upgrading and watching BSG: Razor I have forgotten what I had to share. Oh well, I need to stop with the mega posts anyway.

..I guess. I figured now that we are almost done with September, I’d make my fourth post of the year. Nothing really to report. I wake up, go to work, get annoyed, go home to watch TV, sleep. Occasionally there are drinking sessions which leads to fun, but life is fairly routine. But just to recap:

- Free conferences are great.
- The Space is being shutdown. Parazoid.net is now hosted virtually in Atlanta.
- I want to get back into PHP and doing development work. I have to thank having to do perl work at Marist for getting the programming bug back into me. I have a couple of small ideas of things to do once I get some updates/upgrades done.
- I’m starting to get back into the Internet again. For some reason, every time Summer comes around I stop paying attention to the Internet and stop reading email and news and completely ignore my feed reader until it is so large that it crashes my machine (+45k unread messages isn’t enough). But I am cleaning up and getting back into things, so hopefully I’ll start posting random stuff again, especially fun tips and tricks that I see. So many things to share. I am playing with WordPress and plan on switching soon. Does anyone have any suggestions on good plugins and/or themes?
- I live in Red Hook. Moved up in June with Dave and Sara.
- Have I said free conferences are great? Free food and an excuse to not be at work and not use up vacation day, wow!

Alright, I’m out of random points, and this session is almost over. I do feel bad not pointing to a cool tool or something, so go to xkcd and read through the entire archive. I’ve probably plugged it before, but my god is it good.

There’s a battle of the bands at Marist tomorrow to raise money for the Wenchi Water Project. Read below for the facebook description of the event, or read the Marist Public Affairs release about the event. And facebook users, go to the event page to get more information.

Clean drinking water is becoming an increasingly scarce commodity in Ghana. The supply of drinking water for the rural population is insufficient both in quantitative and qualitative terms. In fact, the treatment and distribution of water occurs in less than 50% of the country. The lack of water in villages and towns makes it difficult to maintain good health and may cause diseases such as dysentery, cholera, diarrhea and guinea worm. Women and children are being forced to travel long distances in order to obtain drinkable water.
Wenchi Water Project Company Ltd. was established in 1984 for drilling water wells in villages in Africa. They are currently in collaboration with the Catholic Diocese of Sunyani in efforts to raise funds for the drilling of clean water in Ghana. This project will aim to build three mechanized boreholes in three targeted communities: Abesim, Chiraa and Dumasua.

Each borehole costs $14,024 and will impact a group of about 7,900 people, mostly school children of small-scale farmers. The project will be conducted in close relation with the District Water and Sanitation team, a government water authority. The Catholic Diocese of Sunyani has asked Marist College to raise $10,000 for project and hopes to raise the remaining $4,000 to build one borehole for one community.

On April 29th, 2007 the Marist College Council of Business Leadership and SGA Student Programming Council will be hosting a benefit consisting of a Battle of the Bands. This event will be open for students and the community in hopes to raise money for the Wenchi Water Project.
Join the Marist community while we enjoy music, food and prizes as we come together to WATER THE WORLD…one well at a time.

The following bands will be performing at the event:
1) Radfax
2) Pass the Broccoli Grandpa
3) Frank Viele and the Manhattan Project
4) The Comeback Tour
5) This Condition
6) Cove Road

The event runs 11:00am – 5:00pm, and there will be plenty of raffles going on throughout the day. And I hear Frank Viele and the Manhattan Project kicks ass.

I was tagged back in May by vgdave, so I guess it’s time to actually follow the rules.

“Once you are tagged you MUST write a blog about your 6 weird habits/things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next six people to be tagged and list their names.”

I’m far from normal, but it’s hard to list why. Here goes:
1. I hate disorganization, but am a very unorganized person.
2. I usually have a good supply of moist towelettes in my coat and/or desk drawer. Occasionally gum and toothpicks as well.
3. I do not have TV, but watch far more than I should.
4. I don’t like people, but I can’t be alone for too long.
5. I’m a packrat when it comes to data. I download files for the hell of it.
6. I finally got out of school and soon I’ll try to get back in again.

Since I can’t think of anyone that actually reads this, I’m tagging MHVLUG people. So I tag Sean, Bruce, Derek, GNU Joe, Mike, and Patrick.