This is late, but better formed. It has been 4 months since I have written to this site and I have gained perspective on the web and beyond. I am starting a teaching credential program at National University near by in San Jose at Night and have been taking care of our, now 11 month old, son Taylor during the day. When Taylor naps I have been busy building a salvage woodshop in our garage. It has been very fulfilling building on the roots of my Grandfather's woodshop/garage, while inside raising the next generation of our family with Amy!
I stayed particularly close to home and close to my thoughts this holiday season. It was a strange pull on my emotions to witness our floundering economy, and to have "buy EVERYTHING" blasted into every sensory input for the entire month(1.5 mo.?) of December. But It is easier for me since the 00's were my first TV free decade! This New Years started a new era for us. We are learning how to manage a family together, start businesses and generally be more efficient and effective both individually and as parents(who are going to have a walking talking toddler in a few months!). Strange as change often is, there is a theme of simplicity that seems to ring through all of it, almost on its own. So I maintain that if I keep my mind on simplicity, the puzzles of change will work out.

The theme of last week was 'knowing when to bend'. I was hell bent on making my living from designing and building Drupal websites. Except for the last few years every step of the way learning about drupal and web design in general was agonizing. The web is a place of great power and flexibility, but with all that comes a great variety in the way one can achieve a given goal. This ultimately is a very good thing, but to someone who is not innately able to look at and manipulate code, the innards of the web are a total nightmare for those of us who are used to having a few buttons to click to make something work. Drupal is getting ever closer to the dream, but simply having passion for the web and what we humans can do with such awesome connected computing power does not alone qualify one to be a builder of the web.

I am sitting in the webmaster issue cue on Drupal.org waiting to see if I will be aggregated on Planet Drupal. I was going to write something once I was accepted, then noticed that I was getting click throughs from the issue que anyway, so decided to start here instead. This is a weird post for those of you who read this blog already. I have created a feed that only includes postings from this blog that are in the category 'drupal', and I am asking to be included in the Planet Drupal aggregator, which is currently 339 bloggers strong. I have had a Drupal login since 2002, at best guess. My current account is from about 3 years ago because for some reason I signed up again. At a Lullabot workshop in L.A., Webchick merged my two accounts, using the newest one since it had the most activity(not that I have a lot).

I have been getting a crap-ton of comment spam in the year that I have maintained this site. Sometimes I get more than others, but it's always annoying to have to delete damn ads of the likes of banks, money scams, masters degree programs, and of course porn, to name a few. So I am finally going to do something about it and I have added a CAPTCHA to my contact and comment forms. Now when someone wants to post a comment, they will have to add up 2 numbers and enter the answer in a field. This is to check if the person trying to submit the form is human and not a robot trying to dump their crap in my front yard.
Sorry for the inconvenience, but it should be a fun little experiment to see if robots can do math too.

Last week I moved this site to a new hosting service called A2hosting. I didn't really have many problems with Bluehost, but I've read so many bad things about it, I thought I would consider myself lucky and move on. There wasn't much written about A2 one way or another, but the little I did read was positive and they tout themselves as being 'green' hosting providers, and that is good!