To celebrate an internal product launch, we took a half-day off and drove up to Tiburon for a long lunch and then rode the ferry back to the city. An awesome day with great people.

Want to come work with me? We're hiring.

While I knew that Deana had started a blog about being a mom in Berkeley that she's been working on for a while but—until she asked me to check that video was showing up on it today—I didn't realize how much she'd been working on it. But now that I know she mentions me on there I added it to my feed reader so I can keep up-to-date.

Last year when the Rude Mechanical Orchestra was recording our second album, Too Big To Fail, I shot some video. I finally got it all edited with the recording from the album. If you like it you can listen to or download the full album on the band's website.

Posting that last video made me realize I've been really bad about keeping up on this whole blog thing. I hadn't said anything about getting married to Deana back in August, or packing up and leaving New York, the month we spent in Reno while I found a job and apartment here in Berkeley. Well, that all happened and at some point it'll end up in a video.

We found a really nice apartment right the middle of Downtown Berkeley, I got a great new job at a startup in SF called Recurly and we've seen a lot more of my side of family. It's strange how different Berkeley is from Brooklyn: there's no trash or graffiti, 50°F is considered cold, you can always smell someone walking down the street smoking weed. Some of the grimier things were what gave Brooklyn a real texture and flavor. I haven't quite figured out Berkeley's flavor but I really do love having a board game store right around the corner for those nights I need to run out for a copy of Carcassonne.

My Uncle Hugh called me up last year asking if I knew anyone who could help him get a website setup—he's very polite like that—for a book he'd written on the housing crisis. Once he said he didn't really care what it looked like—and I knew I wouldn't have to do a bunch of themeing—I knew I'd be able to set him up something simple using Drupal, so of course I offered to help. It was a nice change from the normal insanity of incomplete specs and legacy requirements that the day jobs always entail. I got to just plug together off the shelf modules and enjoy using Drupal for a change.

I haven't been able to read the book yet but he's a fascinating guy so if you're interested in a first hand account of the housing meltdown go checkout The Great American Housing Fiasco by Hugh Morton. I'm going to demand a copy as payment for the website ;)

After two days of trying to use OS 4 on my iPhone 3G I'm sad to report that it's a very un-Apple like release. It's slower, it breaks a bunch of games and doesn't offer any compelling features. I'd go as far as to say they should probably have only released it for the iPhone 3GS.

It's better to have an ex-fiance than an ex-wife so come help me celebrate not being married.

Date: Saturday, August 9, 2008 - 6pm until late.

Get your bike ride on. We'll be hitting up five bars all over the city. The idea of the poker ride is that you throw down $1 as your buy in to get your first card at the Good Foot (2845 SE Stark Street, Portland, OR).

We'll stop at four more bars all over the city and you get an additional card at each stop. At the end of the night the person with the best poker hand wins the pot. The ride ends at my house and there's a keg of homebrew.

I'll be throwing $50 into the pot to make it interesting--and still a whole lot cheaper than a wedding. You can swap cards with other riders if you want to make some kind of a deal, so bring your friends.

I took a break today from my work at Sticky building a website for a major sports apparel company that cannot be named, for DrupalCampPDX. Ben Kaplan and I did the keynote presentation this morning which was definitely an honor. I followed that up with a panel on best development practices which was a bit unplanned but went really well. This afternoon I'm doing a presentation on Views2 and Panels2, I'm a little freaked out on that since I've done zero preparation at this point.

Almost done with classes for the term. Got to do the presentation for my Capstone class tonight. I think next weekend I'm going to try to get down to Reno for the StickerGuy 15th Anniversary. I worked at StickerGuy in Chris McClendon place while he when went on tour back in 2000-something. It wasn't a good experience at the time but as Mr. Bynum always said:

"You either have good times or good stories."

And, at this point, they're good stories. So it'd be good to get down to Reno, see some old friends and bands that I hardly remember. I've gotta say that I'm most excited about seeing The Atomiks, The Scurvy Bastards, and Dragonfire -- the first two because they're great bands the latter because of this video I found on StickerGuy's MySpage:

Update: I totally forgot to mention that my little brother Charles and his friends Petar and Chuck are coming up this weekend. Petar wanted to see Agalloch play tomorrow night and I owe him big for helping me find a place to stay in Boston during DrupalCon. Should be a good time.

Made it out to Boston last night. I'd gotten upgraded to business class on the flight from Portland to NYC which was a nice treat. NYC to Boston in coach was a bit of a blow to my ego but the scenery made up for it. The highlight of the flight was looking out the window and seeing a white speck fly by, it was three white balloons. As the sun set we were flying through a beautify pink mist.

I'm staying with a friend of my brother's friends. Great place but it's an hour away from the conference center by train/bus so I was up early this morning. I've got a nice tickle in my throat so I hope I don't end up sick.

Here's the presentations I'm hoping to hit today:

• 09:00 Drupal Multimedia
• 13:30 Converting mock-ups to Drupal themes
• 14:30 What's in a Theme: The power of enterprise-level theming
• 15:30Design on the Edge of Drupal

I still haven't found a decent replacement for Oink after it got shut down... or at least one that I can get an invite to. Do I have any sugar daddies (or mammas) out there that want to hook me up with an invite to waffles.fm or STMusic?

Update: got an STMusic invite!

I've grown increasingly annoyed at Java over the years. I've taken to describing the language designer's philosophy as "If there's two ways of doing anything, pick the one that involves more typing".

All I want to do in take an array of numbers and convert it into a comma separated list, e.g. 1,2,3,4. Most modern languages make this easy:

• PHP: implode(',', $data)
• Perl: join(",", $data)
• Python: ",".join(data)
• Ruby: data.join(",")
• .Net: String.Join(",", data)

So how do you do it in Java? Well there's no built in method so you end up getting to write your own:

Maybe sometime around Java 9 they'll get around to adding it...

Been keeping busy. The dog keeps getting bigger and smarter. She's able to jump over the baby gates I've been using to pen her in the kitchen. She's also figured out how to stretch up and reach the counter so she can steal treats off of it while I'm not looking. But she's a great dog and I love her even when she is being a jerk.

Nick from NYC was out to visit last week. We had a good time and he was able to get all his stuff out of the basement of the old Russell Street house and mail it home. One of the highlights for me was last Friday when I hosted, what my friend Asia termed, Drew's Brews. Basically I invited a bunch of people over to help me drink the four gallons of porter that Steven and I brewed up. I'm hoping to repeat it again this weekend with a batch of pale ale.

This evening I went to Ignite Portland at the Bagdad Theater with Nick's friend Ingrid (who has a nice food blog). I was really impressed with the event, the speakers with the except the snake oil peddler who was trying to convince everyone that biodiesel is going to save us from our energy problems were all wonderful. I had a hard time picking favorites (though the history of the stick figure and why Germany loves David Hasselhoff stand out in my mind). I can't wait for the next one.

I just finished reading Queen of Candesce by Karl Schroeder. I'd read the prequel, Sun of Suns, last New Year's and loved it. I don't have the words to describe how amazing these books are. I'm just awestruck at the way he's able to construct a space opera that's convincing at every level; from the cloak and dagger intrigue of politics to the physics of constructing a city on the inside of a cylinder floating in air. In many ways it reminds me of the sweeping imagination and vision of the first Matrix movie (the big difference being that this sequel didn't suck).

It's been a while since I posted anything here. I'm a fan of bulleted lists so I'll just resort to one of those.

• Went to New York City. Stayed from Christmas to the 3rd and had a nice New Year's. Etta and I had some pretty major drama leading to...
• An un-engagement and break-up. No need to worry about planning a wedding now. Still need to call all the relatives... That said we're still talking, maybe we'll end up out on a date this weekend. What happens with Shasta and the house are open questions.
• Got a MacBook. The trusty old ThinkPad died. I'd sworn I wouldn't buy a Mac until they had a trackpad that you could right click. Someone had convinced me that the new Macs had two separate buttons in their trackpad but you and to enable the right clicking. Turns out they were full of shit and I'm left ctrl+clicking but it's still the best laptop I've ever owned. If you like UNIX then MacPorts.org is your new best friend.
• Booked a ticket to DruaplCon Boston. I used some frequent flyer miles. I don't have a place to stay or conference reservation but that kind of thing works itself out. When I went to the BeOS Developers Convention in Palo Alto back in '99 I ran out of money for a hotel room and slept in a park in the rain. I'm hoping to crash on someone's hotel room floor this time.

I ordered one of the OLPC laptops through the G1G1 program back in November and after some miscommunication from the OLPC and screwups by FedEX it finally arrived. Several things--like opening it or connecting to a network--have been non-obvious but I'm pretty impressed overall. The keyboard is tiny.