Just moved my site to linode. Making some changes to get this site updated ... eventually...

Yet again Drupal is up for a CNET Webware 100 award. If you like Drupal please vote for it!!!

Drupal one this award in both 2007 and 2008 and we're all hoping to do in a third time.

These awards really help to increase Drupal's visibility which is good for everyone that builds and maintains sites on Drupal (including yours truly).

As some of you may know, I'm involved with a group called the Director's Collective (website coming when I finish it). We're a group of film makers that make one film a month in the spring summer and fall, each participant planning, directing, and finishing one film.

The first film approaching completion is called Joker's Wild and chronicles what happens to the Joker immediately after his capture at the end of The Dark Knight. This is the teaser and once Mike Harvey (the director) and I finish on-lining and color correcting it the full version should follow shortly.

Upon reflection, the audio is sort of badly mixed. My bad, I did that. Also I only had a few minutes for that end title card and it really needs work. Anyway, enough apologies:

Watch. Enjoy.

Among the most liberating experiences in my life has been the destruction of a canvas. Canvases are expensive and they tend to impose a sort of pressure on whomever is working on them to turn them into something beautiful. There is the old cliché that nothing is more terrifying than a blank piece of paper. This is true. I am quite often paralyzed by a fear that what I create will not be good. I become so paralyzed, in fact, that I often create nothing at all. I have to remind myself that creating nothing is worse than creating something that isn't good.

I'm reminded of the oft misquoted quip made by Thomas Edison in regards to the lightbulb:

"[W]e had learned something. For we had learned for a certainty that the thing couldn't be done that way, and that we would have to try some other way."

If you keep making SOMTHING that something will get better and better even if you keep doing it pretty quickly. Today I picked up a sketch book and drew a few extremely crappy sketches, did a few mediocre passes at some layouts for a client's website, and even picked up my guitar and hammered out a new riff for the film soundtrack I'm chipping away at. None of it was very good but all of it was SOMETHING! If I do the same thing tomorrow I'm pretty sure they'll be a little bit better.

It is in this vein that I publish this new blog theme. This theme is a sketch and a failure. It is intended to be. I am publishing it before I've finished testing (or coding) it. It is what it is and that isn't Garland. I was sick of staring at the default theme (the aforementioned Garland) and now I don't have to. Here you have it world! My theme sketch: experiMental. This is a Zen sub-theme so if you want to play with it make sure you have Zen on Drupal 6.

According to department stores, Christmas is fast approaching. This got me thinking about the fact that every year I scramble to assemble a list of things to put on my Christmas list. Last year, I vowed to start an Amazon wish-list to keep track of things I liked or wanted as the year progressed. I kept to my word but I also found a number of things throughout the year that weren't available on Amazon and I started thinking about how I could add them to my list (most notably this sweatshirt). This is how I built a simple module to solve my problem.