I had the opportunity to visit the DMV this week to take my motorcycle driver’s test and obtain my permit. What an altogether interesting experience.
I originally had gone to the DMV License Center to take the test last Thursday when they had extended hours. I wasn’t trying to make use of the extended hours, I just got there late. Nonetheless, they stop administering tests at 4pm, which they didn’t mention on their web site anywhere. What a waste of a drive.
I feel sickness coming on. Thank goodness it’s now and not at the end of the month when I’ll be heading to LinuxFest. I think Riley brought home a bug from preschool, and now I’ve got that post-nasal sore throat thing going on, and am achy, and should probably be going to bed now instead of writing this.
Development on Habari continues. There’s been a ruckus in the development lists lately about the look of the admin pages and the libraries used to develop them. Thankfully, we were able to get together “in person” in IRC and hash out some of those issues. IRC isn’t great for permanency, but it sure makes the exchange faster. I think you lose something in email as you start to roll through paragraphs on your own line of thought, and others read different things into what you’re saying when they don’t get a chance to interject and clarify. So IRC has proved useful beyond a tool for hanging out and idle chatting.
Abby’s first week of first grade went well. She’s already making good impressions on the teachers, and I expect she’s going to be one of those kids that the parents are really proud of, but the other kids scoff for throwing off the curve. Soon she’ll be able to post to her own blog. That’ll be neat.
The holiday weekend was really lazy. We didn’t do anything. Actually, on Friday, we had the new carpet installed. We replaced the carpet in the living room, dining room, up the stairs, in the hall, and in three bedrooms, excluding ours. Big project. We had to move all of the furniture around. I don’t know how Berta moved some of that stuff by herself, but she did.
I was thinking to do some coding, but I didn’t. There were a few things I wanted to try, but just couldn’t be near the computer. This week is going to be interesting, since I have a lot of things to do for work in a very short amount of time. Hopefully, the new guy can help me get this done by the deadline.
Finally, I wrote this post in ScribeFire, which I don’t like because it’s one of the ugliest add-ons for Firefox that I’ve ever encountered, but it does do XMLRPC posting. This is of interest because up until a few minutes ago, Habari could only post via APP. This means that I’ll probably be able to post from Viddler, since their APP support doesn’t seem to meet our APP specs (based on rev17, which looks to be the final version).
There has been a good deal of tumult over a recent TechCrunch post that Mullenweg characterizes as a “hatchet job”. There are some crazy folks trolling the comments over there, and although there are many points there I find on either side of the validity line both in the comments and the post itself, I do have my own perspective.
Changing Way brings up an interesting point about anyone being able to improve WordPress’ spam prevention. After all, WordPress is GPL-licensed, and so anyone can take the source and improve it and re-release it. Skippy has offered a good argument for why a fork of WordPress would have difficulty materializing. But people seem convinced that anyone can submit code changes to the core software to have them included. While this may be generally possible, I think it’s more difficult for the common person than you would imagine, and I think it is an unrealistic belief for this specific feature.
Consider that Automattic runs Akismet, a hosted spam prevention service. Packaged with WordPress is a plugin that uses Akismet, which also requires a WordPress.com API key. If you are a pro blogger (which is one reason why most people don’t lend some credence to this) then the service that prevents spam is a commercial service, from which Automattic profits. You can also choose not to use the plugin if you aren’t worried about spam or have chosen some other route or protection. Where’s the bad here?
I’ve taken the train only a on a few occasions. I realize that this is strange to some more urban denizens, but out the suburbs the train only really seems to go into the city or away into the hinterlands. Even at that, this week holds some landmarks for me in riding the train.
My prior trips included a jaunt to New York City. This trip consisted of getting on an Amtrak train in Downingtown, and riding it the entire way to Penn Station in New York. I didn’t have to transfer, and there was only one stop. No mess at all; hardly a train experience.
The end of September is going to be an interesting time. I had been planning to go to Ohio again this year for Ohio LinuxFest since I went last year. It was at this event that Habari was born, when I first met Chris and Rich in person, and got to tour Columbus with veteran tour guide, Skippy. It’s exciting to get together with these guys again after a year has passed to support Linux, Open Source, and Habari.
So I was looking online, remembering BlogPhiladelphia and the experience there. I remembered that BlogOrlando was happening very soon, and noticed that it’s the day before LinuxFest. On a lark I created a trip itinerary in Expedia to fly out of Philly for Orlando, then go directly, from Orlando to Columbus, then come home. The price of the ticket (all legs of the journey with only one layover in DC on the way to Ohio) was a mere $243!! Considering that it would take me 9 hours to drive from here to Columbus, and then I’d do it again on the way back, I’d be spending a good percentage of that in gas alone. If I flew, I’d ditch the driving and get to spend that day in Florida with friends and bloggers. No brainer?