Personal

I was searching for a video on a song that I really like and came across this video blog from the artist that sing the song that I was looking for. The blog is at their vimeo site Healing Begins Journal Blog. I watched the blog and it struck a little too close to home. I think the author is right on when he says that it's easy to own up to our shortcomings when we are in prayer because there really is no one to admonish us or call us on what we have done. It's much harder to sit down and talk to a friend or pastor and admit that we are not perfect and actually provide real examples of things that we really aren't proud of. It's given me something to think about.

Well I haven't even finished fundraising for this year yet and it is still 98 days until I walk this year but I have aleady registered for next year. Next year will be my 5th 3-Day and I will be walking in my 3rd City. I have walked two years in Chicago, I will have walked two years in San Diego, and next year I will be walking in Minneapolis/St. Paul. The group that I am walking with decided that it's a little expensive to do longer trips each year so we are going to stick with something closer to home next year. The Twin Cities is a comfortable 6 hour drive from Milwaukee so I won't have any airfare next year. That will be good. I have also heard good things about the Twin Cities 3-Day so I am looking forward to walking in another city.

Drupal is a Open Source Content Management System that I started working with a couple of years ago. I originally started looking at it because I wanted to update my Church website off of a static Dreamweaver based website to something that would be easier for multiple people to update. I have since used it to develop this simple blog website as well as a couple of smaller websites for local groups. My sites are still pretty simple and I am constantly learning better ways to accomplish things using Drupal and it keeps getting better with new revisions.

The learning curve for Drupal is quite steep because it is very powerful but once you get started there are so many things that you can do with it. Drupal.org has a large community that does a pretty good job of answering questions for those that have taken the time to do some basic research.

One of the drawbacks with Drupal is it has not had as much exposure in the past as other CMS's like Wordpress. Drupal is working on that but needs more support. Recently Drupal was setting up a booth at OSCON to get more exposure. They asked for donations from the Drupal Community to help cover the costs of the booth. They had a target of $2500 and came up a bit short so they may not have been as successful as they would have liked. I find it a bit amazing that with all the people that are using and developing Drupal that they could not raise such a small amount. If the Drupal community wants to see Drupal succeed we need to do a better job of supporting efforts like this to get Drupal more exposure.

Drupal is a great CMS but it needs more than just the developers to help it grow. For those of us that are not developers or programmers that use Drupal we need to do our part to help it grow in other ways. That means that more of us have to be willing to donate when we can to help get the word out.

I have not been getting much training lately as I have been running my daughters to their practices and activities since school let out. The activities are fun but I will be glad in a couple weeks when the competitions are over and we can relax a bit more for the rest of the summer. I will finally be able to get back to my training also. I am not walking until November so I have plenty of time to train but I do miss my walking. I find it to be relaxing.

I also have plenty of other things to work on this summer. I am working on upgrading several websites and there are so many things I want to make better as I have learned so much since I first rolled out the sites.

Well I decided to go out and get a decent length walk in today as I have been kind of busy and have not been walking as much as I would like lately. I guess I missed the part in the weather forecast where it said it was going to be this hot. I thought maybe we would get to about 80 so it would be good training. Turned out it was almost 80 by the time I left at 9:30 and it was pushing 90 by the time I finished my 11.2 miles today. I had almost forgotten how much I hate walking in this kind of heat. It was 90+ each day of my first 3-Day in 2007 and I almost passed out a couple times on day 1. Today I had to really make sure I was drinking enough Gatorade and I bought a bottle of cold water at a gas station just to have cold water to dump over my head and hat to cool me down a little. I missed the cooling stations that they have during the 3-Day. I usually take advantage of those to cool down in Chicago. That was one thing I didn't have to worry about last year in San Diego. The weather in San Diego was perfect and I much prefer walking in 65-70 than 85-95. I am waiting for them to announce the days for next year. I suspect that I may have a conflict with my Family Reunion and Chicago so next year it may be back to sunny San Diego.

I guess I better get used to it for now. Summer is just starting.