Haven't blogged much (or trained much) this week... I've been focusing heavily on rebuilding my Gentoo (a Linux distro) Mythtv box (a home brew PVR), rebuilding and streamlining Gentoo for my Transmeta chipped ultra portable (sweet but weak), and setting up Drupal 5.2 (and a series of modules) to be the backbone of my Mile-End portal.

I've been overdue for a serious geek out session. Once I get focused on something 4 or 5 hours can pass in the blink of an eye. I've actually forgotten to eat once this week, and I haven't done that in a while... it's hard to forget to eat when you're always hungry from pushing your physical limits.

And BTW the new Gentoo graphical installer is crap, or at least it's currently in the state of being so buggy that it's crap. The old school Gentoo install method is almost preferable at this point... I love Gentoo once I have it up and running, but the process of getting it there is somewhat time consuming... I'm just a little disappointed because I thought the new installer would save some hastle.

I installed the Drupal trackbacks module a few days ago, and man there are a lot of spammers out there. Fortunately Drupal has a badbehavior module, a bayesian spam module, and the statistics module that makes it easy to ban IP addresses.

January Site Goals:

• Plan 2007 race schedule and post it in Events
• Write 2007 training plan
• Plan article ideas on: off season training, Gentoo, and Mile-End
• Expand graffiti photo collection
• Start Mile-End photo collection
• Look into options related to podcasting

I just added close to 200 photos of Montreal graffiti, murals, and street art (2007 version) to the Photos or if you prefer Flash Photos section of this site.

When I was walking around taking photos, a couple of homeless people told me to capture a particular piece of graffiti... Apparently in the piece below you can spot 6 hidden things (I haven't really tried yet). One one of them also insisted that I take his photo (seen to the left).

I've been at Laika now for the past 3 hours playing with photos and hanging out with friends. Once again I have to state that I love this place. At the moment it's quite the laptop farm (I count 9).

I've finally found a Drupal module that will batch up load photos using drupal's native gallery method! Therefore, I've added a bunch of new photos and there will be more to come. I've also added a Flash viewer as an extra fancy (pinky in the air) method of viewing my photo galleries: it's called "Flash Photos" in the menu.

So just in case I find myself unable to work with wireless in Moncton, I've setup the proper servers to run a local version of my site on my laptop. Therefore if you don't seen any new content over the next week, you can expect a jump the day before new years.

A few days of quiet pass with little time left past work and training. I'll get more vocal over the weekend.

Looks like the Moncton Airport has free wifi. Not the best of options, but better than sitting in the car parked outside a hotel or a Chinese restaurant (what I've done in past years).

On the 23rd I'll be heading back home to Moncton for Christmas, and I'm wondering about the current state of free wifi availability (preferably a cafe -- but the airport, train, or bus station will do). I've become addicted to this blogging thing, and I'd like to be able to kill some Moncton time with it. I'm finding precious little online, but perhaps I'm not looking in the right places.

Anybody who might be reading this site/blog has probably noticed that some postings seem to be temporally random (especially with photos). That's because I only began this site in late Sept. (well this incarnation of it -- it's existed devoid of content for about 6 or 7 years), and I keep posting old items as I discover or remember them. I would assume that at some point I'll be all caught up and will move forward with some semblance of order. I guess I could fake order but...

Hyperbolic Tangent todo list:

• post an updated version of my resume
• write some articles
• add and categorize links
• add events calendar for race season
• work on theme
• add some video
• think about some form of podcast

Things with Tanh seem to be quickly getting flushed out. As mundane as it may be, I seem to be able to generate quite a lot content. Drupal is proving itself to be the right choice for a CMS, and while I still have a lot of design work to do with the site my content first approach is working out better than I would have thought.

As far as my todo list goes:

• post an updated version of my resume
• write some articles
• add some video
• think about some form of podcast

I've also been exploring various methods of publicising my site even though I partially don't want anyone to see it and I'm not certain of it's value to a larger readership. Actually I mostly just feel awkward about people I know seeing it (but I'm sure there have been at least a couple)...

The interesting thing about having a personal site open to anyone is trying to figure out what not to post. Except for a few instances I'm trying not to mention friends by name and I hesitate to post photos of friends. Basically I'm just not sure where the line is with these things.

I'm not even sure where all this is coming from. I've been on the web since 1996 and I've never been able to come up with content for my sites. There must be some psychological need driving this.

All in all, I'm not going to knock it, and I think it's also paving the way for me to setup the mile-end.qc.ca portal (hopefully before I move out of Mile-End).

I'm starting to gear up to work on the mile-end.qc.ca portal, and I'm starting to look around at locally (Montreal/Mile-End) generated content. These are two blog related sites that look useful. I may consider approaching some existent content providers to see if they want to participate.

http://midnightpoutine.ca/: Montrealers need Midnight Poutine. It's a personal ongoing account of the city's happenings. It's a delicious high-fat source of rants, raves and musings. It provides the insight you never find in newspapers and the details and tangents that would never fit in a weekly. It possesses cheese-like flexibility. It's sometimes snarky, often unusual and always informative. Your order has arrived. Dig in.

http://yulblog.org/: YULBlog is a list of Montreal bloggers and a place to find out about the latest in person activities.

Laze about weekend letting my body heal. With the exception of Friday I didn't do much of anything beyond geeking out and watching TV. At my most active I met a friend for coffee. I also believe that Friday was my last day of drinking, and today my last day of sweets. I may still indulge periodically in some debauchery, but periodically is word to notice and note. I have to start focusing on building a lighter stronger body. Some think me strange for things doing like this... but...

Tomorrow I'll start some mild training, but I'll carefully monitor my cough. I'll also start tracking my diet, my weight, and my standing heart rate (hard to remember to do in the morning).

I've also scratched the surface of writing my own Drupal theme using the PHPTemplate language. I plan to try to make it XHTML Strict and fully standards complient.

While I still have precious little interesting to say, there are so many cool ways to submit content to Drupal, that at least it's easy for me to say something.

I think I even have a cool way of submitting content from my PDA.

Well since I'm really starting to like the idea of Drupal, I'm thinking that I might extend it by writing one of two modules.  I think it would be handy to have a "classified ads" modules, and I think a "fitness/training log" module (similar to the one found at Beginner Triathlete).  Both of these would be useful to me, and I think they would be useful to the larger community as well.  I'm going to have to look into what's involved in writing modules, and I'll have to check to see if anything has started to be developed in these two areas.

Laika again, the working way from home.  It's quiet here tonight, but as always they're playing a mellow techno that that seems to help me keep a focus.   For those who have never been here, I like working here for multiple reasons: free IleSansFil wifi, others here to do the same, an atmosphere I both like and can concentrate in, coffee, beer, and service that doesn't make me feel like I have to buy something or leave.

I wonder who's a part of IleSansFil these days.  I went to a meeting a couple of years ago, and it was a very odd group of uber geeks (although I don't mean that as an insult -- I quite like the uber geek).  At that point in time they only had one hotspot in town, and wifi wasn't a keen interest of mine.

So Drupal is turning out to be a more and more incredible system.  It's got very good documentation, but I still have to wrap my head around the theme functions.  It seems that with enough knowhow just about everthing is themeable.

Ok Drupal is turning out to be a very cool CMS system, and it's very easy to get it to flush itself out with content gathered from other sites.   But for mile-end.qc.ca I still need to find or write some sort of classified ads module.  I also still haven't attempted altering or writing a skin, so I guess we'll see how that works out.

Performancing is a Firefox Extension that provides a blogging editor capable of directly posting to a number of blogs (Drupal compatible). Therefore it will also save me from having to login to my site every time I have something to say.

At any rate this post is a test of said editor, and thus far it looks like it might work quite well.