This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/11/20/firehousecom-launched-drupal.

Firehouse.com, the last major project I worked on with pingVision, has now been officially launched! I worked as lead developer on this project with the able assistance of Matthew Saunders & Elizabeth Hause on the web producing side; and Ben Jeavons, Matt Tucker, Al Stephen, Kevin Bridges and Zach Meyer on the development and theming side.

Firehouse is a large site which includes articles of fires and fire-handling topics, pages for each fire station who wants to be hosted there, photographs of stations and fire equipment submitted by users, editorial cartoons on the firefighting life, Webinars, an online store for buying subscriptions to the magazine, and even A digital copy of their magazine, month by month, and probably some other stuff I'm not even remembering. Oh, and some blogging, too.

I'll probably work up more of a 'this is how we done it' post later, right now I'm basking in the glow of success.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/11/01/lovely-day-denver.

So, this is Denver: Three days ago I stayed home from work because of a blizzard dropping a foot or two of snow on the city. Today I have the doors open to air out the house, and am happily doing a little work outside. The snow is happily melting away, and will be gone by mid-week, except for those mountains of snow created by the supermarkets pushing all of the snow in their parking lots into one pile of dirty snow, which will last for weeks.

The new bookshelves are great, but it was a bit of a job carving up the boxes they came into into small enough pieces for recycling... but I've managed to do that. This being the weekend after MileHiCon, there's a bunch of minor household chores that didn't get done last weekend and still need to get done now. Tammy's off having fun with a friend, and later on I get to show off the registration system I knocked together for Magnacon. Yay me!

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/10/30/thought-windows.

Windows 7 has arrived, and I'm looking forward to installing it on my desktop this weekend...

But that reminds me. I had cause to look at a breakdown of data collected for advertisers on a random website, where one of the bits of information gathered was operating system. For that month, Windows XP showed 45,000 hits, where Vista showed merely 7,000. It was a bit of a surprise.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/10/21/milehicon-41-weekend-only.

Coming up this weekend is MileHiCon 41, the convention that not only am I attending, not only am I attending some panels, but I am also hosting my tenth anniversary party with my darling wife Tammy.

We originally got married on October 23rd, 1999, and every year we're happy to celebrate our marriage with our friends, surrounded by geeky wonderfulness. Five years ago we celebrated that anniversary with a party, and this year, on Saturday, we're celebrating our tenth. If you know either of us, feel free to drop by if you're at the con, and help us drink this alcohol we scored for the party. We've even picked up Crystal Skull Vodka.

As I said, I've also got a few events on the schedule:

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/10/11/developer-day-boulder-win.

Today was spent enjoying the Developer Day Boulder, held at Techstars' offices. It was totally worth the $75 I laid down for the ticket.

The location was really cool - nicely sized for the crowd, and everyone, I think, had a good view of the screen. The only downside was that the heaters were roaring inside that room, and with all the folks packed in it was sauna-like at times. But it was worth braving the heat for the info.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/10/04/freelancing-early-days.

A little over three weeks ago i set into motion my big gamble - stepping away from pingVision, and starting life as a freelance consultant. I'm not really able to go into all of the reasons, but partially it's a test - can I go out on my own and find my own way, without a company supporting what I do?

And, so far it's launched very nicely. My first client has been SpireMedia, here in downtown Denver, where I've been assisting them with an ubercart site with a large number of customizations, starting with working in three currencies and custom shipping costs, moving all the way to some interesting ways of presenting and offering discounts... which have already lead to one patch for uc_discounts_alt, and probably leading to more later.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/09/25/happy-birthday-tammatha.

Today is my wife Tammy's 40th birthday! Feel free to drop her a line at beadinglady @ gmail dot com and wish her a happy birthday.

I am reminded particularly today how lucky I am to be married to such a wonderful woman.

And yet, somehow I ended up with the day off...

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/09/07/nerd-notes-paris.

You know, for a city of eternal grandeur, Paris is pretty nerdy.

For one thing, the French have these magnificent comic books. They're sold in hardback volumes, with fantastic art, all sorts of genres, and you can find them in bookstores, for cripes sakes. It makes me want to learn French just so I can read them. About half-way through my stay I found out there was a French comic shop (bulles de salon) within a few blocks of the apartment, which had a fantastic layout with a round room with featured items on display, and a long back room with older books, some American comics on their own shelf, and little figurines and posters. I got my wife a fantastic poster of a fairy queen in a long dress, which she was ecstatic about.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/09/07/more-my-trip-paris-2009.

Well, here I am home again. It's been a lovely trip, all told.

It was nice having an apartment in Paris, and the area we were in was a lot of fun, but the internet was a big disappointment. It wasn't really until Wednesday that we had live internet in the apartment, and even then the wireless router that came with the place wasn't working properly with more than one user. Happily, both Matthew and Al were willing to hook up their laptops to the Ethernet cable and substitute as wireless modems, so it wasn't too bad, but still...

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/08/31/so-here-i-am-paris.

Well, I'm in Paris!

The flight out here was as good as expected - a quick trip on a plane down to Charlotte, a dash from terminal to terminal to catch the Paris flight, and then up, up and away! We even arrived a little early thanks to a tailwind that pushed us on our way. We helped Matthew (a co worker) collect his bags, and then met up with Greggles, another Drupaller who arrived moments after we did, and took a cab from the airport - for four people it was much more pleasant than daring the underground on such little sleep.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/08/25/fantastic-weekend-preparation-paris.

This last weekend was really a lot of fun. It's our last weekend here in Denver before we take off for Paris this Saturday, and so there was a fair amount of preparation for that going on.

To start with we headed off to Weight Watchers, which I hadn't been to in a month due to... well, a mix of different reasons, including my trip recently to LA for DrupalCampLA. Happily, it turns out I'd lost another 1.4 lbs, which means I've lost more than fifteen pounds! That, followed with a little breakfast over at the Village Inn (free wifi!) was a beautiful start to the day. We then slipped into Best Buy to look for the new Professor Layton game, coming out this week - I was hoping it might be out early. It wasn't. Ah, well.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/08/04/dasfacom-gone-live.

After a bit of twisting and forcing, I've got the new http://www.dasfa.com/ up and running under Drupal, a feat which makes me feel rather happy. DASFA stands for the 'Denver Area Science Fiction Association', and I've been slowly taking over the webmaster duties for a while now.

I still need to get dasfa.org migrated as well, but there's some email forwarding accounts that I need to get sorted out first. But it shouldn't take too long.

Also, I've set up a new twitter account: http://www.twitter.com/denver_sf to keep track of local Denver SF happenings.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/07/20/what-do-i-want-phone.

So, I'm thinking it's about time to get a new phone. The one I have still works, but it's pretty basic, and there's so many pretty flashy new things out now that sound lovely. Plus, I think I'd like to have a camera I carry around.

But I'm not sure what I want. I'm a customer with T-Mobile, and I'm generally pretty happy with the company, so I wouldn't mind staying with them - but do I just want a simple camera phone with a little extra, or do I want to go whole-hog and upgrade up to an Android phone?

Thing is, I've got an iPod, and I'm pretty happy with the cool stuff it does - lots of neat apps, and so on. I get tempted to upgrade to the new iPhone, but that would involve both switching providers (to AT&T, which most iPhone users hate) and having to migrate my stuff from iPod to iPhone... which then leaves me with an iPod I wouldn't be doing much with.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/07/16/vacation-sweet-vacation.

So, This week I've been on vacation.

It was originally going to be more of a week at the ocean, but since suddenly my friend JM was getting married, it turned into a trip to Reno followed by a trip to the ocean, but this was a little nicer in some ways because I got to spend more time with my wife Tammy.

Flying to Reno was nice in that the flights were pretty empty, but there were two wierd bits - first, we had to fly through Las Vegas to get to Reno, and second, our takeoff was delayed at least 100 minutes by rain, which is yet another sign of the seriously odd weather we're having in Denver this year. Usually we're in a desert, but this year we've got a lot of rainfall...

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/06/27/john-and-ezras-test-code.

Here's the talk we gave at Drupalcampcolorado.

Presentation at http://docs.google.com/Presentation?id=dxmgvdn_4c2mfkkdj

(If you're seeing this on livejournal, there's files to download on www.jcfiala.net)

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/05/24/weight-loss-and-iphones.

It was with considerable surprise that I weighed in at Weight Watchers yesterday morning and was told that I'd lost another pound. I hadn't been really concentrating on my diet for the last two weeks - since the last time I'd weighed in - and although I had generally kept away from the fattening and rich stuff, I hadn't totally. But apparently I'd been good enough, and my official tally at WW went up to 10.8 pounds lost.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/05/21/limberick-math.

From http://limerickdb.com/?top150 :

If A equals B (so I say),
And we multiply both sides by A,
Then we'll see that A squared,
When with AB compared,
Are the same. Remove B squared. Okay?

Both sides we will factorize. See?
Now each side contains A minus B.
We'll divide through by A
Minus B, and ole!
A plus B equals B. Oh whoopee!

But since I said A equals B,
B plus B equals B, you'll agree?
So if B equals one,
Then this sum I have done,
Proves that two equals one. Q.E.D.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/04/21/okay-cool-where-do-you-go-40k-readers.

John Scalzi posted a blog post about a session he did at the Tools of Change conference this year on his blog.

It's a long video - 40 minutes, as it's an entire session - but it's an interesting one, with him, Patrick Nielson Hayden of Tor, and Toby Buckell, discussing building online communities around a website and where you can go with them. It's not so much about where you go after 40K readers, as how dang useful it is to have 40K readers, in my opinion. There's also an interesting point there that Tor.com can hire writers at professional wages to write short stories and give them away and have it disappear into their advertising budget as opposed to the short fiction markets who can't pay a living wage to get printed in a small magazine that a few thousand people ever read.

Definitely worth watching. And now, back to prepping for my D&D game tomorrow.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/04/20/twitter-down-drupal.

Hm, seems like Twitter's Down.

I'm having some fun setting up a Drupal 5 install just so I can test that a patch fixes a problem with upgrading to 6 while using the link module.

This is a blog post copied from John's Website - please feel free to join him there and post comments. He has set up openid, so you can post there with your livejournal account using your openid, which is the same as your journal url minus the http://. You can find this entry at http://www.jcfiala.net/blog/2009/04/03/thoughts-chronicles-riddick.

I recently got a copy of The Chronicles of Riddick Trilogy, which is a bit of a misnomer, given that it contains two full-length movies and a short animated film bridging the two. That said, the word 'Trilogy' on an inexpensive disk probably sells better than 'Duo', so why worry about that? The following review/commentary contains spoilers for the film, but it's been out for a few years so I doubt that's a big problem.