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)

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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/2009/03/29/fight-magazine.

I'm not sure if I initially realized how great a loss it was when Dragon magazine retreated from the world of print (and newstands) to become a purely digital offering. I know in the past I've been a great fan of digital releases of RPG materials such as games and supplements, but that's an attitude I've slowly been becoming less happy with. When I first was able to buy digital games, I went in whole hog and bought a lot of them... and then barely read any of them.

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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/2009/03/27/stranded-boulder.

So, here I am, stranded in Boulder.

My bosses here at pingVision are pretty cool, and once it became apparent that the snow was going to be just this bad, and reports kept coming in from various quarters of the problems folks were having with the traffic, they were kind enough to feed us all early and send us on our way back home. Unfortunately in my case this release was a little too late - RTD had already shut down all of it's traffic down to Denver, and it wasn't clear if they would be opening for the day... so I got a room here in Boulder for the night.

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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/2009/03/24/another-test-post.

Sorry, the header on the last one was kinda funky, so I want to try again and see if it comes through better.

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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 blog/2009/03/24/drupaladdtabledrag-notes.

A couple of quite notes for those of you trying to use drupal_add_tabledrag() on your sites, that may prevent you suffering through the same pain as myself... but I'll hide it after the break for those of you who don't care and want to get on to the next bit.

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This is a blog post copied from John Fiala'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://.

Hello!

This is my first post coming in from my new (ish) website at http://www.jcfiala.net. That's my official website now, and I'm planning to be posting from there (well, here) from now on, using a lovely drupal module to copy the posts over here to livejournal. For the moment I'm leaving comments open at both locations, but hopefully some of you will come over to my site and set up accounts - I've turned on openid authentication, so you can create an account with your livejournal account by entering in your journal url minus the http: - for instance, mine would be jcfiala.livejournal.com.

I've been meaning to set up this switch for a little while now - I've already posted a couple of blog posts there, but from now on they'll be mirrored on livejournal. I want to make comments about life, Drupal, D&D, and other things that come to mind... so hopefully this will also get me to post more often too.

See you around!

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The following is a test post

This is a test post. Just ignore it.

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Hey folks, sorry about that. I was pretty worn down and stressed last Friday.

So, for those of you not following me on twitter (I dare you to guess my id there) - three weeks ago my wife went into the hospital with pains in her gut. This was eventually revealed to be a problem with her gall bladder, which they efficiently took out and from which Tammy was able to recover rather quickly from.

Then, the week after that I was in DC for a conference for work.

That friday when I posted that, Tammy called me and asked me to come home from work - she'd been having nasty pains in the gut again, and might need me to drive her to the hospital. I was able to rush home with the able assistance of a friend, and Tammy decided to wait an hour and see what happened... she eventually did feel a lot better, and she's thinking now that she just had too much fat for her twice-revamped digestive system to handle. But at the time I was feeling pretty stressed out and needed to say something to someone about it.

She's fine now, I'm fine now, and she's going to be more careful with what she eats now.

I'm worrying now.

Although I did get some interesting-looking games at GenghisCon - where I was coordinating the RPGs this year, and thus didn't get to play - what I've been looking forward to just arrived in the mail yesterday, although I didn't notice the slim package until I walked out this morning. And that's the 'White Box' edition of Swords & Wizardry along with the first two issues of 'Fight On', all sent from Lulu.

Fight On issue #3 I tried on a lark, and found that it was a magnificent lark of old school gaming content - there's a huge region stated out with encounters, there's a dungeon level, there's npcs, random tables, and articles about the birth of roleplaying games and the Judges Guild. So, I thought I'd try issues #1 and #2, and give them a try, and while I"m at it, why not get Swords & Wizardry, a generic OGL version of the original D&D, before they stuck 'Basic' or 'Advanced' on the name. I got the 'White Box' edition, which was cheaper and contains content similar to the original 3 books. (Which you can apparently buy on rpgnow, btw.)

I've been really enjoying reading up on some of the old-school blogs that are out there, and it's interesting reading about gaming from a different perspective.

So I'm almost done with my ridiculous 4 hour commute today, and as I go up 36, I get an overwhelming urge to hit 'm' so I can compare my location with where I am going. World of Warcraft has done weird things to my head.

Or, y'know, whatever you're into. But I hope you're enjoying the day off, at least.

For those of you who have been following my life, you already know that my wife Tammy had stomach bypass surgery this last September. She, as well as myself, have been overweight most of our respective lives, and for her it was really becoming a health problem - she had diabetes, blood pressure problems, she was basically taking a dozen pills every day.

So, after a long time going through the selection process, my wife got accepted to have stomach bypass surgery, and that surgery happened mid-September of this year. Going into the process, my wife weighted 298 pounds.

Her goal weight at the end of this year was to reach 235 pounds, and this morning she weighed in at 234.6.

Ladies and Gentlemen, my wife is awesome and has done an awesome thing. Do me a favor and drop her a line at beadinglady <at> gmail.com, and congratulate her for reaching her goal weight two weeks early!

Thanks.

The Instance, available at http://www.theinstance.net/, is a really cool podcast. These two guys, Scott and Randy, sit around and jaw about World of Warcraft for an hour, nothing very deep, but generally entertaining bits about the game, from things like patch notes to comics and the like based on the game. It's like hanging out with a couple of friends, and the relaxed atmosphere is really good. Also, there's entertaining little sub-shows that show up during the show, which give you quick tips on modules, pvp, and now macros.

I suggest you give it a look, and not just because I'm entering a contest they're having.

Well, this weekend was a little busy. Got platelets donated for the first time in a while, followed up with some shopping that needed to get done for the holiday. Got out and played possibly the longest game of Runebound I've had to deal with so far, and also managed to reach 67 with my death knight.

He's done with Nagrand - I think I'm going to have him adventure in ShadowMoon valley for a while, as I only barely visited there with Doman, who hit 70 in Nagrand. I only walked through Shadowmoon to get my trick or treating achievement, so all the quests and monsters will be pretty new. Of course, at some point I need to get going and get my main moving again.

Commute this morning was nasty - between snow and record low temps, the roads were icy and traffic was very nasty on 36. Last year I was coming up a different bus route, and I didn't have this problem with 36. I need to figure out what to do - do I need to change my commute to go west some days? Le Sigh.