Forking the Blog

By brock on Sun 1 Aug 2010, 1:13 pm

For those of you who don't want to hear about Drupal and other nerdy web development stuff, fear not: I will soon be launching a separate blog for those posts.

And for those of you who don't want to hear about religion or my thoughts about it, you too should fear not: I will soon be launching a separate blog for that, too, with my lovely wife Erin.

The religion blog has been in the works longer than the Drupal one - which is to say, I've been sitting on the domain for that one longer. I'd like to make time to launch both of them in the next month or so, because I am well aware that I'm using this blog to write to about four different topics and audiences. I'll be sure to post announcements on both and details on RSS feeds for the sites, so you can choose what content you want to follow.

Comedies, or The Other Guys: An Indirect Review

By brock on Wed 1 Sep 2010, 7:58 am

This weekend, Erin and I saw The Other Guys with the Sunday Night Film Club. While there were plenty of funny scenes, it was an overall disappointment as a film. I left the theater thinking that it could have been so much better - but then again, it was pretty much what I expected.

Last month, I re-watched Shaun of the Dead, and I think that it ruined most comedies for me for the next six months or so. Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, the two big hits from the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg/Nick Frost trio, set a high standard for funny movies. Read more »

Safety

By brock on Sun 29 Aug 2010, 11:34 am

I doubt that any right-thinking person would drive around a city at night with their lights out and no seatbelt.

So why do so many people ride their bikes in the city at night with no lights and no helmet - nothing but a little red reflector between them and the hospital?

Spammers Are Getting Smarter

By brock on Wed 25 Aug 2010, 8:45 am

Have spammers started employing people to actually read and comment on blogs? I just got a comment on a two year-old post about Devner:

I do agree that Denver is weird, though other parts of Colorado are perfectly beautiful. Also, it is a pity that you didn't go out of your hotel/conference venue for your entire trip to Vegas, there is so much to see and to do! Maybe next time, in fact, no maybe about it - you simply MUST. Trust me man. Tim from leather armchair

Somebody actually took the time to read the post, comment on it with some context, and sign off with a link. I'm a little bit impressed - but not impressed enough to leave the comment there.

Twenty Seven

By brock on Mon 23 Aug 2010, 10:06 pm

A couple important-to-me milestones are looming on the horizon. Late November marks five years since I finished college and moved to DC. But before that, I'll turn 27 in October.

Both make me stop and think. Five years out of college isn't an important milestone, but I tend to look at things from both directions. For example, I left RIT five years ago. I like to compare that timeframe with the same amount of time before that. So, five years before leaving RIT (and thus, ten years before this November), I was just a couple months into my senior year of high school. When I compare where I was in my life then, in high school, to where I was five years later as I left RIT, there's a world of difference. But in the same period of time on the other side of that placeholder in history - the five years since - I don't feel that I have progressed as much. Sure, I've grown personally, emotionally, and professionally, but I can't help but feel like I should be further along somehow. Read more »

Updating Drupal Core with Drush

By brock on Thu 12 Aug 2010, 10:01 am

Sometimes I want to update the Drupal core without updating all the modules and themes I have installed. By default, drush up will update everything, but that's not what I wanted to do today. This seems like the kind of thing that would be easy to find on Google, but no such luck.

So, for the benefit of the next drush newb:

drush up drupal

Makes sense, right?

The Pomodoro Technique

By brock on Thu 12 Aug 2010, 8:18 am

At it's core, the Pomodoro Technique can be described thusly:

  1. Pick a task.
  2. Set a timer for 25 minutes.
  3. Work on that task, without interruption, until the timer goes off.
  4. Take a five-minute break.
  5. Repeat.

This technique is useful for two reasons. The most important thing, of course, is that it encourages you to focus on work and nothing else for those 25 minutes. It doesn't force you to do so, of course, but it helps keep you in check when you find yourself wondering what's new on Twitter. And second, it reminds you to take regular, short breaks, which is something I often neglect to do until I realize my eyes have dried out from staring at the screen and I've needed to use the bathroom for half an hour. Read more »

Drupal MD

By brock on Sun 1 Aug 2010, 1:33 pm

Thursday night, Dave and I braved the wilds of suburban Maryland to check out the Drupal MD group.

It was a nice change of pace from the DC group. The DC group meets in the upper room of a local bar. There are typically around 20 to 40 people there, and a few people will give lightning talks, then everyone kind of mingles. Read more »

Adding A Field Formatter to Display Suite

By brock on Sun 1 Aug 2010, 1:08 pm

On one of my current projects, I'm using Display Suite to layout various node displays. This is only the second time I've used DS and I haven't needed to get too deep into it, but so far, I'm finding it to be a lot quicker than coding different versions of node.tpl.php - and it allows the site admins who will maintain the site to modify things without getting into the code, something I talked about last week. Panels is another very popular option for things like this, but the one time I used it, I wasn't too impressed; for whatever reason, it just didn't click for me. Read more »

Three Years

By brock on Tue 27 Jul 2010, 11:19 am

Three years ago tonight, I met my lovely wife Erin.

We both went to see Sunshine - she with the Indie Film Meetup, and me with the Sunday Night Film Club. The two groups had arranged to get together afterwards, and so we met each other over a crappy meal and disagreed about the movie - I liked it, she didn't.

Along with a few other people, we went to the bar for drinks after dinner, and the two of us got to talking about music and religion. A week later, she Facebook-stalked me to invite me out with some friends. Later that weekend, we went to a punk show together. Another week after that, we went on our first date. Exactly four months after that, we signed a lease on our first apartment together. Four more months after that, I proposed, and we were wed a year and a half later. Read more »

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