WordCamp Boulder

(Yes, that’s two old marquee photos in a row. However, this one is fully in use – the Boulder Theater is a living venue.) What a great community Boulder/Denver is – that they could fill such a place with geeks interested in blogging! (WordCamp Boulder was Saturday July 10th.)

The event was great. All the sessions were interesting. It was a big contrast to DrupalCamp Colorado, last month, which was much more on the coding/geekiness end of the spectrum.

There were seminars on why it’s good to test your website before launching it, led by Steve Martin of CleverCubed. Another session included ideas like following a criticism with a suggestion on how to improve the problem. (That’s not applicable to just blogging!)

Finally, lots of freebies were thrown in the mix. I loved that iced coffee from Atlas Purveyors. Lunch was a $10 gift card to use at any one of many many restaurants in downtown Boulder.

I compare the Drupal community to those who prefer Linux – and the WordPress community to those who prefer Macs. Both have their time and place.

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Unused – but still there

A few weekends ago, we took a short break in Buena Vista, Colorado. That town has an old empty cinema building in the center of town, as well as an out-of-commission drive-in theater outside of town.

I appreciate the fact that the signs are still up for both. It’s a nice reminder of what used to be.

Takeaway: What things can you “leave up” in your life to remind you of good memories or events?

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In the club

If you’re into backpacking, the stuff Mont Bell has to offer is just the best.

Ironically, I don’t even like backpacking much anymore. But I would love to own just about everything they sell. It’s just the lightest, highest quality, finest designed products available. (They are now what Sierra Designs or North Face used to be.) Maybe I’m like like the SUV owner who never puts it into 4WD. I just like the possibility of using the extreme capabilities.

Their US flagship store is just 40 miles from my house. The siren calls…

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More fun

Tumblr is a website platform that is sort of between a blog and Twitter.

Mine is over at shinybits. I use that space to put things that aren’t worthy of this blog. (Mostly I don’t want to clutter this space with that stuff.) And it’s a bit quicker to post.

Hope you enjoy it. And if you create your own, leave the link as a comment here on this blog, so others may enjoy your quick thoughts!

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I love WordPress

What other blogging tool would automatically generate such a message?!

I’ll be at WordCamp Boulder tomorrow. I’ll join hundreds of other faithful WordPress followers to hear testimonies of changed lives. (Well, not really. But it will be interesting to those of us so geekily inclined.)

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Great little idea starter

Plinky is a service WordPress just bought. Go there to get a question that will give you ideas for your next blog post.

(And my answer to that question? A way for all of the villages in Africa to have clean water within a year.)

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Avoid Best Buy

…Just for this one thing, anyhow.

If you are about to buy a High Definition TV, don’t get the HDMI cable from Best Buy. A quick search on Yahoo Shopping yielded the same thing for $7.99 from Sears.

(By the way, we don’t have an HD TV. Low-definition is good enough for us. And most low-def players come with all the cables you’ll need.)

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Becoming a millionaire

What would I do with $7.5 million?

During our recent long-weekend family vacation, I had the luxury of sleeping late enough to linger on a dream. I won $7.5 million in some kind of a contest. (The kind of contest was not revealed to me – dreams are so funny in how they give us such random details and leave out others.)

The first thing I thought of was how I would get two more Solatubes for our living area and hallway. (The two we currently have are wonderful!)

I ended up paying off our mortgage. We kept our two current vehicles – but I spent some money fixing them up to perfection.

Being a car guy, I pondered how fun it would be to get a fairly new sports car. (Even though I was a millionaire, I could not fathom spending the extra for a brand-new car. Some aspects of my thinking will never change.) But in the end, I decided against it, as I could not store it on the street and thereby show off our wealth. Our minivan would need to stay in our one-car garage, as it’s such a pain to clean off the snow on winter mornings.

Much of my dream was spent in figuring out how I would give to our missionary friends. That was a tangle of thoughts. Investment of the money was tied into that – as of course we would need to live off the income for years to come and be able to continue giving.

So overall, the money in my dream was not a fun thing. I guess that’s a indication that life is good the way it is.

Lest you think I am a total killjoy, in the dream I booked first-class air travel for an upcoming (real life) long trip in the fall – for myself and all those traveling with me. Long trans-oceanic flights are brutal. I’ve often dreamed of how nice it would be to experience one of those voyages in a total-recline seat.

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Unpublished?

A very minor shiny bit to leave you with for this long holiday* weekend…

I found it highly amusing that in the latest Communication Arts magazine, there is an entire section devoted to unpublished artwork. How can the works be unpublished when the magazine has published them?

(*Independence Day in the States, to those of you not here.)

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