Yesterday, I traded my ailing Lancer in on one of these:

It's....well, awesome. 6 speed manual, 4 wheel drive, etc. My insurance cost actually went down. Weird.

While I'm thinking about it; if you're having trouble leaving comments, try taking the blogspot.com out of your profile home page. Jeremy, the fine webmaster of Kerneltrap, manually approves posting from people that list blogspot.com in their home page due to a lot of spam coming from there. Hence, if you have blogspot.com info in your profile when you post, you won't see your comment for a while, until Jeremy approves it.

The introduction of Gesanghua(2007 version)
http://www.gesanghua.org/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=433

We are a group who love and cast our attention to the west of china. On our way of traveling to the west, we are not only attracted by the vast and splendid scene of the QingZang altiplano but also stuck by the poverty resident especially the eager eyes of children who can not afford to go to school. In the west, people live in the village without electricity and road to modern world. Their mean earning per person is no more than one thousand Yuan. Most of them are not be able to pay just USD 52(about RMB 400)tuition fee per year and so their children have to lose the chance of being educated. When you are facing them, how can we turn a blind eye to those eager eyes. So please give your hand to them, help them go back to the classroom again!

Gesanghua’s Deuteronomic Letter(2007 version)
http://www.gesanghua.org/ReadNews.asp?NewsID=436

There is an old saying: if you offer someone a fish, he will have something to eat for supper; if you teach that person how to catch fish, he will have the skill to survive. Fifty US dollars maybe are just enough to buy us a bottle of wine or a carton of cigarette. Yet the same fifty US dollars could totally change a child’s future. Let’s give them a chance to get education like the rest of us. We can make a difference!

Kari and I went to the cheap theater today and saw "The Astronaut Farmer." I give it two stars.....I didn't want to kill Billy Bob Thornton after I saw it (like, for instance, Pushing Tin), but it was kind of cheesy. Kudos to American cinema though; we'll never give up the happy ending, but at least American directors are finally showing characters screw stuff up a bit. (spoiler here:
e.g. Of course he flys the rocket in the end, but there are a few minutes in the movie where you really think the story will close in failure.)

Our two week European vacation was a blur and already it was time for Jamie to return back to her school-oriented life in Florida. On our way back to Manchester we stopped in London with just a few hours to follow The Queen's Walk and enjoy the sites. We took the underground to the Palace of Westminster, then walked across Westminster Bridge and downstream along the River Thames as far as Tower Bridge. After a nice dinner along the Thames, we headed back out to the airport for an absurdly early flight to Manchester the following morning.

From Manchester Jamie headed back to St. Augustine, while I continued on my travels, not planning to return to St. Augustine myself until the end of June. In Manchester I stayed a week with a friend and old colleague, Basheer, from Florida. I then flew back to Ireland returning to Ballintoy where I will stay for a few weeks.

Just like me to infer that I'd actually blog more often, then go on a month hiatus. Sorry, and it's not like there hasn't been stuff going on. So I guess I'll just put up a whole bunch of stuff that's been going through my head and you can sort through it.

• I've had the Men at Work Song, "It's a Mistake," going through my head the last 24 hours. Even though the song refers to Reagan's 80's, I think it's oddly appropriate today.
  

We flew into Belfast International Airport and rented a small car, circling the northern half of the island. Driving in Ireland proved to be an adventure, not just because the steering wheel wasn't where I typically expect it, nor just because the traffic flowed in a direction that seemed counter intuitive to me. The windy narrow roads encourage creative driving and a certain amount of faith and good luck, further compounded by the Irish tendency to park anywhere and everywhere that's convenient for the person parking. Having the car did give us the freedom to explore at our rapid pace, always in a bit of a hurry as there was far more we wanted to see than we really had time for.

We followed the coastline through Northern Ireland, then headed down the west coast into the Republic of Ireland through Galway into Doolin from some traditional music. We explored a couple of caves, and got as far south as the Cliffs of Moher, offering a spectacular view. We then cut across the center of the country and headed east into Dublin from where we flew back to England.

My original plans to fly to New Zealand changed, evolving into a trip through Europe visiting friends. Jamie still had a few more weeks off from school, so we planned a quick trip to Ireland via England. We landed in Manchester and stayed a night with one of her friends, then set off on a far-too-rushed train journey to a few locations around England. We whizzed through Stratford-upon-Avon to visit Shakespeare's birthplace and final resting place, then continued down to Salisbury to see the Stonehenge. Finally we headed through London up to Ipswich to visit friends I'd met years ago when working in Florida.

With the current exchange rate of two British Pounds for ever American Dollar, the country proved far more expensive than I'd quasi-planned. In addition, the time required to travel by train was greater than we'd expected, cutting into our time to actually enjoy the destinations. In spite of that, the whirlwind trip proved to be a lot of fun.

Usually people complain that nothing ever happens to them, whatever they do, and if something happens it is bad. I heard a story somewhere about a man who as a young man set himself more than 150 goals in life, he is something like 50 now and has achieved more than 110 of those goals. He just went for it and didn't look back.

While working in San Francisco I got a call from a cousin that I was expecting but not looking forward to, telling me that my grandmother had passed away. She'd taken a quick turn for the worse in the past week or so, suffering a major stroke and fighting pneumonia and a relapse of cancer, the latter which she'd survived once already 30 years earlier. My mom was enroute from Alaska to McMinville, and I'd been planning a visit myself in a few days hoping for one last chance to say goodbye.

I stayed in the Portland area along with my mom at her youngest brother's house. We spent much of the visit packing up my grandma's stuff, moving her out of the home we'd moved her into not that long ago. It was a strange feeling to be surrounded by all her stuff filled with memories of the past, realizing it was the last time I'd be surrounded by all her photo collections and all the things that I'd associated with her for as long as I can remember. She was my last living grandparent, and the one I'd gotten to know the best by virtue of being an adult while she was alive. For years I'd been calling her on the telephone once every week or two and visiting once or twice a year, as often as I could pass through Oregon. I try and not think back on the weeks I didn't call when I should have, happy that I got to know her as well as I did.

About 3-4 years ago I was heavily addicted to computers, I liked everything about them and would've never thought to stop using them all the time, well what you know. Nowadays I'm right out of the business, I'm far behind on linux stuff.

I always will keep a linux machine though, I'll never give that up. At the moment I have one FreeBSD machine, two Linux machines, one MacOS X laptop and one Windows workstation. Usually a guy with this many computers knows all about them, and I actually do. But this stuff with newest releases on things and patches and whatever I actually have 50.000 unread mails in my lkml folder and about the same on FreeBSD mailing lists. So why don't I follow these lists anymore? I have no idea. I just didn't have time for it anymore.

I flew into the San Francisco area to attend the 2007 OSCMS Summit, hosted by Yahoo! at their Sunnyvale campus. I originally got started using Drupal in 2002 when the creator, Dries Buytaert, contacted me regarding the scalability problems I was experiencing trying to run KernelTrap on PHP-Nuke. I quickly became a fan of the code base and the developer community. Over the years I've been an active developer myself, and now even make a living writing and maintaining Drupal code. It's been exciting to watch what started as a humble open source project develop into vibrant and rapidly growing community.

After the conference I was one of five speakers at the Performance and Scalability Workshop which raised $5,800 for the Drupal Association. It was an honor to speak along with Drupal creator Dries Buytaert and other Drupal luminaries such as Matt Westgate and James Walker.

While in California I stayed with my old high school buddy, Leif, and his wife, Erika. It was great to get a chance to catch up over various fires in their backyard in Berkeley. They're expecting their first child in August, so I'll have to be sure to make my way back to the area in the fall.

And by "that" I'm referring to Internet Exploder 7. I just uninstalled it on my work laptop after trying it out for about a month and a half, and the best thing that I can say about it is that the uninstaller actually worked. Not that IE 6 was great, but at least it worked with the Sharepoint site here in the bank, unlike IE7, which sometimes would authenticate correctly, but mostly not. I seriously don't understand why people waste their time and money on Microsoft products. I get it when people say that learning open-source stuff is difficult, and there are problem with OSS software as well. But seriously, take a look at what M$ offers. Admins get a kick in the nuts of having to do something differently with every new product (not unlike some OSS stuff), and they pay for the privilege of doing things that way. Screw that. Oh, I did I mention that even Microsoft can't get their own products to interoperate well? Jeez people....wake up and start using software that actually works.