There's Something About Harry

Since I worked all night last night (Sunday) I feel obliged and guilt free in talking about my weekend a little bit. 

WordPress Meetup in Charlotte

Going into the weekend, I was gearing up for the Greater Charlotte Area WordPress users meetup.  I founded this group and this was our first meeting.  I’m happy to say that it went very very well.  We had a dozen people show up out of 15 yes rsvps and that seemed pretty darn good for a Saturday and a first meetup at that.

During our meetup I provided a session on how to design a custom wordpress theme from scratch with some great software that makes it a snap to create a custom WordPress theme.

I let people see how to design wordpress themes, and used the software also as a means for helping many of the people in the meetup better understand the components that go into a typical wordpress theme, why they are there and where they come from, such as the header, footer, sidebars, content sections and more.

I got lots of video of the presentation including a screencast. I neglected unfortunately to get any pictures of the attendees.  So I’m hoping a few other people grabbed some snap shots of the event. 

Bible Belt Zaps Religulous DVD

That evening, I came home, rented Twilight and Religulous.  I had the intention of watching Religulous first (with the kids) but the DVD would not play in our DVD player.  It wasn’t a blueray issue, just a standard DVD in a standard DVD player.  I was suspicious that a local might have zapped the Religulous DVD or something, but the next day when I tried it on my computer it played fine.

Twilight

So instead we watched Twilight.  Twilight was a good movie, but as vampire movies go, there was no revelation.  When you have heard the history and capabilities of vampires once, you’ve heard it a thousand times.  Basically, this just mixed in the perspective of a moody, post goth teenage girl who developed a crush on the extra pale rebel of a vampire from the local vampire horde.

The movie probably would have been down right dull if the cinematography wasn’t excellent.  Its hard to make the rainy areas of the Pacific northwest look inviting, but the movie managed to pull it off, with odd contrasts back and forth with Joshua treed settings in Phoenix.

The Lazarus Effect

The next day I finished a Frank Herbert book I’ve been reading called the Lazarus Effect.  You may be more familiar with Herberts books from the Dune Series or the Dune movies.  This was a pretty good book, but nothing to do with Dune.  It did involve scifi and politics and the battle for scarce resources, and mutants and religion and things of that nature.

We ended the day with a cookout with some friends.  The kids played with their kids, we all ate some great steaks with rice and beans and had a few beers.

It was probably the beers, but that night I got tired early and crashed around 9 pm, only to wake back up (probably after the beers had worn off) just before midnight.  So I ended up working on editing the audio and video from the WordPress meetup until the kids got up in the morning to go to school.

Today Shaping up . . .

I helped one of my customers, Kensington Solutions who provides IT and business intelligence consulting services out of Atlanta, with a little assistance with their website.  In the process, I helped show Randy how to use WindowsLiveWriter.  Randy’s very tech savvy and picked up the program in about 30 seconds, after we got the WLW connected to his website, which I built a few months back.

In the process, I upgraded my own installation of WindowsLiveWriter.  I always try and keep my installation up to date so that I can help my customers use it by providing guided tutorials or help over the phone if they ever need it for any reason.