I received an email this afternoon from a well-intentioned friend of mine. The email listed a bunch of books Sarah Palin supposedly sought to have banned when she became mayor of a small Alaskan town.
Since there were so many amazing classics in the list, my B.S. detector went off. I looked it up on Snopes.com, and as it turns out, the email is false.
This kind of thing discredits liberals, making us look just as bad as those fire-breathing conservatives who keep insisting Obama is a closet Muslim (which is false to begin with, but also implies it’s scandalous to be a Muslim). We should rise above the hysteria and function from our strengths – empathy, intelligence, and dedication to social justice.
Take the high road, people.
Tags: banned books, sarah palin, snopes
Many of our friends are well-acquainted with our passion for margaritas. We’ve been both celebrated and reviled for our parties that feature margaritas by the bucket.
The recipe is a near-match to the famous Rio Grande margaritas. The Rio Grande Restaurant started as a hole-in-the-wall in my hometown of Ft. Collins, Colorado. From there it spread to Boulder, Denver, Steamboat Springs, a much bigger restaurant in Ft. Collins, and now apparently, Austin, Texas.
The Rio margarita uses a particular lime juice, which is manufactured in Denver. The exact juice they use (Beich’s) is actually a proprietary product not available to the public – or so I’m told.
HOWEVER, an enterprising group called Royal Products uses the same manufacturer to produce Duffy’s Lime Juice – a very similar juice (a little greener, basically). So, since it’s available to the public, that’s what we use. The results are splendid.
Unfortunately for most people in the world, it ain’t all that easy to find. We know of two liquor stores that carry it regularly – Liquor Mart in Boulder, and Applejack Liquor in Lakewood (Denver). For those of us on the Western Slope, it’s been tough to find.
Until today. I spoke with the distributor of Duffy’s, one Innermountain Distributing out of New Castle. I’m told I can go into my local liquor store here in Paonia and arrange a special order of the stuff. I haven’t verified that yet with the local folks, but you can bet I will. For anyone else on this side of the hill looking for Duffy’s, you should also be able to do the same since Innermountain serves a huge portion of the Western Slope.
For those of you not fortunate enough to live in Colorado, let me know if you’d like me to start my own interstate shipping business. 
Tags: duffy's lime juice, margaritas, rio grande
One of my clients is a high school reunion organizer. She hires me to build and maintain the sites used for registering and other reunion-related stuff. These sites are built in Joomla 1.0.15 on Linux/MySQL servers. She uses GoDaddy for her hosting provider.
I’m usually able to simply copy/paste the last site I made for her and customize it for the new year and school. However, the last reunion site I did included a photo gallery. And, apparently, the extension I used to provide the photo gallery functionality stashed a bunch of images into the DB.
Which means, of course, when I went to copy the last site’s DB, the SQL file was rather large – 57 MB – much larger than GoDaddy will allow for importing into a new DB via phpMyAdmin.
GoDaddy tech support turned me on to this new technique. If you arrived here through a search on this subject, I hope it helps. I couldn’t find anything about it when I needed it.
Note: This information is only relevant to people using GoDaddy hosting accounts who need to import a large SQL file. I also assume you know how to get around GoDaddy’s control panels.
- Dump the old database into a SQL file. If it’s less than 2 or 3 MB, you can probably just use phpMyAdmin for the import and skip all of what follows.
- On the NEW hosting account, create a fresh MySQL DB using the tools GoDaddy provides.
- After the setup of the DB is complete (takes several minutes), do a backup of the new DB. Yes, even though it’s empty.
- Again, this will take a few minutes. While you’re waiting FTP the SQL file from the old DB into the _db_backups directory in your HTML directory.
- Go back to your NEW DB, and do a restore. It will ask you which file you want to use. Use the big fat SQL file you just FTP’d to the new hosting account.
- The new DB will be populated with the old DB’s content.
If you found this page and used this workaround, let me know. Thanks.
Tags: godaddy, joomla, mysql, phpmyadmin
Took me long enough, but here I am finally writing about our excellent visit with friends up in the mountains last weekend. First, we were only gone about 30 hours. But this was one of those trips that actually felt like a lot more – in a GOOD way.
Our friends, H & A, have a cabin near Lake Irwin, which itself is on the Crested Butte side of Kebler Pass. The cabin sits about 11,000 ft. The tallest mountain in the vicinity is Mt. Owen at 13,102 ft. There are tons of 13 and 14,000 ft. peaks in the region.
I’m kicking myself for not properly loading maps onto my GPS receiver, and for then forgetting that I could still plot our course even without the maps. Sigh.
Anyway, here’s a map that shows the most interesting parts:
We hiked from the cabin up along the western edge of the Robinson Basin, eventually reaching the pass between Scarp Ridge and Purple Peak. From there we could see forever.
When the wind picked up and we started getting cold, we hiked back down and stopped by Green Lake.
You can see photos of the day on our rapidly-deployed photo gallery site.
OK, back to work!
Tags: friends, hiking, nature, photography
Although the forecast calls for some weather, we’re going to risk heading up to a friend’s cabin for the evening. From the photos I’ve seen, it looks stupendously gorgeous. Can’t wait.
I’ll post some photos when we get back.
Happy Labor Day.
Tags: Travel
Many of our friends watch BSG, and we’re avid fans. We all watch the show in different ways. We don’t have satellite or cable, so we download the show. One couple we know watches it when it airs on their ridiculously huge plasma TV. Yet another couple has been watching via DVD, so they’re a bit behind the rest of us.
Tonight we’re gathering before the big plasma to enjoy the show together. We’ve been trying to do this for months.
I’m not sure exactly which season or episodes we’ll catch tonight, but I think it’ll be fun.
Tags: battlestar galactica
Thea and I continue to have multi-hour brainstorming meetings about the next project. We hit a wall today on a part that had really energized both of us, so that whole smashing-head-on-wall thing kinda slowed us down. Still, the rest of the concept seems quite feasible. Even (dare I say it?) COOL.
There are still several important things to work through, but we have a mission statement and a vision statement we both feel good about. This is a noteworthy improvement over Informify.com, where we never really got behind the point of the site. Which meant it would never really feed our souls the way it would have to if we expected to spend 16 hours a day on it.
I’m still not back on the productivity train I’d planned to catch this week, but I’m improving. Right now my to-do list includes
- stuff for clients (paying work)
- stuff for the house (Fixing a banister, a lamp, and brushing dog teeth)
- lots of stuff so we can make money again
- selling a truck (Interested in ’97 2WD Ford Ranger? Anyone?)
- getting in shape again
On the last item, I can proudly say that got up and took a bike ride this morning. I fully intend to do the same thing tomorrow morning. Hopefully I’ll have cut a couple pounds by the time we attend the San Francisco wedding of some friends of ours we knew in San Luis Obispo, which occurs on the 20th. (The bride-to-be is sharp as a tack, and rarely passes up the opportunity to point out my shortcomings — albeit playfully). It’s not so much a need to impress her as much as a need to offer as small of a target as possible.)
We’re looking forward to getting back to SLO for awhile. It’s been 3 years since we left, and there are definitely some places and peeps that we sorely miss.
Obama’s campaign announced Joe Biden as their VP pick today. I didn’t know much about Biden, so I looked up some info on him.
Good Points
- Authored the Violence Against Women Act
- supports biodiesel and other renewable energies, but not ethanol (yes!)
- supports a guest-worker visa program
- voted to prevent nuclear proliferation
- advocates following the 9/11 Commission’s recommendations, and opposes the administration’s lack of respect for habeas corpus at Gitmo
- supports Roe v. Wade
Bad Points
- supports prayer in school
- supports abstinence education (ugh)
- supports building the wall between the U.S. and Mexico
I’ve never understood the need for people to pray in school. Muslims are supposed to pray 5 times a day, so I can see not being able to pray at school kind of a challenge. But most of the time the school prayer advocates are the completely deranged Christian Right types. And they openly advocate the breakdown of the separation of church and state anyway. I think they talk a lot about 1st Amendment stuff, but that’s not really the top item on their agenda.
Abstinence education follows directly with the whole religious thing. The Heritage Foundation thinks abstinence programs are great (or at least they did in ’02). But in 2007, The National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy said the programs aren’t effective. I’ve never met a teenager who unswervingly did as he/she was told, so I can’t imagine that these programs would work.
I think everyone is just a little worked up about the immigration thing. There are legitimate concerns for national security, I’d say, but this country functions largely on the cheap labor provided by the people who risk their LIVES to come work here. A responsible path toward citizenship and a guest-worker program makes a lot more sense than building a big-ass wall. At least it does to me.
So we’ll see how it comes out with Biden in the mix. As of right now the media portrays the race as neck-and-neck. I’m no giant fan of Obama, but I’ll choose him over the alternative.
Tags: 2008 election, abstinence, obama, religious right
Not sure what’s going on lately, but I’m having a tough time focusing on the important stuff. I literally have dozens of truly important things to do. How many have I done in the past couple days? One. Maybe.
I guess it must have to do with the transition away from Informify to whatever it is we’re doing next. Don’t get me wrong – we have some GREAT ideas for the next site, but the ideas are so vague that I get anxious about how to take the next steps. I’ve always been susceptible to fears of the unknown. One of my least-liked weaknesses.
And the money’s gone now. With only small injections of income in the meantime, the money we made from selling our house in California lasted us 3 YEARS. In no way to I wish I’d invested the money or saved it and kept working. I actually did some living during the past few years, learning much about myself. My relationship with Thea is stronger than ever. I have good friends. Life has been great. But reality is in our face now, big time.
If different people had been running the show, Informify probably would have turned into something. But we’re us, and we’re both relieved to get out from under the yoke of that project.
The new project (still nameless after hours of discussion) will be very cool. Of course, it will be demanding, but we now know better what kind of work schedule works for us; it will be easy for us to build the new business with this in mind. There will be some major technology challenges in this project – perhaps even challenges that will need major money to overcome. But the promise of the project overall is very encouraging.
So that is what I’ll try to focus on as we pull ourselves out of this malaise. Monday I want to get back to work so I can feel productive again – even if I don’t know what’s coming down the road.
It’s the first post – what do you expect?
Today we did some work on the new business, met with Laura, and ran errands. I just watched both the American mens’ and womens’ 4 X 100 meter relay race teams drop the baton. What better time to start a blog?
