Politics

I've been researching who to vote for on November 4th, no not the president, my local representatives. In the past, I've felt like an ignorant monkey showing up at the poles, reading the ballot, and wondering who the heck these people are. I am ashamed to say I would vote by using such arbitrary rulers as their name sounding more pleasant than their opponents, or something equally dreadful. Not this year though! I decided to become proactive and see if I could find any information about who would be on the ballot and track them down to see what their platform was and really try to pick who I thought would be the best for the job....unfortunately I am finding out that it's harder than I anticipated.

I started out fine, after some frustration with my smart phone, I was able to go to my county's website and download an example ballot for the general election. (I had to wait to get to a desktop computer as the website wouldn't work on my palm treo.) I also found that most -- if not all -- of the state and national campaigns had web pages that were listed with the candidates contact information...no, the problem was with the Local elections, the running for legislative district representatives, sheriff, and county board members. There is almost literally nothing I could find online for any of them. I spent a good 3 hours on Google trying different searches to see if I could get anybody to tell me about who these people were. I tried youtube, facebook, wikipedia and others, but it was mostly all in vain. Oh, I found a morsel here, a crumb there but not what I was expecting.

I did find one shining star in all the empty space however. A friend and coleague of mine Roland Smith recently retired and is trying to inform Southeastern Idaho about political matters. He has a blog at http://www.rnsmith.com/ and he's also created another website http://www.seidahovotes.com/ that have some good information on them. I was also able to email Roland and get his take on many of the candidates. He had some good insites and anecdotes from meeting these people at luncheons and events. I'm not going to take his opinions and just run with them, but after our email discussion I feel a lot more confident in understanding the lay of the land around here.

Drupal Camp LA 2008

Ok, so the camp has started.

http://picasaweb.google.com/jjemmett/DrupalCampLA08#

The keynote addresses were very well done. I took notes on paper, and I will transcribe them in here later.

First Presentation: jQuery and Drupal by Victor Kane

He spent a lot of time on the background of everything, but so far, no meat.

Tools that he is using: Firefox, and Firebug.

What I am understanding is that jQuery is currently a part of the core of Drupal, and we can interact with it via the console in Firebug.

Drupal uses a naming convention to do a type of polymorphism.

node-quote.tpl.php - adds the javascript to the page that is needed for the page, and it also templates the quote.

His website is http://awebfactory.com.ar/, and he will have his example code up on his blog.

That's all folks.

Second Presentation: Dreamweaver & Drupal 6 - XTND.US (Chris Charlton)

Dreamweaver is one of Chris's loves for the web.

• It's a good IDE much like Eclipse.
• It's a great tool.
• Designers using Photoshop use it.
• It's used by lots of people.

You are always learning CSS. Don't hold yourself back, stop using notepads and start using environments.

Always create two additional folders in their sites/ folder. Modules and Themes

His presentation is very Dreamweaver specific, however he's going over certain principles that are expandable for all users.

Introduction to: Drupal 5 Themer Kit Pro extension for Dreamweaver which he will be selling to get money for the Drupal Association.

Write down everything - "naming conventions rule"

Third Presentation: Theming with Zen (Mike Stewart)

Zen Fixed Width
Negative Margins. Make sure all your elements don't bother eachother.

Fourth Presentation: Introductory Theming & Understanding the Template System - (Michael Thorne)

http://drupal.org/project/devel
http://api.drupal.org/
http://drupal.org/node/209561

Fifth Presentation: Using CSS and JQuery to Manipulate Style and Markup: A Case Study of LAdrupal.org - (Helior Colorado)

Don't Modify, Override! Hacking the system breaks the community driven methodology of the project.

zen/subtheme/style.css and zen/subtheme/script.js are the default files that drupal looks for to override the more general objects and styles.

In order of importance in cascading style sheets:

1. User !important flag will force an override of style
2. Author !important
3. Author styles
4. User styles
5. Browser styles

1. Inline style=" "
2. !important rule
3. #id selector
4. .class selector
5. type selector
6. * (universal) selector

Specificity Calculator - counter of how many times this is used (using an unspecified multiplyer. We are going to use multiples of 10 for an example)

1. A(inline) X 1000
2. B(id) X 100
3. C(class) X 10
4. D(type) x 1
5. Position (last loaded) takes precidence if two have the same specificity
   

Example:

#main .block .nav li {
display:inline;
padding-left:5px;
} = 121

#page #main .block li{
display:block;
font-weight:800;
} = 211

item1

= 1000

Case Study: ladrupal.org

The website is owned by someone that can never be contacted.

sets defaults first
* {
margin:0;
padding:0;
}

jQuery can be very helpful to modify the theme after the page is sent to the browser but before it is sent to the user.

Add code to the script.js

$(document).ready(function(){
if(document.getElementByID("Secondary")){
$("#primary").html($("#secondary").html());
}

google search visual jQuery -> remisharp will help in understanding how the jQuery API works.

Meet and Greet: acquia is a corporate sponsor of Drupal much like Redhat is a corporate sponsor of Linux.

It's a girl!

The baby has arrived, and all is well with her and her momma. She arrived at 7:15 this morning a robust 7lb. 15oz. and is 21 inches long. Her big brothers and sister are really excited to include her in the family. Shauna is doing especially well, and may be released from the hospital early. We have her mother here helping watch the kids while I am at the hospital with her.

Up late with wife and Monk

My honey loves Monk. I think we've now watched every episode that is out on DVD. Earlier this week we rented the last two unseen DVD's from the local video stop and they were due this morning.

Each one being 3-4 episodes, that's a lot of time with Monk, but after we got the kiddies in bed, I threw a disc in and we had a Monk marathon.

When the credits rolled on the final episode it was 3am. I'm paying for it today, but I really had an enjoyable time with just my wife, me, and the TV. Some times making your marriage work takes long talks and long walks and roses and chocolates...sometimes it just takes an obsessive compulsive detective.

Repaired piano bench and a truck window

Yesterday, B came by my office at lunch and asked me what I was doing. I told him I wanted to get some wood to repair the piano bench that was broken when we got the piano. He suggested looking in the scrap bin of Home Depot to see if they had a 1x4 piece to fix the back and maybe some scrap thin plywood to fix the bottom.

I also wanted to get a rock-chip repaired in my truck's window before winter hit and the chip starred even worse than it was already. So we stopped by the glass store before heading to HD.

The first glass store we went to was out of resin if you can believe it. Apparently with all the road repairs that have been taking place over the last couple months, so many people have gotten rock chips that this particular glass store couldn't keep up. We tried another place, but it was even more expensive.

Giving up on that idea, B said that while we were near his pop's place we should check and see if he might have some wood that I could use to make my repairs. Lo-and-behold, when we got there, they pulled out some old wood that had been used on an organ. They said I could have it for free. They also said that they had a small piece of thin plywood I could have. "Need to use the table-saw too? No problem!" ... I love those people.

With all the tools available and the good wood, I was able to create a duplicate of the destroyed wood piece. When I got home later that night, I put it all together and it looks better than ever.

As a side note, after working on the wood, I was able to stop by a third glass place. They were able to fix the chip and it was made even sweeter by being the cheapest place too. The truck also got two buy offers which made me feel proud.

What kind is it you ask? It's a 1976 Ford F150 Ranger 2wd.

Old dog....

I guess I am going to see if the old saying is true or not. We bought a used piano from a family that was moving. It came with some primers and teach-yourself books, so now I am trying to learn how to play the piano.

Last night I spent about 3 hours tickling the ivories and I think I made a good start. What's nice about one book is that it has 2 CD's of the songs you are trying to learn, so you can hear what it's supposed to sound like as well as being able to play along. It's neat.