I got a chance to take a Segway for a spin at work today. Campus safety was letting people try one out for a couple of minutes. It's virtually impossible to not look like a DB on one of these, but I have been wanting to try one for a while. Plus, at RIT, there is always somebody ready to step up and look like a bigger dork than you. The large lady that got on it after me slowly crashed it into the wall and then jumped off like it was about to explode.
Mike, Christy, and Colin came over on Friday. It was really great to see them, and it was fun to see Greta and Colin getting along so well. Before they came, Greta kept asking, "Is Colin coming over to my house? Is he coming over because he wants to see me really bad?"
Look how cute they are:
On Saturday, we went back to Skaneateles to have part two of Fran's father's birthday celebration. This celebration was originally scheduled to throw Fran's father off the trail of his surprise party, but because we are classy and we love extravagance, we did it anyway. I am not about to deny myself filet mignon and lobster tail just because it's not a real celebration. Fran's father was kind enough to share both a 95 and 96 Opus One with us. Everyone really enjoyed it. What they didn't know is that I secretly bathroom-pounded the Opus and replace it with Carlo Rossi.
Greta, Grandma Norma, and Hoppa
On Sunday, we took a trip to BJs (like I said, we're classy) to pick up household items in obscenely large quantities. While we were out, we all got really hungry, for McDonald's. Greta got a Cheeseburger Happy Meal with apples and milk. She ate most of it, but she could not finish all of the apples. As we were leaving, Greta said she wanted to take the apples with her.
A few minutes later in the car:
Pat: Greta, are you going to eat those apples? Greta: No. I want them, though. Pat: Should we share them with a hobo? Greta: Noooo, they're mine. Pat: Wouldn't you want to help a hobo? Greta: Why? Pat: They might be hungry, and you don't want to eat those apples anyway. Greta: ButI want to save the apples. Pat: It's nice to help people if you can. You could help a hungry person.[Pause] Greta: OK, I wanna share my apples with a homo. Pat: Ok. We'll do that.
I'm back. Fran forbade me from posting. She wanted all the comment love for herself. She's tried to keep me out of this game, but I can't leave all the Pat Reed fans hangin'. 2009 is my year.
As you can plainly, see we have revamped pnf.com. It was long overdue. We launched the site in November of 2002, and we really hadn't updated the back end or look of the site until now. Ooops. Hope you like it because we are not due to update it again until March of 2016.
If you like the nerdy crap and want to know about the site development, keep reading. If not, skip it. I ditched the old home-grown blog platform in favor of a Drupal-based site. Drupal is an open-source content management system (CMS) that is developed and maintained by a community of thousands of developers (and it kicks @$$$$). I started messing with it about a year ago when RIT Libraries was looking for a CMS for our sites. RIT Libraries now has about 12 sites running on the Drupal platform. I am definitely partial, and when I decided to ditch the home-grown system, it was the clear pick for me. Porting the content from the old site to the new one was a bit of a biatch. We had roughly 700 blog posts and almost 6,000 comments. I had to spend several hours understanding the database differences and working on the scripts to massage and port the content. Now that it is done, I am really excited about all the possibilities. I created the custom site template. It is based on the Genesis framework. I'll be prettying it up some more over the next few days/weeks. I wrote most of the JavaScript on the site using the jQuery library. I plan on writing a lot more Ajax-y site functionality soon. I configured Drupal to work with the TinyMCE WYSIWYG editor. Our home-grown CMS required us to write the HTML for the posts, so this is a welcomed addition. I think that about sums up the majority of the technical aspects of the project. If anyone wants any more information on any of this stuff, please don't hesitate to get a hold of me.
The things that I am excited about:
A stop to the daily hate mail demanding an RSS feed
Relief from the shame and ridicule that I had to endure for the outdated site look
