Bought a book about Joomla a lil bit ago and just reading over it makes it seem like a wonderful platform for doing a whole bunch of really really neat things.  It kinda makes me want to redo the custom CMS i’ve been making at work for the last 3 months for fuddruckers.  Well ok there’s some pretty significant things that aren’t in there for that particular job.  Nonetheless it looks like a very robust foundation to know and be able to expand upon.  So I’m goind to get started on the Drakkheim.com lan planning / management site just to get more comfortable with the ins and outs of the system.  

Hopefully once I knock it out I’ll have the knowledge to use Joomla as a base platform for many many other things that I’ve got planned both at home and at work.

In completely unrelated news Robert Asprin and Lody Lynn Nye have released another book in the wonderful MYTH series called Myth-Chief..   Jeez come to think of it I’ve been following those for close to 15 years now..  Well here’s to another 15.

Soo it’s been a fairly productive beginning of November.  I’ve got the version 1.0 of the new http://www.beautifulbasics.com up and running.  Still need to put up some instructions etc etc.  But the core functionality is there and it works fine.

Yaay and It’s actually quite addictive, and embeddable into myspace/facebook etc etc.  I’ve got a whole list of secondary features to add to it and minor bugs to iron out.  

I’ve been playing with the acrylics again and starting to get a feel for it.  Maybe things actually get easier with practice…. nahh.  Anyway it was quite fun  to just glop paint around and see what emerged.  Can’t wait to do it again.

just messing around

Oh well back to the salt mines.

Well the year sure went fast. 

Been playing with some basic python and pygame stuff.  Seems like a pretty easy to learn language and api, just havent gotten myself convinced for the need to learn yet another language… oh well Im sure I’ll think of something to use for an excuse.

But it probably wont be until Xmas.  Letting the brain relax and just enjoying some neglected games and movies and such.  blah blah blah blah..

Well it looks like the comicpress theme broke the site in Internet Exploder… so I’ve switched to a generic template until I can find the problem.. Who knows maybe there’s a new version of comicpress that’ll magically fix it. 

But for now at least it works in IE again.

So, It’s been a good year.  Overall… Though I’d say the first 7 months or so really…er.. sucked.. The last 5 have been absolutely spectacular.

The holiday’s are just about gone.  My christmas tree is still up and glorious and the presents are scattered around the house.  The remnants of nerf battles past lie scattered around in the corners.

The amazon wish list was a success Including an awesome score of a copy of Descent: journeys into the dark, Feersum Endjinn, a nice iPod alarm clock and other goodies!

But, it’s about time to start a pet project… and no time like the beginning of a fresh year to do so. Soo… I’ve cracked open some Ruby on Rails tutorials and am gearing up for the start of an actual development.  I need to crank out some milestones and a basic design guideline and then go from there.

But on the other hand… I did get some cool canvas boards that are just itching to get slathered with paint, not to mention my copy of painter has been doing good things.. so maybe that will distract me.. 

Boy, life is hard with too many hobbies…