It’s been a busy year since my last real update.  The biggest news is that I’ve sold my house.  (Shed a tear if you wish)

Mid-summer of last year, I came to the realization that the house was just draining me – financially, physically, and to some extent, emotionally.  To say I came to the realization is probably not the right phrase, but rather accepted the realization.  I’d known for some time that things were going downhill.  I tried and I tried to make it work, make things better, but it just wasn’t happening.  The lender was unwilling to work with me on a refi or a “Home Affordable” modification, so I started down the sales path.  
Unfortunately, I had to short-sell.  In the long-run, it should be ok for me.  I’m not 100% happy that I had to sell or the circumstances that brought this about, but it is what it is.  Unfortunately, to force the bank to the table, I had to strategically miss a couple payments.  Again, still hasn’t hurt me too bad.  But I’ll tell you what, you find out a whole lot about the bank’s “customer service” when things go wrong.  Needless to say, my experience (and that of my realtor) in dealing with them was nothing short of HORRENDOUS.  I’ll leave it at that for now.

It was also a struggle to get to closing.  I think that the buyer’s agent was mis-informed or didn’t communicate the need for urgency to their buyer.  We barely made the closing deadline as it was.  I’m still waiting for the final confirmations from the banks, but I do know that the wires went out.

I hope the buyer winds up being happy with their purchase.  They certainly weren’t pleased at closing, which I can understand, because I wasn’t too pleased about the process either.  I turned over a house which aside from a few small things (mostly cosmetic) is in great shape.  I certainly spent enough time cleaning the damn thing.

Squeezing from a 4 bedroom/2.5 bath house into a 2 bed/2 bath apartment isn’t easy.  But I’m there at least.

The real kicker though is the week after I moved in, I find out that the DOT needs to take my building as part of the urban loop around Greensboro.  =/  I’ll have about 3 months or so before I need to move out.  At least the DOT is going to provide funding for me to move, and the management will give me some rent incentives to stay in the complex.

So generally, that’s where I’m at right now.  Just a bit of an update.  =)  I’ll try to get around and post a bit more.

It bothers me to see the actions of the government over the last six weeks.  A political deadlock over the fact we need to cut spending, then vote to spend *more*?!  Logic took a long walk off a short pier up in DC the last few years…

To date, over the last four years, the government has spent almost $1.8 trillion in defined “stimulus” packages.  Where’s the payoff?   Unemployment is still at an all-time high. Jobs growth is nil.  The remaining economic numbers don’t look all that hot either.

So here’s my wild-ass idea.  Might not work, but hey – people who make a hell of a lot more money than me and have tons of alphabet soup on their business cards haven’t been doing any better.  The simple thought – take that $1.8 trillion and split it amongst US households, and DON’T require them to pay it back over a series of years.  It’s a gift, not a loan.  Even better, how about just paying down the total US Consumer Debt number of $2.4 trillion?

Hear me out on this… As of May, the average household credit card debt stood at just shy of $16k.  In interest payments only, that’s $2,100 per year.  How many are actively paying more than that and trying to pay it down?  (Consumer debt, by the way, includes things like personal loans, car loans, etc.  I don’t believe student loans are included.)  So, in essence, you free up at least $200 per month per household, perhaps more.

That’s money that was being spent to pay down debts that could be used elsewhere.  Perhaps an extra dinner and movie out per month?  Maybe vacation money?  Perhaps a new TV, or maybe even a new car.  Home improvements, such as a new washer & dryer for the one that’s been there for fifteen years?  What happens then?  Producers have to raise production to meet demand (or prices inflate).  IF they have to raise production – doesn’t that mean more jobs?

Or perhaps they save it at the bank (yes, yes, horrid rates and all).  If that happens, that would give banks much higher reserve ratios, which would allow them to lend more (with proper risk controls) at reasonable rates.  That in and of itself would be beneficial to not only consumers, but businesses as well.

The point I’m trying to make is this – these “stimulus” packages are short-term at best.  The roots of a true economic recovery have always been at the consumer-spending level.  All these packages serve to do is provide a sense of false hope and keep the politicians in office for another term.  What’s the President going to be touting for the next twelve months as he stumps?  ”I brought in a stimulus package for jobs.”  Big whoop – it’s not addressing the core problem.  And realistically, how is this packages supposed to help “now” anyways?

Sure, we can go on and on about how this might be a short-term fix as well, all the pitfalls, etc.  But really, the first $1.5 trillion hasn’t broken us out of our slump.  Consumer sentiment and confidence are low.  The simple reason is that people know they have a lot of bills that are still due if they’re out of a job.  Remove some of those bills and see what happens then.

I find it folly to believe that a corporation can create jobs when there is no demand for the goods and services they produce.  So what exactly are we stimulating them to do?  Did you hear the story about one of the stimulus programs that spent a few hundred thousand and created exactly 1.2 jobs?

I’m obviously not part of the “brain trust” in DC.  (No, I don’t mean the one where they share a brain between all of them, though it seems that way sometimes.)  I don’t have an advanced degree in economics.  What I do have is real world experience.  I know that if I had another couple hundred bucks in my pocket each month, I’d eat out or go on vacation.  I might buy something that I really don’t need, but would love to have.  Perhaps it’s time the “trust” in DC actually thinks what they would do with their money if it was in their pockets rather than their lobbyists’ pockets?

One of the big things I’ve been doing (aside from working) has been working on my yard.  I didn’t do much last year, mainly just keeping up.  The previous year I did a lot of work to the front yard, just working on the “curbside” appeal (or was that 3 years ago?).  I’ve neglected the backyard somewhat, in favor of presenting an appealing curb view.  I’ll save you the bandwidth if you want by only presenting some before and after pics, and link you to the rest of the pics. (Excuse the fact that I haven’t cut the grass yet, it was HOT today.  I already spent enough time outside putting in the last tree.)

(Edit – I forgot to post the link to the gallery of all the pics - http://www.t-gk.net/photogallery/springhousepics/)

Four of the trees I ordered from a site called “Fast Growing Trees”, which is out of Charlotte.  Two Dynamite Crepe Myrtles, 1 Hybrid Poplar, and 1 Tulip Poplar.  The fifth tree is a Pin Oak i picked up from Lowe’s (and got 25% off).  The back of the hill is where I put the two crepe’s (on the corners) and the hybrid poplar is in the middle.  The Tulip and Pin Oak are closer to the house to provide me shade (since the back of the house faces west).

The four trees I ordered were for a reason.  Lowe’s & Home Depot only carry the more popular varieties for homeowners – Maples mostly, but also a few others, like the Bradford Pear and a different variety of Myrtle.  The Poplars are fast growers that tend to be stronger than most other fast growing varieties.  They should sprout between 4-8 feet a year, and get a maximum spread of 30-40 feet.  The oak is a slower grower, but it can get to 40-50 feet without effort. The crepe’s should grow to about 30 ft tall (if even), and will bloom red from around this time through Labor Day.

I’m a little worried about the tulip poplar.  NC is known for it’s red clay and it’s not a soil that drains well.  When I planted everything, I either used outright topsoil or mixed it in with some of the native dirt.  When I planted the tulip, I was running low on good soil, so I mixed in a bit of mulch and more of the original soil than I would have liked.  It didn’t drain well at all.  Initial watering I basically “flooded” it, and a week later, it was yellowing.  I dug it back out, and it was still basically sludge (smelled like sewer drainage, ewwww).  I’ve replaced all the soil and the mulch with dry stuff and barely watered it (as the root ball was still wet).  I’m hoping this holds up.

I’ve been working on filling in the bare spots in the grass.  That’s the main project for the rest of this summer is getting more grass in the front and back yard.  I’m thinking at this point that I’ll bite the cost for core aeration in the fall, do a heavy overseed then, as well as another overseed in the spring.  As you can tell by the pics, it’s come a long way in a few years.  (I just wish my neighbor to the right would work on their yard – giant dirt patch visible from my back door. The other projects, which are generally smaller in nature, is to do a retaining wall planter/ring around the tree in the front yard, and to actually put in some edging along the “shrub bed” at the back of the house.

When I put in the flower bed in the front a few years ago, I transplanted all the bushes from the front to the back, so that’s why they’re there.  Since the house faces a relatively major thoroughfare (it’s a dead end with a large church at the end), and the “back entrance” to my development, it’s amazing to see how many other houses on my street haven’t really done much with their back yards.

So anyways, that’s one of the big things I’ve been busy with.  Hopefully I’ll remember to post more updates in the near future.

It’s interesting, because this article - Custom Web Design or Website Template, somewhat illustrates a concept I was trying to explain earlier this week to a “client”.  He was asking me why I was able to crank out a basic design/prototype for his club’s website so quickly, yet struggling with his own company page.  I’ve developed an “extension” of the article, I suppose, that explains my feelings on when to use a ready-made template/theme package vs. building from the ground up.

On both the “club” sites that I run, the local alumni association and soon his local Mustang club chapter, I’ve built them off of Joomla! and not WordPress.  The reasoning behind the choice of CMS is pretty straightforward – Joomla! offers a much higher degree of control and “community” features than WordPress.  Sure, WordPress offers several different levels of “ACL’s” (access control levels), but it’s primarily built from a blogging-platform up.  Meaning that it’s really designed for just a few people to run and have interactivity.  The creation of a “subscriber” account is mainly for convenience in commenting on an article, not interacting with others on a pretty regular basis.

Beyond that, it’s about the interactivity of the community itself.  Club sites like these need to offer the users more than just a fairly static feed of the latest news.  Interpersonal interactions and sharing of resources is really what needs to be available.  WordPress is lacking in these options, because the plugins that create things like galleries and forums are either too basic, or require a higher level of security access to use them.  On top of that, there are certain functions that are completely lacking (newsletter archives and sending, for instance).

But back to the point about the design itself.  I use commercially available themes on these sites because they don’t necessarily need to have their own identity.  Sure, I’ve customized them a bit, but by and large, does it really matter if it’s got a similar feel to another site of another club locally?  I suppose in some respects, it does, but my feeling is that the focus needs to be and is on the content – whether it be “webmaster-driven” or “user-driven”.  There’s also the little fact that Joomla! templates/themes are a bit more complicated, and I really haven’t gotten into understanding HOW they’re built just yet.

A company, on the other hand, needs its own identity.  It’s not just about the content, but the design and feel.  Some elements of course will always borrow from other sites, but the color scheme, layout, etc, all should be fairly unique to help establish that identity.

And there-in lies my problem.  It’s not that I’m not creative when I need to be.  I’ve got a couple of good ideas for his company’s design, but I lack the necessary graphical skills in the Photoshop department to implement them.  His isn’t the only design I’m having an issue with.  A buddy of mine asked me to play around with a “theme” for his YouTube channel, and I’ve got a great idea, but can only partially implement it.  I haven’t been able to figure out how to bend Ps to do what I want it to do.  And it’s frustrating enough to make me want to put it down entirely.  It also doesn’t help that I swear I’ve picked up a hint of my dad’s color-blindness and have issues matching colors… =/

I could just easily take a pre-built theme and rip it apart and mix some things up, but I’m not really at the point where I want to accomplish that just yet.  It’s a headache re-working someone else’s code, ESPECIALLY when they take little to no effort to actually annotate what they’re doing in certain sections, and I have to trace the reference calls.

There’s just so much to learn that it’s overwhelming, and it doesn’t help that a lot of the materials out there for Ps (books, not web tutorials) all focus on using Ps as a software to modify photos, not as a design medium.  Guess I should probably just suck it up, read what books I have, and learn to translate those tools to the design process instead of editing and retouching.

I posted last year my thoughts on the iPad as a viable platform, especially for it’s “Kindle replacement” argument (obviously that hasn’t happened yet).  I still stand by the argument that if you want a pure reading device, that’s your best bet.  But I’ve found myself away from my PC’s more (sitting in the Great Room) and despise having my phone for internet access. My laptop only has a 2hour and change battery (what I get for going low-end, but I didn’t need the monster I had prior to this one).  Price-wise, tablets are still not a “consumer item” (at $499+ for a “decent” tablet, plus data).  There’s been dozens of reviews on the spec differentials, so I won’t bore you there.  But earlier this week, I came across an article discussing how people were taking the Nook Color and “rooting” it to run the Android OS.  After doing some more reading and digging (it’s relatively simple), I came across the Viewsonic G Tablet as a viable option.  It’s priced in the upper 300′s, so it’s a bit more reasonable, and it’s got the specs to match the iPad 2 and Xoom (dual core processor, onboard RAM and memory).  I went out and picked one up.  The stock firmware isn’t that hot (even after the update to the latest version), so I rooted it to run any number of “ROMs” that are out there.  Most of them are based on either “Froyo” or “Gingerbread” – phone OS’es.  They aren’t bad, and certainly seemed snappy enough.  But that form factor… just didn’t jive for me.  It’s 1.55 lbs, and huge.  It also doesn’t sit well, as the screen is “off center”, and the screen itself doesn’t work well unless you’re looking right at it.  (It’s a netbook screen, basically.)

So going back to my reading, I picked up a Nook Color, having the chance to play with one in the B&N store.  Much better, as it’s the same size as my Kindle3, just heavier.  As soon as I got it home, I immediately rooted it to the “preview” of Android Honeycomb (the OS designed for the Xoom and other tablets).  All I have to say is WOW.  It’s just as snappy as the bigger gTab that I had, weighs less, feels more “solid”, and infinitely easier to root than the gTab.  Honeycomb isn’t slated for release for a few more weeks, so a lot of the features in this ROM aren’t ready yet, but the basics (email, web browsing, etc.) work just fine.  I can’t ever see myself using these as a gaming platform or just casual videos (youtube/trailers), but for $250, it’s basically a “poor man’s” Samsung Galaxy Tab.

Now, the stock B&N firmware isn’t that hot, so I still wouldn’t recommend it as a pure e-reader.  It was very sluggish and misinterpreted a lot of the taps and touches on the screen I was working with.  When you’re working with a pure e-reader, the device itself should take a back-seat to the reading experience itself.  That’s why I love my Kindle.  The “device” falls away when I’m reading and I’m engrossed in the content.  I don’t think the iPad or even a rooted Nook Color would really allow that to happen, but I’ll give it a shot when I’m playing with this thing in the meantime.  =)

WP 3.1 rolled out on Wednesday, and silly me, thinking it’d be fine to upgrade, did so on both t-gk.net and cans-crew.com.  t-gk.net was fine (and why shouldn’t it be?), but cC went into a tailspin.  After multiple hours of frustration, I finally got cC back to basic functionality again, but it’s still missing some key features.

The integration (WP-United) redefines several functions that until WP 3.1, had been in a file that was rarely called.  3.1 moved those into an “always active” file, creating PHP Fatal errors.  Not good.  As a temporary work around, I wound up just renaming the files in WP-United.  It’s at least restored template functionality, but the user-integration method is somewhat borked for the time-being.  As a solution, I *think* that if I comment out the offending functions in WP, all will be well.

This is what happens when you use a piece of software that’s not actively developed right now.  Officially, the last “stable” release of WPU is compatible with WP 2.9 and phpBB 3.07-pl1.  The dev has been disappeared for over 6 months.

I’m thinking at the present time that I should take a serious look at pulling several pieces of his  software and merging them with another one out there that’s missing them.  I don’t feel 100% comfortable doing it, but I think it’s going to have to be done. =(

The design is for my gaming community, cC (formerly’ cAn’s Crew).  I’ll spare anyone *not* interested in the gory details by posting everything below the cut.  Background

cC was founded in 2006.  As is a requisite for most gaming communities, you need a game server and forums.  That’s how the site started out – just a “stock” phpBB installation.  About 2 1/2 years ago, one of the founders, cAnOPENER stepped aside, pushing the hosting off on the remaining members.  cincinnati (cincy) was left in charge, and asked for someone to step up and help out with site maintenance.  At the time, Preacher volunteered to host the site and take care of the ancillary pages (we also started hosting a MediaWiki installation for the more “static” stuff.)

Preacher rebuilt the site roughly a year ago to use his programming language of choice – Ruby on Rails.  That takes a lot of extra configuration to get things like phpBB and Mediawiki running.  Cincy handled the majority of the design look.  The downside to preacher’s build is that he never really integrated the 3 sections of the site (home page, wiki, and forums).  Each had their own distinct look and operation, logins weren’t integrated (as best as I can tell).

Fast forward to this past December/January, and cincy and preacher started discussions for him to not host the site anymore.  There are rumors it was based on personal reasons, and I won’t go into those.  Regardless, in January, we moved to a shared hosting provider with JustHost.  I was asked if I could host from my VPS, but I declined, as I’m rather in the habit of wiping and reinstalling my VPS every few weeks (although I’m running on a good 7 weeks without a reformat right now).  I also didn’t want to create an issue with the members if I decide to leave or whatnot.

With shared hosting, running a rails application takes a lot of work.  I’m not very versed in Rails or configurations where I don’t have root access.  Needless to say, I couldn’t get it running.  On top of that, I honestly ask why it makes sense to run two different programming languages on a service that’s more built for PHP?  But I digress.

The Integration

I make no bones about the fact that I’m a fan of WordPress.  It’s a simple CMS system that can be expanded to infinite functionality.  Theming WP is relatively straightforward. You can get as simple or complex as you like.

Since the forums constitute the majority of our history, it made sense to find a package to integrate with them.  I found that in WP-United.  Despite the developer’s occasional disappearances, the plugin works pretty well.  Oh sure, there are other systems I could have looked into, even actually migrating us away from phpBB to another, like SMF, vBulletin, etc., but why switch?

The wiki solution was more a pain in the butt.  Between the integration with WP and phpBB, MediaWiki would throw a PHP error every time I tried to integrate the WordPress theme.  The inelegant solution would have been to basically skin MediaWiki with what I was doing for WP and be done with it.  But it still makes it a standalone solution.  Instead, I opted to install WikkaWiki and integrate that.  (For the record, this involves invoking 3 calls in the wiki files – wp-load, get_header, and get_footer).  Unfortunately, there’s no clear migration path between MediaWiki and WikkaWiki, so it means re-constituting the information manually.  It’s probably for the best, as a lot of the information was out of date.

The Theme

I’m no stranger to theming from scratch.  I dislike it, as there are about 50 different schools on the subject.  Instead, I chose to go down the route of using an established framework.  I used Justin Tadlock’s Hybrid framework for this.  For a small fee, support is available on his forums, and he’s damn helpful.  Unfortunately, I think his system’s a bit overloaded for what I need it for, and he tends to believe in using CSS for all styling (like doing rounded corners).  But, it’s given me some great understanding of hooking into the WordPress system and using that instead of a myriad of downloadable plugins.  While it’s common knowledge that too many plugins can slow down a WP site, I still wonder if hard-coding them helps that out or not.  It certainly saves having to load more than the requisite stylesheets and javascript.

Combatting spam

One of the things I knew and suspected was that this move would open us up to the spam bots.  In the first three days since putting the site live, Akismet stopped over 800 spam comments.  On top of that, I still cleared out another 200 that made it through Akismet.  On Monday, I put us on Cloudflare.  In essence, it acts like a firewall, blocking known spam and bot traffic.  It’s been a boon, as it’s blocked quite a bit of traffic.  I’m debating putting t-gk.net on it, but I’m not sure how far I want to go with that yet.  I don’t have the fine-tuned control that my friend SaYnt does with his registrar.  I have some subdomains on here that I’m really not worried about getting hit.  It’s the main site that really takes any traffic.

So there it is.  A new site rolled out and functioning.  Response to the redesign has been pretty positive so far amongst our members.  How much longer this lasts is another question entirely.  I really need to get back and get serious on the Piedmont Triad Productions site.  I never really set a deadline or due date, but since I actually have to populate the content AND come up with the design, I’ve been dragging my feet.  Time to get serious.

I’ve been struggling to integrate MediaWiki, phpBB3, and WordPress together.  Basically, WordPress is going to run the functionality of the overall site, including the template.  This is for my gaming community, and we’ve had phpBB and MediaWiki running together for quite some time.  Unfortunately, they’ve always run disjointedly, meaning there was never any real integration between the home page, the forums, and the wiki.

Sadly, Mediawiki won’t integrate with the WP-United setup.  It’s left me very frustrated the last few days.  The idea of adding a few lines of code that call up the WP header may work for WP & Mediawiki alone, but not with WP, Mediawiki, and WP-United.  Maybe phpBB4 will fix that, but that’s easily 12 months away.

The elegant solution, it seems, is to just use the idea of the integration instructions and use another Wiki package.  Seems I’ve found that solution with WikkaWiki, although it remains to be seen if I’ll be able to get the data inside our MediaWiki install and convert it to WikkaWiki.  I hope that I can.

My friend Daniel has developed some modeling software called CurveExpert.  He’s had it for a few years, and this was his site to sell it originally – www.curveexpert.net/original.  It’s all manually done html, low on graphics, and *gasp* ugly.  He didn’t even have a proper domain!  He asked me when he started working on the update to the software what he should do in terms of webhosting, as well as site design.  I suggested that he move to WordPress, PHPBb (for user forums), and get a VPS similar to me (he’s fairly decently versed in Linux.  So he dove right in.  He used the default WordPress theme initially, but went shopping for a theme for the “final release” of his software.

So, about a week ago, he wanted to get the forums to match up with the main site.  I told him that I’d take care of it for him.  I just finished up last night.  Check out the finished product at http://www.curveexpert.net and http://www.curveexpert.net/forums.

It was a good exercise, because I’m going to wind up doing something similar with my gaming community’s site.  We changed providers and the old webmaster has stepped aside.  He builds sites using Rails (a newer method of coding), and I can’t seem to get it to run on our new host.  Not to mention we had a very disjointed feel between all sections of our site.  So, I’m going to start integrating things together, and needed the experience of editing a forum template.  Hopefully this will go somewhat easier than the last one!

To say the numbers are night and day difference would be an understatement of epic proportions.  Just the “feel” of my computer now is amazingly faster.  From the time I press power to fully into Windows 7 is about 35 seconds.  Photoshop loads almost immediately.  I’ve not seen a drastic improvement in my game load times (possibly because the worst part of my level changes are always re-negotiating with the server, something I can’t control).  I chose to do a fresh install of Windows and my programs rather than do a drive image, and the whole process took at least an hour less to perform.  Windows 7 installed in roughly 15 minutes!

If you do decide to make the leap to an SSD, do your homework.  There are various tweaks you need to make to Windows 7 in order to make sure that you get the most out of your drive and extend its life.  Also check into the reliability of the controller software.  While it’s true that drives with the SandForce controller sets are some of the fastest on the market, they have a fairly high failure rate (10-15% based on non-scientific reviews from NewEgg).  I bought the Samsung SSD – which seems to be from observation, the most reliable at the present time.  Time will tell though, as this drive doesn’t have quite the age that some of the SandForce-based drives (like the OCZ Vertex and Agility have).

I’m now debating replacing the hard drive in my laptop with an SSD (albeit a smaller one, since I don’t have 15gb of games on my laptop).  I wonder what sort of increase in performance I’d see from my HTPC with an Atom processor with one of these babies.