While he looks too young to drink, you must watch out for this man and never ever play beer pong against him:

I'm currently working out of the Caribou Coffee at Colfax and 225. Don't ask why I'm in this part of town. But I am. They allow 1 hour of wifi access and enforce it by making you register an account based on an email which they then offer to send special coffee related news. I can't wait to get emails full of important coffee news...

Your account is limited to 1 hour. Fine. My 1 hour comes and goes and there are several interesting people still here:

1. the girl studying her school work who had already finished her drink before I arrived. still taking up space.
2. the annoying business meeting that is way too loud (especially about business - it should be confidential guys, get some class or your clients will sue your ass!) continues to run from before I got here until my hour is up.
3. the middle aged woman reading her book is still reading her book.
4. the same 4 tables that were emtpy when I sat down have remained empty the whole time

Now I understand some coffee shop wifi glomming etiquette. I got myself a piece of delicious lemon poppy bread ($1.87) and I tipped a dollar. If the place were full I would leave. But this is ridiculous to kill my wifi when they don't kick out all the other people who are abusing the comfortable space/light/Air Conditioning/etc.

Getting infinite hours of free wifi from Caribou

Given all that, I don't feel bad sharing this tip: use a new email address. Most hosts allow a [email protected] where the "wildcard" can be any text. That mail will still go to the [email protected] email address. I know for a fact that gmail and dreamhost use this system. So...use that system all day long for your free caribou wifi (as long as there's space for you and you tipped nicely). And don't feel ashamed, either!

Digital Nomad category

Drupal Introduction for Denver Linux Group

Tuesday night the folks at CLUE South (in the Denver Tech Center) had a "CMS Panel" that ended up collapsing into a Drupal and Mambo/Joomla! discussion. As I was writing my presentation I happened upon Gabor Hojtsy's request for new maintainers for modules including the S5 module. It seemed like a nice coincidence and since I found the S5 module to be useful in preparing my presentation I'm now the maintainer.

So, you can now see the slides that I used last night as a Drupal book or as an s5 presentation - including Drupal style theming.

Drupal as Presentation Maker - s5 Module

This is, in my opinion, a real boon for conferences and organizations that host presentations. You no longer need to worry about "which slideshow technology do we use" or "where do participants go to download the slides. Now everyone can use html or markdown syntax to make bulleted lists in Drupal book pages and then click the "export to s5" button and your presentation is all set to go.

Once I figure out a few details to make the system easier to use and the theme a little stronger I'll be committing the changes, release an improved version of that Drupal s5 theme, and branch s5 for Drupal5. If you want to try out the s5 module for Drupal5 now, the HEAD in CVS is currently compatible with Drupal5.

Future of Drupal Presentations

I wanted a sleeve for my Dell Inspiron E1705 (which is basically the same machine as the Inspiron 9300/9400) but couldn't find many good reviews online. Some said it would fit in XYZ sleeve and others would say it wouldn't fit in the same sleeve. So, I traveled to a few local computer supply shops and found several things. First, OfficeMax/OfficeDepot suck for laptop sleeves. They have lots of briefcases.

So, I showed my mom the RainSkirt photos I took and she hated them. Not hated them, but hated the fact that they were untouched. I like things in their "natural state" and generally don't touch up my photos, but now that I see her work I might be swayed.

comparing these two photos of Nikki in her skirt on that lone rainy day this spring:

Have you ever wanted to create a backup (aka dump) file of all databases on a server on a regular basis.

Well, here's an easy way to do that:

Let's say you need to drop all tables in a mysql database. How do you do that?

You could use a gui, but that's not fun.

You're a shell jockey so you want a commandline:

 mysql -u uname dbname -e "show tables" | grep -v Tables_in | grep -v "+" | \
gawk '{print "drop table " $1 ";"}' | mysql -u uname dbname

(that's all one line, but if I do it as a line then it screws up my theme - go figure).

This assumes that you are running in passwordless mode. See "man mysql" for tips on how to pass in passwords in another manner.

What this does is