Beautiful rendition of ‘The Dragonborn Comes’ (Skyrim Bard Song and Main Theme) by Malukah.

You can download the mp3 for free at http://www.malukah.com/free/

Chords - The Dragonborn Comes

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Derrick Bell, Steve Jobs, and Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth.
(Photo: David Shankbone/Wikicommons, Justin Sullivan/Getty Images, REUTERS/Tami Chappell)

I am sad that Steve Jobs is gone. I didn’t know him, but like many other people, he changed my life. There have been many tributes to Mr. Jobs in the past week and it is easy to see how widespread his influence was. There is also some negative sentiment in which people are furious that so much attention and honor is given to the death of a corporate billionaire while the deaths of race scholar Derrick Bell and civil rights leader Rev. Fred Shuttlesworth, who died on the same day, were much less prominently noted. I definitely agree that the deaths of Derrick Bell and Rev. Shuttlesworth deserve at least as much attention as the death of Steve Jobs, but it is Steve Jobs’ influence on my life that I will write about here.

Apple IIe

Like many computer geeks, Steve Jobs was a hero and an inspiration to me. He changed ‘thinking different’ from a reason to get beat up to a reason to be respected (at least as far as nerdy computer geeks go). I have been in continuous awe of the things he has created since the day my dad brought home an Apple IIe in 1983. That, along with a Commodore 64 and a VIC-20 that we used in the high school Computer Club, were the first places I learned about programming. BASIC. Loved it!

To a person who thinks of things in a very literal way and finds it hard to get along in a world where logic does not always dictate reality, programming provides a comfort, a world where actions and consequences are dictated by logic alone.

Aside from learning some PASCAL in college, I was out of the computer/media loop until 1995, when my dad told me about Windows 95. I got my first PC, a Compaq Presario 100MHz mini-tower with 8KB RAM, and read “Windows 95 For Dummies” from cover to cover. Over the next 10 years, I learned to build and fix PCs. I learned to build websites using FrontPage Express, a program that was included with Internet Explorer 4. It had a split view where you could look at the visual web site on one side and the code on the other, making it very easy to see how changing one would affect the other. I also learned more than I ever wanted to know about the Windows operating system.

By 2004, I was sick of the constant problems with Windows and had decided to switch to Linux. 2004 was also the year that the San Francisco Apple Store first opened. Lured by the promise of shiny electronic things, I wandered into the store and was completely blown away by what I saw. The operating system of the time was OS X 10.3, aka Panther. It was simple and beautiful, yet had the power, stability, and security of a UNIX based operating system behind it. That was it. The bar was raised forever. My first mac was a 12″ PowerBook 1.33GHZ PowerPC with 256MB of RAM. Somehow, that little thing ran circles around my 3GHz Pentium 4 PC with 1GB RAM.

I knew almost nothing about my new mac, which was a little disturbing considering that I could troubleshoot Windows in my sleep. Luckily, Karen knew how to use a mac and showed me the way. Before long, I realized that I was so confused at first because everything was so easy to do! I expected everything to be more complicated and unstable like Windows, but it was not. There was no need to troubleshoot in my sleep anymore. Like programming, macs made sense to me.

I currently use a 24″ iMac, a 15″ MacBook Pro, and an iPhone to do my work, learn new things, play games, and communicate with the world in a way that was not possible for me in the past. I am thankful to Steve Jobs for thinking differently and for the amazing contributions that he has made to the technical world. I am thankful to him for his inspiration and vision. I will miss him and the contributions he surely would have made in the future had his life not been cut so short.

Steve Wozniak remembers Steve Jobs

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Mad World of Cataclysm Lyrics:

All around me are the brand-new races,
Messed up places, forlorn faces.
Deathwing broke the world I knew in pieces,
Flooded cities, unveiled new species.
Suddenly I’ve got a crappy gearscore,
No one invites me, pugs don’t like me.
Back to griding rep and max professions,
New achievements, quest progression.

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad,
Disenchanting all these epics after wanting them so bad.
It’s so humiliating, I’m upgrading with greens,
Hearthing back to Stormwind in a very, very,
Mad world.

Yesterday I was an epic raider,
Purple blader, Lich King slayer,
Now I’m not well-geared enough to get in,
Bastion of Twilight, Throne of the Four Winds.
Cued for randoms, I was very nervous,
No one knew me, pulled right through me.
Hello trainer. Tell me what’s my lesson?
Reforge this. Don’t stack that anymore.

And I find it kind of funny, I find it kind of sad,
Disenchanting all these epics after wanting them so bad.
It’s so humiliating, I’m upgrading with greens,
Hearthing back to Stormwind in a very, very,
Mad world.

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Favorite minesweeper app for iPhone :

Both of these apps are free.

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Even though we are only 9 days in to 2011, this year has been pretty crazy so far. So crazy, that 2010 is already kind of a blur. Karen and I are trying to get ready to move to Baltimore in April and there are so many things to do, it boggles my mind. We are both crazy busy with work, cats, packing, cleaning, and about a million other things.

I have not had much time or energy to post here on LBnuke other than the ‘Please vote for AWN’ series. Thank you so much to everyone who voted! We came very close a few times, but did not win. As it turned out, we made lots of good connections and will be able to do many of the things we wanted to do with the contest money. I think 2011 will be a great year for the Autism Women’s Network

2010 was the best year ever for BeeDragon, my business. I have been crazy busy and am now working on 2 large projects that were not supposed to overlap. It seems to be common in this business for clients to be very late with their content. Thankfully one of the projects has been sticking to the planned schedule. I still dream of having some kind of  partnership, network, whatever, where I am not a one person shop. My ideal team consists of me doing general web development, an awesome graphic designer, and a business manager. I don’t know anything at all about the local Baltimore web dev community, but hopefully I will find it quickly!

LBnuke 2011: I am in the process of adapting LBnuke to be a little more Tumblr like so that it will be easier for me to post things here. Right now, I am running an early release version of WordPress 3.1 so that I can play around with ‘post-formats’ and learn how to work with them in theme files and templates. As usual, WordPress makes this pretty easy.

Time to get back to work now. 2011 will be a big adventure for me and K. My current plan is to avoid going insane while so many things are going on at once. So far this is going ok except that I fall asleep a lot. At the end of March, either me and Karen or just Karen will go to Baltimore to find a place to live. At the beginning of April, we will pack up our cats and drive across country.

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Lori B. says, “Truly awesome! I laughed, I cried, I didn’t really cry.”

Credits:
Directed by: Jed Whedon
Music by: Jed Whedon
Lyrics by: Felicia Day
Main Vocal: Felicia Day
Rap: Jeff Lewis and Sandeep Parikh
Backup Vocals: Maurissa Tancharoen and Jed Whedon
Director of Photography: Omer Ganai
Choreography: Chantal Robeson
Edited by: Jeff Yorkes
Produced by: Christian Agypt, Felicia Day
Costumes: Sarah Trost
Weapons: Greg Aranowitz
Production Design: Tyler Robinson

Starring:
Vincent Caso
Felicia Day
Jeff Lewis
Amy Okuda
Sandeep Parikh
Robin Thorsen

Dancers:
Bijoya Das
Jul Kohler
Maurissa Tancharoen

English Subtitles: Daniela Figueiredo
Portuguese – Jonathan Iury and Dani Figueiredo
Spanish – Pablo Lopez Vila and Carles Soler Sala

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With the growing popularity of open source software, I have been able to focus on building sites with WordPress and Drupal, and to greatly increase my skills in taking these platforms to the next level for my clients.

Once again, my business site has become outdated. The web development business is incredibly fast moving. One of my favorite things about this job is that I am continually learning new technologies. 2010 has been an especially exciting year for web development with the growing browser support for HTML5 and CSS3, as well as new releases (or near releases) of both WordPress and Drupal.

I am still working on the site, but for the most part it is done. I would like to thank Sallie Goetsch (aka The Author-izer) for helping me with much of the copy that fills the site, and as always, Karen, for being supportive, helping with the words, editing, and helpful suggestions.

An Updated History of BeeDragon.com* (Original History):

• 1995 – version 1.0 – No layout at all, not even a table. All text is centered. Animated GIF of a dragon flying across the screen repeatedly.
• 1997 – v2 – Table based version of the same site. Graphic page title images. Presentational CSS added. <FONT> tags removed.
• 1999 – v3 – Template Monster template with Flash header. Need I say more?
• 2004 – v4 – Mambo/Joomla CMS. Nice for 2004, but too boxy and modular for 2007. Very web 1.0. Hardly anyone has ever heard of a blog, so long detailed explanations were necessary but confusing.
• 2007 – v5.0 – Customized WordPress site. Reflects what I do. Updated prices. Simple. Pretty. Tables for data only.
• 2010 – v6.0 – WordPress 3.0. Once again, updated to reflect the work that I do. New design, focus on WordPress development, All-in-one website and hosting packages added, Portfolio updated.

* Fine Print: Technically, this is not really a history of BeeDragon.com. BeeDragon.com was registered in 2002. Before that, my “web design business” sites lived on aol, compuserve, and home.attbi.com.

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Best Web Standards Video to a Bob Dylan Tune

More info and lyrics @ Molly.

Best YouTube Distraction for Geeks

The TechKnowledgey Show by Devir Kahan
Completely entertaining geekery and possibly my inner child come to life.

Most Distracting iPhone App

Bejeweled 2
Awesome for clearing your brain of anything except shiny jewels! $2.99 at the App Store and worth every penny.

Most Educational Distraction

This is my favorite distraction of all!

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Best LEGO Distractions

[nggallery id=8]

Best Drupal Rap Video

Best Invitation for Women to Drop Bombs on Hitler

Found in Mom’s Basement

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The conference has been very fun. It is well named. Definitely have never been around that many girl geeks before! Tomorrow is the last day. There is a session about asperger’s which I would never have expected, but it was subtitled “the geek syndrome”, so guessing that is the connection. I am very curious. There is also one about Drupal called ‘Show me your back end’. Hopefully they are not both at the same time. Drupal will win. Some pix from the museum:

[nggallery id=7]

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