Fourty-Four

February 8, 2011 By 1 Comment

When I was in grade school, kids used to call me “44″ because the big serial killer of the moment (1976-77) was David Berkowitz, aka “Son of Sam”, aka the “.44 Caliber Killer”. For those of you missing the connection, my last name is Berkowitz. My birthday just passed on January 28th and I turned 44. For obvious reasons, this has reminded me of my old nickname. It was one of the nicest nicknames I had during grade school. One other observation that I have had concerning my birthday is that it is pretty cool to turn 44 in ’11. Not sure why.

I had a great birthday. Highlights of the day were Macworld 2011 (regardless of the iPad-centricity), birthday cake with a bee on it, and champagne :) (Thank you K!)

The night before my birthday, Karen was kind enough to join me at an HTML5 meetup in San Francisco where Paul Irish, an awesome front-end development genius, was speaking about HTML5 Boilerplate, “A rock-solid default for HTML5 awesome”. If you are very sad that you missed it and would like to see it now, here it is!

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Goodbye Kito

February 5, 2011 By 2 Comments

Our little white friend
Go peaceful on your journey
Your love will be missed

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Mad World of Warcraft Cataclysm

Added on: January 22, 2011 at 11:31 pm Leave a Comment

WoW! What a great video written and performed by Brunhila on YouTube! An exceptionally well done video showing and describing the WoW world after Cataclysm to the tune of “Mad World” by Tears for Fears.

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.

Filed Under: Geekery, Random Tagged With: ,

2011: The First 9 Days

January 9, 2011 By 1 Comment

Baltimore

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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Filed Under: Geekery, LBnuke Stuff, Random Tagged With: ,

Vote For The Autism Women’s Network Every Day In November!

November 1, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Thanks to everyone who voted for AWN in last month’s Pepsi Refresh Project. We were in the top 100 again in October, so our entry will continue on in November. Thanks again to everyone who has been voting and please keep on voting every day in November! We get a little closer to #1 each month. Let’s hope November is our month to win :)

As a tie-in with our Pepsi Refresh Project campaign, the Autism Women’s Network is featuring posts by autistic females or their caregivers. We hope to give the public a better idea of what female autism is in the words of people who actually live it every day. To see these posts, please visit the AWN FAIM Blog.

The voting process is kind of confusing and round-about depending on which method you vote with. I think the easiest way is texting. To vote by texting, text 101500 to Pepsi (73774).

I have been voting by clicking the link in my sidebar and logging in through Facebook. Every day, I need to click the vote button 4 times. Please make sure you have voted after you click the button. You will know if you voted because the vote button will disappear and be replaced by some text thanking you for voting and asking if you want to help promote the idea. It might be quicker or easier if you get a Pepsi Refresh account and log in that way. As confusing as it may be, please take the extra 30 seconds to make sure your vote has been counted.

Disclosure: Lori is the Director of Technical Services and Web Development for AWN.

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Filed Under: Random

BeeDragon.com 2010

September 3, 2010 By Leave a Comment

BeeDragon Web Services2010 has been the most successful year yet for my business, BeeDragon Web Services. I have been getting a lot of work from other web developers and designers. It is very exciting getting to work with talented people who do similar work. When each person combines their unique skills, we make each other’s work shine.

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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Next Year in Jerus… I Mean Baltimore

June 11, 2010 By 2 Comments

Moving to Baltimore

Way too many things. Last month was the first month I haven’t posted here since July 2005. Probably wouldn’t have even noticed except for the missing link on the Archives page. Very busy with work. I am enjoying my projects, but wish I was working on them when there wasn’t so much else going on.

Our trip to Florida and Baltimore was nice. Good to see the families. Karen and I are moving to Baltimore next year, probably in March. Almost did it a few years ago, but the economy crashed and we got stuck here. Thanks to K’s sister offering to rent our house, we can now go for real. It is a huge move. I have lived in California for 20 years and K’s been here a long time too. I like Baltimore a lot, but do not have enough experience there to imagine what it will be like to live there. We will be near K’s parents and that will be good. They can use our help. I really like all of K’s friends there. It is very easy to hang out with them. It will be awesome to live near my friend Kim again. Will also be nice to be on the same coast as my family again!

There are so many things to do. Karen has to take her licensing test for being a social worker in Baltimore. We need to find a place to live. K needs to find a job. I need to get hooked up with the Baltimore web development community that I am assuming exists. There is tons of stuff I need to do for my business. Have not had the time, money, or brain to do what needs to be done. AND, we have to pack up our house and somehow manage to drive 4 cats across the country in a Corolla.

Part of my business plan is adding some work/business stuff here on LBnuke. This site has about 1000x more traffic than my business site. It is the site I like to work on and the site that people I know visit. Of course I will keep my business site. I don’t want to connect that site to this site. Too personal. When I have bits of free time, I have been adding little changes to this site. The theme is new. Same design as before, but wider and better organization of information. I will be working on it until at least the end of the summer. Got some great suggestions from Lou Anne at Be-Found!. If you need some SEO services, I would recommend her highly.

The summer is turning out to be busy as usual and things will only get busier as we get ready to move. I will miss it here, especially the weather! Baltimore will be a new adventure. I think I am ready for it.

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First Annual Distraction Awards

March 23, 2010 By 2 Comments

I have been very distracted lately! Too many things going on and I can not focus on any of them. Luckily, I have had no problem focusing on distractions. I would like to give recognition to the distractions that have proven to be most entertaining in the ‘First (and possibly last) Annual Distraction Awards’.

Best Web Standards Video to a Bob Dylan Tune


More info and lyrics @ Molly.
[Read more...]

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Happy Birthday to Me

January 28, 2010 By 3 Comments
Harvey Fierstein in Fiddler on the Roof

Harvey Fierstein in Fiddler on the Roof

Today I am 43 and having an awesome birthday. Last night K took me to see Fiddler on the Roof with Harvey Fierstein at the Golden Gate Theater in SF. It was awesome! I think it is possible that he was born to play Tevye. Perfect. I was really wishing my family was there too. We used to listen to the 8-track of Fiddler on the Roof in the car all the time when I was younger.

Not sure what I will do the rest of the day. Kind of happy not having a plan. It is nice getting to spend the day with K :D Going to She’s Geeky for the next 3 days at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View. No idea what to expect, but I love the idea of it! Had to miss Design4Drupal at Stanford last weekend. Went to the first session and then found out I had to work. It would have been a great opportunity to learn from some of the best, but it will also be nice to have some money! Luckily, DrupalCon is in San Francisco this year, so I will still be able to get my fix.

Ok, back to my regularly scheduled birthday now :)

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All Drupal All The Time – Too Bad I Can’t Breathe

November 6, 2009 By 1 Comment

Writing on the iPhone. Hard to breathe. Shaky. Strangely okay besides that. Sometimes writing helps. Been very busy lately. All Drupal all the time. Besides from the insane learning curve and non-intuitive UI, I am in awe of its power and flexibility. After more than 15 hours of video tutorials and reading tons of docs, I am finally understanding how it works and how the code is organized. I am learning while building a site for an awesome organization. Will link to it when it is done. If all goes according to plan, it will launch around Jan. 1st, 2010. Not mentioning the org. because there is a board and I don’t know if things like that have to be decided about, but if someone who knows the answer and wants to post it in the comments, go for it :) I haven’t used Drupal to build a site since version 4.1 other than keeping my test site updated. Been wanting to learn it for real for a few years so very happy to finally get around to it. Still, it makes me appreciate the simplicity and clean code of WordPress even more than I already do. Been having some small jobs besides from that.

Me & K went to Monterey for K’s 40th birthday and had an awesome time. Happy birthday K! We went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see the seahorse exhibit. It was amazing. We also saw lots of sharks and rays and other random sea creatures. We stayed overnight at a nice bed and breakfast and got home the next day in time to give Halloween candy to kids. Not so many kids this year.

Still hard to breathe but not so dizzy anymore. Sometimes it is kind of annoying to be me but most of the time I like it. Enough writing for now. I think it helped some.

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Filed Under: Autism / Asperger's, Geekery, Random Tagged With: , , ,