Fafblog! the whole world’s only source for Fafblog.: “Were lives lost? Of course. Were cities razed, flesh burned with poison gas, families slaughtered and children raped? Naturally. But one can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, burning the crockery, setting the kitchen on fire, firebombing the restaurant and summarily executing the survivors.”

nerdalert!: “so i’ve always pretended i’m a nerd, but really i’m not. BUT i’m hoping to change that with this: my treatise on HOW TETRIS IS LIFE.

(Via When I was a girl, my life was music.)

Things I missed.

• Tweeting my frustrations with “the way things are”
• Questions my followers could help me with
• Talking about what I was listening to
• Complimenting @blairblends on his fab new avatar
• Announcements of big achievements (I had two!)
• Marking tweets as favorites.
• Reading tweets from friends
• Reading tweets from people who can teach me something I want to learn.

Things I did not miss

• The noise
• Being among the first to know about scandals or deaths
• Green avatars
• Reading tweets from people I am trying to keep tabs on

What Now?

I think it’s time to focus a little bit more on the people who I like the most on Twitter. This is going to mean unfollowing a lot of people I have been following for a long time. It’s going to mean unfollowing some people who follow me. I’m OK with that.

I also felt like I had more creative energy for bigger projects. I was surprised how much not tweeting meant for my “blog ideas” lists or ideas for my book. I think I’ll be moving toward just the occasional tweet during the day and doing most of my tweeting at night.

But overall, I found it an interesting experiment. If Twitter is a big deal for you (and I imagine some of you reading this might fit that description), I recommend taking some time off and seeing what you learn.

(Via Business Guys on Business Trips (New every Monday!).)

The house is really rounding into shape. As far as I know, there is no finer moving coordinator in the world than my wife Megan Van Fleet, and she has done a masterful job getting us unpacked and sorted as usual. There are still a few odds and ends about, but overall I could not be more thrilled with how it’s turning out.

The Surprises

It’s difficult to pick the most pleasant surprise thus far about the house, but there are a three I can think of off the top of my head.

Living right

First, having a hot tub in the master suite is great. I internalize a lot of stress (although I’m making progress on communicating– just ask my boss!) and its a tremendous stress relief possibility. Mmmmm, jets.

Not a vacuum.

We also got that little fellow over to the right there, and it’s been awesome! It would be impossible for it to seem more like vacuuming the lawn, because you need to run the power cable along with it. But it starts instantly and doesn’t stink when it’s done. I was very happy to give it a try and it turned out great. Megan got home early on Friday and says she did the entire yard (including edging) in 90 minutes.

X-cape!

The final surprise has been how little furniture that we need to credibly live here. I was worried about going from a 1800 sq. ft. townhouse with one sofa to a 2900 sq. ft. home without having to spend a lot of money on furniture, but so far we’ve just picked up an additional matching chair from IKEA. Megan went to IKEA and spent less than $200, that should tell you all you need to know.

The Big Ticket

I spent a majority of my day today on my office. The effect of having a real office with a door I can shut that has a good music system is already reminding me how important those things can be to me. I feel gears deep inside turning that are rusty from not having turned in a long time. Megan got a chuckle out of me telling her that I felt a bit of magic in there. I even got a very nice painting from Megan’s stepdad Bob. Bob, if you’re reading, THANK YOU. It reminds me of where I grew up…

Graves Festival

…namely, the mountains. Graves Mountain Festival of Music is where we go to hook up with Megan’s friends from high school, who are now my friends as well. It was a delightful time, and next year I’m committed to staying longer. This trip was particularly satisfying since it was our first time back in three years. We missed 2007 for our wedding and European vacation preparations, and we missed last year because of my bad back.

Check out this picture, guys. Beautiful. It’ll also wrap us up for this installment, I think I heard my phone ring.

• Shopping for a house
• Making an offer on a house
• Having the offer accepted
• Getting financed
• Closing on the house
• Moving in
• Unpacking

Well, they have multiple things in common, but the one I’m thinking of is that I apparently do not consider them blogworthy.
I will now shamelessly steal from my wife’s blog to show off.

Backyard with pergola, concrete planters for my herb garden, and fence.

Dining room from living room, heading back to the kitchen.

Master bathtub, “bathed” in sunlight (waka waka waka!)

Master shower with pebble floor. 3 shower heads cropped out.

Master bedroom. Doors lead to custom closet (that I will rearrange once I get my mitts on it!)

What will be our nursery in 8 years.

Guest bedroom! Come stay with us and help up unpack!

Guest bathroom off the hallway upstairs.

Basement with TV nook and stairs to upstairs den.

Backyard with more of the “wild” section of the yard on film. And a river runs through it.

Kitchen–fridge and desk area. This is where my laptop will live!

Den off the kitchen with bar area. Woohoo!

Jim standing in the dining room! And plenty of ceiling space to spare!

Front Living Room with fireplace and beautiful front door! (Not pictured (but just around corner and wired to front door and windows): Security system…phew!)

Office with built-in bookshelves and built-in nook)

As pretty much everything hip in the Ruby and Rails sphere is doing this days, Mephisto has moved to Logical Awesome’s GitHub, which is a great philosophical fit with the way Mephisto development has gone in general. Namely, let the developers get at their work, and lean on the community for documentation and support.

The plus is was able to make a great many changes and check them in to my own local version of the repository, managing it independently. By maintaining different remotes, I can bring anyone else’s work on Mephisto into my own installation.

The minus is that the developers now assume that all users have this ability. There is some kind of energy pattern around the core contributers vs. those informed users (like myself) who *could possibly* document, and the generally interested who “know Rails” but are fed curveballs by Mephisto’s decidedly non-standard Rails-ness, etc. This also makes things like upgrading and reconciling mephisto plugins a specially tedious chore. I am making the decision not to spend time on this.

The Mephisto to Wordpress convertor on GitHub worked flawlessly the first time (!) and I was on the ground with WordPress almost instantly. Hats off, and thanks to Matt Walters and his Wordpress Easily platform which allows me a great level of control for an exceptionally reasonable price.

Independently, I have used and experienced more wikis than I care to count, or to name here. Although I believe passionately in the wiki concept, and the effect that it can have in groups of all sizes and varieties, I personally don’t care for a vast majority of them. To my mind, there is Confluence and then everything else, although Confluence is a paid product. For non-profits (and open-source projects), however, Confluence is freely available! I’ve had CISV set up with it for awhile (although it to date has not been that successful.)

To fan acceptance for the wiki, I wanted to upgrade to the most recent version of Confluence. I also had the opportunity to upgrade to the new suite of server software at CISV USA’s preferred host. I figured I’d get the two set up together and could just transfer the DNS, and it’d be done. Turns out that’s not how Confluence wants you to perform an upgrade, as I spend the next several weeks (off and on) finding out.

To make a long story short (although you can find more details in the support ticket I filed), I tried to get support and was pointed to existing Confluence documentation. I pursued all leads and wasn’t helped. I posted a note on Twitter that I wasn’t satisfied, and soon after the director of support was involved. Although it took some additional time, they ended up providing the highest level of service I could have imagined.

Update: Ivan contacted me directly and independently yesterday to follow up (see what I mean?) and informed me that he is a support team lead, not the director of support.

My hat is off to Atlassian for having a great product and standing behind it in ways that allow us all to benefit. I encourage you to consider Confluence should you need a wiki– it is the best around.