I’m happy to announce that my new book, Beginning Joomla! Web Site Development, is now shipping! You can order it from the publisher’s website, or from most online book retailers.

Beginning Joomla! Web Site Development will take the reader step-by-step through the process of building a website with Joomla! 1.5. From beginning to end, the book will explain a concept and show how that concept relates to the development of an actual sample web site the reader can access online. This book applies each concept to a real-world example every step of the way. Once a concept is explained in theory, it is then illustrated by showing how one would implement each concept in a real web site.

• I feel really sorry for that Melissa girl on the Bachelor. That whole situation was just ridiculous. This guy essentially breaks up with another girl and has this big emotional breakdown, and 10 minutes later proposes to her, only to end the engagement on national television 6 weeks later because he’s still in love with the other girl. I sat through this entire season with my wife, and now I feel kind of dirty for watching it. I’m going to have to make her start watching Heroes with me.
• Taj George is stupid for telling the other contestants on Survivor that her husband is a famous ex-NFL football player. What was she hoping to accomplish by telling them that? The first thing they were thinking was “Vote out the rich girl. She doesn’t need the million dollars.”
• I like the mom and her deaf son on The Amazing Race, and I hope they do well. By the way, this is my favorite reality tv show by far. In fact, it is probably the show that originally got me hooked on reality tv.
• I’m glad the Finnish guy didn’t win Top Chef. He was probably the best chef on the show, but he was just so arrogant that I found it really difficult to like him.

I’m not sure why I felt the need to share that. Maybe someone will find it interesting. Or maybe it’s just self-indulgent garbage. Then again, isn’t that what a blog is all about?

I love you, Carly. Thanks for reading my blog!

1. I have an abnormally large head. No seriously, I do. If you know anything about fitted hat sizes, you know that the average adult male wears between a size 7 and a size 7.5 hat. I wear a size 8. Actually, that’s not true. I really don’t wear hats, due in large part to the aforementioned large head. Unfortunately, my daughter inherited this gene from me. She just turned 3, and she wears hats made for 5-year-olds.
2. I once got in trouble for indecent exposure. OK, so “indecent exposure” actually makes it sound a lot worse than it really was. I was on a trip with my high school choir when I was in tenth grade, and long story short, several of us got in trouble for mooning each other. It was actually probably the worst trouble I’ve ever been in in my entire life. I guess I’ve led a pretty boring life!
3. I once flew to New York on an impromptu trip to see the Late Show with David Letterman live. My wife and I got tickets to see a live taping of the Letterman show, which are extremely difficult to get. We couldn’t pass up the opportunity, so we hopped on a plane to NYC. We really lucked out because we were there during sweeps week, the week when the networks pull out all the stops to get the best ratings possible to set their advertising rates for the year, so we got to see a couple of A-List guests: Tom Hanks and Kanye West.
4. I sang the US National Anthem for Elizabeth Dole. When I was in high school, I sang in the school choir (see #2). My senior year was 1996-1997, which happened to coincide with the US presidential election between Bill Clinton and Bob Dole. Dole’s wife, Elizabeth, made a campaign stop at my middle school, and they asked if a group of guys from the senior men’s chorus would sing the National Anthem at the event. Being  a part of the chorus, I was selected as one of 8 guys to sing for the event. I’m not really sure if Elizabeth Dole actually heard us sing or not, but I’ll just assume that she did because it makes the story more interesting.
5. I weighed 10 pounds when I was born. Not only that, but I wasn’t even the largest of all my siblings. My brother weighed 11 pounds 2 ounces. I’m still not sure how my tiny little mom was able to carry us around for 9 months!
6. I have never had even a sip of an alcoholic beverage. It’s not that I have a problem with alcohol from any sort of moral or religious perspective. If you drink alcohol, more power to you. For personal reasons, that’s just something I choose not to participate in. I’d be happy to tell you more about it, if you’re interested, but I’ll just leave it at that for now.
7. I am a reality tv junkie. There, I’ve said it. I feel better now. Seriously, though, I will watch almost anything that is reality tv, with the exception of Rock of Love, Flava of Love, or any thing in that genre of reality tv. My all-time favorites are The Amazing Race and Survivor. I would love to be on either one of those shows, so if you are reading this and you have connections that can get me on the show, you know where to find me!

Not to be one to let a chain letter end with me, I hereby tag the following people:

• Rusty Fincke
• Barrie North
• Steve Burge
• Kyle Ledbetter
• Christopher Meinck
• Jason Boyette
• Barack Obama

The rules:

1. Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
2. Share seven facts about yourself in the post – some random, some weird.
3. Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
4. Let them know they’ve been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter.

For the record, if this song were about George W. Bush or any other president, I would be equally creeped out. This kind of indoctrination of children is frightening, to say the least. I only pray that Obama has the wisdom to be as creeped out by this as I am. Otherwise, we may have just elected the new Führer. I’m going to give him the benefit of the doubt and assume that he is creeped out by this.

Thanks, and Happy New Year!

A year-and-a-half ago, the Joomla!/OSM team announced their stance that any extension of Joomla! should be licensed under a GPL-compatible license because it constitutes a work derived from a GPL-licensed work. For the record, I disagree with that stance, but I won’t get into that argument here. As much as I may disagree with that stance, I applaud the fact that they are finally taking steps to “clean house,” so to speak, and stop listing non-GPL-compatible extensions in the JED. It’s a bold move, guaranteed to make some people mad, but at least they are sticking to what they say they believe.

Beat, one of the lead developers of the very popular extension, Community Builder, makes a good point that the stand that the team took a year-and-a-half ago was that extensions should be “GPL-compatible,” and the new stance is that they will only accept GPL-licensed extensions. I’m not sure what changed between then and now, but this does seem a bit inconsistent.

Brian Teeman also makes a good point that although Joomla! is licensed under the GPL, it uses libraries that have a license that is incompatible with the GPL. So, technically, Joomla! itself is not purely GPL. For what it’s worth, though, they have indicated that any libraries used in Joomla! that are incompatible with the GPL will ether be relicensed or removed from Joomla!.

Overall, I don’t like the hard-line GPL stance that the core team is taking. I think it’s too fundamentalist and too restrictive on the community as a whole. However, as former Texas Longhorn football (American football, not soccer) coach Darrell Royal would say, “Dance with the one who brung [sic] you.” I’ve been with Joomla! since the beginning, and I will continue to stick with the project that has given me so many opportunities.

Seriously? Does that really count as an investigation? Of course his own internal review is going to find that he didn’t do anything wrong. Let an independent investigator perform a review of what the Obama team may or may not have done with regards to Blagojevich, and then I’ll believe the results. He may as well have just said “I didn’t do it.” That’s all that the internal investigation amounts to.

Update: Here is another article that makes the Obama team seem a lot more beleivable. Why didn’t they say that in the first place? Knowing that they met with actual investigators lends more credibility to the claim that they did nothing wrong.

I just read an interesting article about a German company that is selling a chocolate Jesus. Apparently some churches in Germany are not too thrilled about it. I’m not too sure about how I feel about it. It does seem a little sacrilegious, or as Home Simpson would say, “Sacrilicious.”

What do you think about the chocolate Jesus? Good idea? Bad idea?