Neil Gaiman at UCSB

We went and listened to Neil Gaiman at UCSB last night. He read a few of his newest short stories in front of what looked like a sold out event. Very enthusiastic crowd. All in all a good evening. We got home from SB late.

I really do enjoy his writing, and he seems to be a very nice person, but does he have to mention Twi%$&%tter quite so often? I guess I just need to go with the times and embrace that whole band wagon, but I'm not drinking the kool aid just yet. Any ways this was his twitterage about the event:

"Just talked writing to UCSB lit students for 90 Minutes. So fun and so much enthusiasm and smarts. And I was hugged a lot at the end."

Santa Maria Pre School Website launched

So the website for Santa Maria Pre-School is finally launched. You can have a look at it here: www.santamariapreschool.com

I've built the site using Drupal. It is at this point only in the initial stage. More content needs to be added and there will need to be some modifications done,  but at least it's up and running.  Have a look.

It's a Montessori school in Santa Maria that's just starting out.

FDR

Part of Franklin D. Roosevelt's message to Congress in 1938:


"The first truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if the people tolerate the growth of private power to a point where it becomes stronger than their democratic State itself. That, in its essence, is fascism — ownership of government by an individual, by a group or by any other controlling private power.

The second truth is that the liberty of a democracy is not safe if its business system does not provide employment and produce and distribute goods in such a way as to sustain an acceptable standard of living."

That was over 70 years ago.

Christmas Break

is finally here! Yeah. Two weeks off.

Det finns inga ord för det, på det här jävla språket

Front Page Slide show for Drupal using Views Slideshow

After weeks of research into how to create a dynamic slide show with thumbnails as navigation I finally found a module for Drupal that seems to do what I need it to. Enter Views Slideshow. Using views I fairly easily set up a slide show for my front page, using thumbnails as navigation. One issue that I've run into is that for some reason when being logged in I cannot see the navigation of the slide show. This caused a bit of head scratching until I just logged out and saw that things actually were working. The look and feel of the thing will take some CSS tweaking but at least I've finally found a working solution. If a module is integrated with Views that is certainly a big plus, seeing that this is the direction things are heading with Drupal.

Other modules I looked at:
Views Carousel - Really cool but not quite what I was looking for. Here is an excellent video podcast from Mustardseed Media
Quick Tabs - Neat module but it did not seem to support thumbnail navigation, at least not out of the box.

Considering the time and research spent on this I do support the effort to consolidate and improve the multitude of modules offering some kind of rotator or slide show functionality. For a good starting point see http://drupal.org/node/418616

My brother just sent me this, and I thought it was funny enough to warrant repeating