A project that has fascinated me for a long while is Wordpress. I'd link to the site except, well, I don't have to. Everyone and his mother knows about Wordpress (and if you don't, it's only a google search away).

One of the fascinations is the continual comparison of Wordpress to Drupal. Drupal is a content management system that lets you store all sorts of crap on your website. With no programming experience, you can set up a pretty nice website. If I ever finish one of my projects, you'll be able to set up a nice website with a custom look AND import your data from a Wordpress site.

Now, Wordpress is a blogging platform. Anything more than straight blogging, and you need to migrate away from Wordpress. And that's fine. What it does, it does very well, and has a significant market penetration. Doesn't hurt that I've met Matt and spent time accidently running into him.

Because the tool I'm writing will work for Drupal as well as Wordpress, and Wordpress has a huge following, I figured subscribing to a Wordpress mailing list would be good exposure to the issues around Wordpress, from a different perspective.

After about a month of reading the mailing list discussions, my opinion is honestly, holy crap, this is a premiere blogging platform? WTF?

Issues that surprised me, in no particular order other than this is how I remembered them, include (recalling that these are developer issues, and not necessarily issues an end user would notice or care about).

1. No error reporting on plug-in installation failure.

   This is basic stuff. If there's a problem during the installation process, let the user know.

2. Log errors to a central location.

   A developer published a break-through plug-in, without full code release though, that allows other developers to record a log message with a single line, and this was a breakthrough. I almost have to pick on this one, since Drupal has had watchdog() in since I started working on it in the 4.1 days many years ago.

3. Multiple database connections corruption

   Different plugins, needing to create connections to a different database or its own connection to the WP database, can cause DB connection corruption errors. The recommended solution? Use the PHP mysql_* functions, losing all the DB helper functions of the package. This removes a large part of the alure of using a framework in the first place by removing the database abstraction layer (and forcing the user into the only database the plug-in author supports - what if the user wants to use postgres? Or Oracle?

   Update: apparently this issue was brought up from a bad bit of code, which has since been fixed in some plugin. Need to look to see if you can set up access to multiple databases in WP.

4. Big fans of superficial criticisms

   In the GoPHP5 movement, rather than debate the merits and goals of the idea, a lead developer complains the site is ugly. This surprised me a LOT.

5. Plugins for simple fixes

   A user needs to install a plugin to change a quote in a post title from an incorrect HTML code to a correct one. Another one that surprised me. I thought people considered Drupal to be complicated.

6. The view of Drupal as "THE" competitor

   The number of references to "Drupal converters" and Drupal does this and Drupal does that nearly universally implies that Drupal is the WP competitor of note. Personally, I find other blogging platforms like Typo3, or hosted ones like Vox, LiveJournal, or Blogger to be WP's correct competitors.

The part that gets me in all of this is that Wordpress developers seem to both drink the WP koolaid and have a chips on their collective shoulders.

I'll still continue to watch the project, with the intent of bringing to Drupal any nifty tools that Wordpress users get, but the glow of the project has worn off. What is it about discovering the insides of software that removes the shine so quickly?

Mike complained I wasn't putting anything up on my blog. Go fig.

So, there's the bump on the back of my right leg. It's on the outside of the back of my knee, in the place where, to be perfectly honest, I've been sunburned a lot. Something about that particular location that just begs to have sunscreen just slide right past it, missing every bit.

I've been worried about this particular bump since I came across it about a month or so ago. I hadn't noticed it before, but it didn't seem to be growing particularly fast. It looked like it could be a wart, I've had those on the bottom of my feet. Worse, it looked very, very similar to the bump that was next to my eye last year, and we all know how that one turned out.

Because of the similarity in size, shape and texture to the bump near my eye, my worry level has been increasing and increasing. I worried and thought about this bump like a dog on a bone, never quite stopping the gnawing. I asked friends what they would do. I asked doctors-in-training what they thought of the spot. I asked Kris, who responded something like, "Eh, ask a doctor."

After gnawing on this bone too long, I did something you're really not supposed to do. I picked at it.

I know, I know, don't pick at your skin. Bad, bad, bad. But I did. I wanted to see if I made it small, would it come back? And, if so, how quickly? I had a spot on my right index finger when I was 14 that grew incredibly fast. It grew to about a 1/4" before I took an xacto knife to it and cut it off. Not the smartest thing to do, especially using my non-dominant hand on my dominant hand, but the spot, which turned out to be a wart, annoyed me so much that I had to remove it.

Turns out, warts form a kernel that doesn't quite attach fully to your body. If you peel along this edge, you can literally extract the wart from your body. The tricks are, of course, getting it all and dealing with the pain. I have no idea if Dad ever noticed the blood in the bathroom sink from that little bit of surgery.

So, yeah, the bump on the back of my leg. Tragically, I picked at it. It bled. This is not good, because that gives an entry point for cells to travel to other parts of my body. If this bump is cancerous, I just introduced another avenue for it to spread.

Can you believe I graduated in the top 0.1% of my graduating high school class? No? Me either.

Eventually, I told myself to stop it. Stop worrying about it. Stop playing with it. Deal with it the right way: make an appointment with a dermatologist and have it removed to be tested. Simple enough. Scary, sure. But I'd rather be 1 for 2 in finding my own skin cancer than having skin cancer again and dead.

Today, looking at it, I noticed the spot had changed. I wasn't sure what had happened, but it looked like a tag of skin had come off the top of it, probably from all of my scratching. Well, can't have that, can we? I pulled on it, as I'm wont to do with random pieces of flesh with neon signs pointing to them that read "Pull me! Pull me!"

I felt no resistance as something came out of the bump. It ended up being about 3 millimeters long and just under a millimeter wide. It was white, and I have absolutely no idea what it was. It was soft, and that's about all I could tell about it. When it was out, the bump was gone. There is now a small hole in my leg where the bump used to be.

After putting away my confusion with the bump extraction, I can honestly say that, for today, there are few things more enjoyable than discarding the worries of a cancer return in the trash.

And a hole in the leg is a small price to pay for that relief.

My aunt Sonnie lives in the mountains of Colorado, having spent the last ten years building a house with her partner Bill. Living in the mountains means I get emails like this on occasion:

hi kitt, tried to call. you must be out celebrating
your birthday. so, happy birthday. not much new here
in the mtns surrounding rye. did see a bear. came
into the garden, but then decided not to stay. i am
now wearing a whistle around my neck. it's very
shrill, so hope when i blow it, it will scare the
critter (if i see him/her again). love you much, a. sonn

Yeah. Bear in the garden. Happens all the time.

To the passenger in 23C,

Airplanes in flight are mostly closed systems. The air that you breathe has been circulated, and theoretically scrubbed or filtered in some way, but not really. Unfortunately, that scrubbing of the air doesn't happen until the air has actually been pulled into the filtration system.

So, when you fart, then proceed to wave around the papers in your hand, the air isn't actually filtered for a while. The smells emanating from your ass will actually disperse more quickly with your paper waving. Perhaps you don't like those particular smells from your butt, but I assure you, we in the row behind you like them even less.

Next time you fart, try to hold it in, keep the smell close to you. Save us all the unpleasant moment of realization that, yes, you let one rip just under the noise threshold of the jet engines.

Thanks much!