The Zibings Starts Here

5K Training Officially Begins

2010-04-26T15:30:00.001-04:00

More specifically, it begins somewhere around 6,000 feet above sea level. In case you’ve never attempted to do anything that high up, the general idea is that you can not breathe. Being from a state like Pennsylvania, where our highest mountains are just barely touching the 2,000 foot mark, it’s a pretty big jump.

Despite the difficulties, I already started to find a rhythm in my short run and my breathing showed improvements by the end of the trip. I won’t embarrass myself by tracking the distance I run JUST yet, but I ran enough to be thoroughly tired. I’m looking forward to tomorrow’s run, as well as the rest of the week. Training is hard, but the reward is amazing.

- Andy

Surprising Family

2010-04-25T09:22:00.001-04:00

Driving 1,800 miles is a hefty task to begin with. Doing it and staying quiet about your arrival is another thing. Through several months of scheming and organizing, I was able to travel across most of the country to Colorado and surprise a few family members, including some I hadn’t seen in close to a decade. All has gone over well though, and I’m recovering from a bear hug I got yesterday from one of my cousins.

Now that the cat is out of the bag, I can begin posting some pictures and other thoughts on the trip I’ve been on for close to a week already. As a quick overview, I’ve headed west from Pennsylvania on Route 70 to Colorado. I am now somewhere around Colorado Springs with my family and will be here for another week.

Surprising my family, especially my cousins, was great fun. My cousins have grown up so much, it’s almost scary to see. I need to do this more often.

- Andy

Training Begins

2010-04-19T21:55:00.001-04:00

This past Saturday Matt and I officially began our training for the 2010 Livestrong Challenge in Philadelphia. The ride was really a test to see in what shape we were in as we begin more consistent/rigorous training in a week or two, but it was important nonetheless.

We went on a ride that I did last season which in total is about 60 miles. After about 40 miles a combination of fatigue and destroyed bridges forced us to pack in for the day, the final total being 42.5 miles or so. It was a good ride and showed me how much my training at the gym this winter had helped, and it was nice to see that Matt is right there with me (oh to be as thin as him!).

The more serious training will begin when I return from my current trip in a couple of weeks, but until then I’ll be working on my 5K run by walking and jogging in some higher elevations. I’ll see if I can’t get some pictures along the way!

- Andy

PS – If you’d like to donate to me or anyone else on the team, you can find us at http://philly2010.livestrong.org/teamzibings. Feel free to join us too, we’re open to anyone!

An N2 CMS

2010-02-05T09:18:00.001-05:00

As I wrote about earlier this week, we’ll be “forced” to move our company and personal blogs off of the Blogger platform come the end of March this year. All opinion on the matter aside, we decided this was a great opportunity to test ourselves with N2F Yverdon.

Going in line with that idea, we sat down to catalog the features we needed to replicate from Blogger and WordPress to make the CMS useful to us across multiple instances. Here is that list:

Support for Windows Live Writer and other desktop publishing clients (Atom Publishing Protocol, MetaWeblogAPI, MovableType or Really Simple Discovery)
Multiple authors with profiles for each
Entry trackback links
Comment moderation and spam protection
Image upload integration with RTE
Pings to services like weblogs.com
Atom/RSS Feeds
Code Syntax Highlighting
Memcached compatibility

The list we have going is a bit longer, but mostly due to it digging down deeper with each of the above features and listing most of the common features you could expect in any useful blogging application.

You may notice that there is no mention of plug-ins. Keep in mind that for the moment we’re building a system mostly for internal use. N2F Yverdon is already so easily extensible we basically have a plug-in system already built. We will be releasing the application somewhere (likely on the N2F site) under the same MS-RL license used for N2F Yverdon. If any of you would be interested in helping us build a good plug-in system, we’re all ears.

That’s all for this announcement. It’s looking like we’ll be putting down code as early as next week, which is good if we intend to have this ready for use by the end of March! More updates to come as they’re available.

- Andy

The End of Blogger (At Least For Me)

2010-02-03T06:45:00.001-05:00

For the past few years, I’ve been using Blogger as the service powering my blog (and recently it was chosen to power the blog for the company). It made things pretty easy for me, as all I needed to do was open up an FTP account to the service and let it rip. Google had announced a while ago that they were phasing out the FTP feature for Blogger. Since I try pretty hard to ignore Google, I missed this notice. They were kind enough to send me a reminder email of sorts yesterday, letting me know that sometime in March this year, the FTP feature would be discontinued completely.

In some ways, this is a sad moment for me. I have enjoyed the service, mostly because of how easy it was to use. In other ways, this presents itself as an opportunity. I have no intention of allowing Google to hold onto anymore of my data than they already do, so the thought of switching to a custom domain is just unacceptable. I’m left with two choices as I see things:

Install WordPress/Drupal/etc to replace Blogger
Create a new CMS/Blog, because the world doesn’t already have enough of these

It’s true, the world probably doesn’t have enough. A Bing search for ‘free Blog engine’ turns out approximately 17.5 million results, which essentially means nothing. There are a ton of good-enough solutions out there which I could easily utilize to take care of the switch. Unfortunately for me, I am – by default – required to be an annoying advocate for my open source framework, the N2 Framework. We love our little framework so much, we’d rather spend time reinventing the blogging wheel and show it can be done.

So it seems that is what I’ll be doing over the next month or two. I might be able to rope one or two of the other N2F developers into helping, but I don’t have more than a few extra hours each week that I can devote to the project. I’ll do what I can to outline our progress here and on the N2F site. Our goal will be to simply replicate all of the features we have available for us with the Blogger service. I’ve got two months, here’s hoping this framework works as well as we need!

- Andy

Going Back…To Old Methods

2010-01-29T11:05:00.001-05:00

I’ve been teaching a very close friend how to program recently. As we got close to beginning a full-fledged project (which we’ll be starting to show off sometime in February), he gave me a request. For the most part, I’ve been showing him how to use N2F Yverdon through the lessons because of a pre-existing foundation in PHP syntax. His request was to go back to the way I “did things before” so he could see where N2F was born.

My immediate response was a simple look of horror and sharp intake of breath. Get rid of my beloved framework? Go back to complete manual sanitization for data? Use mysql_query() calls!?

After I was recovered from the shock, I realized that this is a great opportunity (or excuse) to revisit those old methods and remind myself of the very things that I hope to make unnecessary with N2F. I agreed to the challenge, and my grin seemed to frighten my friend thoroughly.

To say it will be interesting doing this is probably an understatement, but I’ll be sure to keep you all up to date on the project’s progress. Has anyone else done something similar?

- Andy

1 Update in 1 Year, 2 Months?

2010-01-24T18:59:00.001-05:00

As I was putting the finishing touches on the new N2F website yesterday, I happened to notice that the release date for Yverdon v0.1 was November 2nd, 2008. That’s over 1 year and 2 months for us to release a ‘minor’ revision to the framework. Quite frankly, I was embarrassed at first, that’s a long time for an update that doesn’t really cover a whole slew of changes.

After that initial moment however, I did stop and think about what all has gone into producing this framework. When Matt, Chris and I originally set out to build this framework from the things we’d learned using an old framework I had built years earlier, it wasn’t something that we were able to piece together over night. If my memory serves me (which it usually doesn’t), we spent upwards of 8 months just talking about the way the system would work and what things we wanted to accomplish.

With that in mind, I started looking back on the past year and two months that it has taken us to build v0.2. We’ve spent a lot of time and energy testing out the different pieces of the framework, and we know we still haven’t hit everything. After all the testing was done (or in progress), we then had to sit down and go through the process of discussing what changes needed and what we wanted to accomplish. We actually went through this cycle 2 to 3 times before finally getting things to the point where we could release them.

All in all, it’s been a long and busy year. We hope that the v0.2 release reflects that to those of you who end up using the system. I promise we’ll try to keep the release of v0.3 under the 2 year mark. ;)

- Andy

New Zibings Inc. Blog

2010-01-15T08:55:00.001-05:00

As of today, Zibings Incorporated is now entering the blogosphere. We have created a blog for ourselves using Google’s Blogger service at http://blog.zibings.com/. We’ll make sure updates are posted every other week, so be sure to check it out!

- Andy

Forget Me!

2009-12-06T12:26:00.002-05:00

Now that I’ve finished rebuilding the ZibTech Consulting website, I took a bit of time to have fun with jQuery and N2F on the comments for our news entries. In doing so, I came up with an idea to solve a problem I had, as well as maybe solve a problem end-users have on the internet.

The problem I was solving was a common one; Anyone who navigates away from the news entry page (purposefully or not) would have their comment page reset to 1, even if they’d been on page 23. This seems useless and annoying, so I quickly implemented a storage method using PHP’s sessions. Though this did solve the problem, I decided I wanted a way to clear the pages I was tracked as being on if I felt like reading from the beginning again.

It was at this point I realized I could do something that users to all Zibings sites might enjoy. If you visit the site, you will see a “Forget Me!” link on the bottom of every page. The purpose of the “Forget Me!” link is to give user the ability to clear the session information stored about them on the server. This feature is going to find its way onto all Zibings Incorporated sites in the future, but not simply because we’ll have some AJAX comments hither and thither. Instead, the feature will enable end-users of our sites who haven’t signed up to opt out of things such as having their demographic information stored for their visit to the site.

When we build a site that needs a more thorough explanation on the technical specifics of the feature, I’ll take the time to spell everything out (I’d look for this on the upcoming release of ZibNet). Until then, just know that moving forward we’re going to at least commit ourselves to giving users a real option for opting out of certain things on our sites without forcing them to stop using the site. I think we could all use a little bit of that in today’s age of lost privacy, don’t you?

- Andy

Music Piracy (The Great Music Debate)

2009-10-13T07:50:00.001-04:00

This post will be the second in a series of posts between myself and Keith regarding the oh-so-hot topic of music piracy/downloading. You can read his first post on the topic (and my initial reply) here.

Before I begin, I want to be clear on a few things. First and foremost, at this time it is actually illegal in most countries to download music illegally online. As opinionated as I may be, understand that downloading music is still considered wrong by the law, which means that if you do it you are accepting a certain amount of risk that if caught you will be fined and/or taken to court by the copyright holders. My purpose in this discussion is to point out why I feel those who do consider such actions as copyright holders are doing nothing but hurting themselves and their bottom lines.

Another thing that needs to be stated is that I have downloaded music illegally. I’ve done quite a bit of it in my lifetime to be honest, and I will never be ashamed of that fact. I get most of my music these days from my Zune subscription, so you might say I’ve “come clean”, but I find that phrase mildly aggravating and offensive. Much of the music I love today is music I discovered illegally.

In his original post, Keith states his definition of piracy as “..someone who downloads, or effectively steals an artists music..”. Keith’s basic point is that by downloading a song instead of buying the CD, one is hurting the musician through lost sales of their album (we’ll include digital sales in this discussion as well). The problem I have with that definition and reasoning is that its pretty unfair to assume that a person would have bought a CD if they hadn’t downloaded the album illegally. Much of the music I’ve become a fan of I was introduced to through illegal downloading. I would have never listened to Daft Punk if I hadn’t found them (by accident), and I can assure you that without knowing who they were I would never have ended up buying their albums (which for the record I have done, we’ll get to that a little later).

Assuming that lost sales can be counted by the number of illegal downloads is a very arrogant and inaccurate idea. People download music illegally for a slew of different reasons, including lack of funds, boredom, curiosity and some for just plain hate. The last of the group is a rather destructive bunch who I’ll touch on later, it is important to know that they represent a very small minority of users who download music. For the others in the group, downloading music is a way to discover or listen to music they otherwise wouldn’t have the resources to purchase. Those who can’t afford albums need no defense, if they download because they honestly can’t afford something then you can’t really expect that they’d have bought the album anyway. Those who download because they are bored (much like myself) tend to be the ones who also eventually buy albums of bands they end up liking (just as I have). They download because they don’t have the resources to be buying singles or albums for hundreds of different artists just to find some new music they might like. Even those rich enough to afford this will probably quickly find themselves not so rich if they adopt methods such as that to broaden their horizons. Finally, the curious downloader is another person who often times end up buying albums, but will only do so once they’re sure they like the artist. Most curious downloaders are interested in a specific band or artist they have heard (maybe on the radio). As with the bored downloader, the financially feasible way to do that is to get a sampling of their music elsewhere without incurring cost.

In addition to the above, it should be noted that there have been studies done (one example) that show downloaders are actually just as likely to buy an album during a year as someone who doesn’t download. There are also multiple instances of people who have increased sales of an album through the illegal use of it on a YouTube video (example here).

In the end, there is growing evidence being mounted against the claim that illegal downloads equate to lost sales. If anything, we’re being shown by the market that they tend to lead to more profit for the record companies, and that is without mentioning the millions won by the recording industry in piracy-related lawsuits.

At the outset I mentioned that I get most of my music from my Zune subscription these days. I pay about $15 per month to be able to download and listen to an unlimited number of songs from their library and play it on my Zune (with a few restrictions from certain copyright holders). This is one of quite a few examples of programs that have evolved from the use of illegal downloads by people. The Zune Pass, Slacker.com, Pandora, Last.fm and others are all great attempts at filling the void left by record labels on the subject of music discovery. I am having some trouble finding information on how much of the money earned by record labels on these types of subscription and discovery agreements actually goes to artists, but I have a feeling that the number is very low (if not non-existent). Without that information I can’t do more than make an assumption that piracy is no more harmful to artists than my Zune Pass (if anyone DOES have this information I’d be delighted to get some details). I think this is probably a fair assumption, but I can’t stress enough that it is nothing more than conjecture and can’t be relied upon as a valid argument for music piracy without further evidence.

In my post next week I’ll continue dissecting Keith’s arguments against music piracy. Hopefully so far this is proving to be enlightening or at least fair and professional. Feel free to let either of us know your thoughts on the subject and we’ll do what we can to represent our respective sides of the argument thoroughly.

- Andy

Updates!

2009-09-28T19:44:00.001-04:00

I’m feeling particularly chatty tonight, so I figured I’d give some Zibings updates to those of you who still read this blog.

The Zibings Network
We are well into the rewrite now and are hoping to be testing a new version of the site towards the end of October. Whether or not this happens will depend a lot on me, but we’re putting as much time into the project as we can afford. It has become a very large part of the direction we’re looking to take Zibings in general, so the lot of us are doing different things to make the re-launch smooth and worthwhile.

N2 Framework
Ah yes, the framework we love to use so much we can barely spend enough time to do updates! In a way, we’re really happy that we’ve gotten so busy using it that we haven’t been able to finish doing the v0.2 release, but in most ways we’re just annoyed. The release is coming still, but I’m learning that setting dates for these isn’t going to be easy while we’re the only main contributors to the code. Even so, I keep putting some hours into it each week and will hope to release Yverdon v0.2 before the end of the year.

Super Tech Help
The forums are back, and about as active as they ever were. No real plans have been put forth JUST yet to figure out ways to draw new traffic to the boards, but a meeting is in the works for that exact thing. I’ll be reviving my PHP tutorial, finishing it eventually, and moving on to another tutorial which I hope won’t take me 3-4 years to complete.

All in all, we’re busy-busy here and loving every minute of it, as usual. I’ll be sure to let you know when things are getting closer to completion.

- Andy

A Musical Showdown

2009-09-28T19:11:00.001-04:00

Coming this Saturday I’ll be doing a bit of a musical ‘swap’ with my friend Keith. Keith, for some illogical and useless reason, does not like trance music. I’ve tried to help him come to his senses many times over the years, but he just won’t give it a fair chance. I don’t fault him for it, he’s a few years younger than me so he probably just doesn’t know any better, but regardless the time has come for him to give this a shot.

After a lot of insistence that I listen to Jack Johnson for a while, I realized I had a golden opportunity. This Saturday (October 3rd, 2009) he and I will be swapping music for a day, thanks to Slacker.com and the Firefox LastFM extension. I will spend the day listening to a ‘Jack Johnson’ channel Slacker will create for me, and he will listen to the ‘Trance’ channel.

I don’t know if he’ll wise up or not, but you can be sure he’ll at least have had some exposure finally.

;)

- Andy

How Not to Take Ride Videos

2009-09-09T16:18:00.001-04:00

I thought myself pretty clever that I’d be taking my digital camera with me today. Clever beyond all compare, at least until I got onto the bike and realized just how horrible of an idea this had been. Chris and I did a hill climb day on my favorite local series of hills, went up them 4 times total in an hour. I’m thinking the only way I’ll get a decent video is if I grab a helmet cam, but I’m not that interested in dishing out the money for one. Oh well, will just keep trying other things…

Heading northwest along the Susquehanna….

- Andy

An Experiment

2009-09-08T19:09:00.001-04:00

I promised that I’d try and get some pictures and/or videos from today’s ride, so I did what I could to deliver. I apologize for the quality, but it appears I can’t find my digital camera and am thus forced to utilize my cell phone’s camera and camcorder features.

Just one of the many straight sections we rode on. My computer tells me we did a little over 20 miles in an hour and 42 minutes.

Chris did a good job making it through the ride. Not bad for his second real ride since getting a bike.

I tried thinking of something witty to go here, but I’m experiencing the same lack of intelligence I was during the picture.

I have some videos that I took, but after uploading the first to YouTube, I’ve decided that one is enough with the poor quality that they ended up being.

More to come tomorrow, we’re doing hill-climbs!

- Andy

Back On The Saddle….Again

2009-09-07T22:34:00.001-04:00

So after 2 weeks ‘rest’ from my injury, I finally got back onto the bike today for a somewhat serious ride that I could bear. Chris and I did an easy 12 mile loop along Front Street and City Island in Harrisburg. The ride felt good, and I was able to do some hill-climbing that I wasn’t even able to do when I was preparing for the Livestrong event. Chris and I have a 33 mile ride planned for tomorrow afternoon to really give the legs a bit of a stretch, and to say I’m looking forward to it is a bit of an understatement.

Zibings projects are moving along at a good clip now as well, with my arm no longer restricting the amount of time I can type. It even looks like someone is interested in helping to resurrect the Super Tech Help forums, which would be nice to see. So much to do, so little time.

I’ll make sure I get some photos from the ride tomorrow, maybe even a video.

I got warmed up a bit too early for Chris and had to wait. Turns out my Rally America hoodie is great for keeping me warmed up!

- Andy

Arm-Update

2009-08-29T07:15:00.001-04:00

After about a week, my arm is still giving me trouble, but the amount of trouble decreases on a daily basis. I am still unable to fully extend my arm, and putting more than 10-20 pounds worth of weight in my hand is more than it can handle. Even so, I’m happy with the way it has progressed and can tell that it is indeed healing happily on its own. I had some trouble typing this week because of the way I have to twist my arm to use my keyboard, but that is finally going away and I can get caught up on the various projects that fell behind. I’m not in any amount of extreme pain (as long as I’m careful with the arm), so I’ll just continue on letting it heal itself.

I have my bike back with a (pretty neat) new back wheel/tire. They even put on a higher grade set of cogs on the wheel for me, so hopefully this helps my derailleur out through the gears. I’m anxious to get back on the bike and riding again, but I’ll wait until my arm is much more healed to be sure I’m not going to cause myself any more damage.

More updates to come on Zibings projects this next week!

- Andy

A Disappointing End of the Day

2009-08-23T20:05:00.001-04:00

Today I participated in the Philadelphia Livestrong Challenge. I set off around 8:10am with the rest of the 45-mile group. The ride started off quite well, this of course being the first time I’d gone on any manner of group ride in my life. I ended up making friends with a fellow rider named Bob who took me “under his wing” as a past participant to make sure I didn’t kill myself. It was certainly great having a friendly face amongst the hills to keep me upbeat.

Even so, my day didn’t end even remotely close to how I’d hoped. A little before mile marker 10, on a quick left-right turn series, I was involved in a bit of a pileup. As far as I can tell I was the only rider who was tossed off of their saddle, but it didn’t really matter much in the end. I flipped over the front bars, did some strange aerobatics that involved jamming my left elbow and head (with helmet) onto the ground. I popped up immediately and walked my bike to the side of the road as police and other riders stopped to ask if I was ok.

At this point, I could feel that I’d hit my left elbow quite hard, but it seemed as though I’d be able to recover. I calmed my nerves, hopped onto the bike, and gave it a go with Bob for some more distance. I made it to approximately mile 22 before I couldn’t stand to put weight on my arm anymore and stopped. I was picked up by a SAG (Support and Gear) vehicle, and eventually made my way through medical stations and to the start line, but I didn’t get to finish.

My arm is quite sore right now, but I don’t seem to have done any major structural damage that won’t heal on it’s own. To say I’m disappointed in my inability to finish would be an understatement, but it is simply how the cards fell today. I met a lot of great people and am looking forward to next year’s challenge in Philadelphia. You can be sure I’ll be back, and next year I won’t be so kind to the course…

- Andy

2009 Livestrong Challenge - Philadelphia

2009-08-14T07:12:00.003-04:00

I've been talking about doing this for a week or so now (basically since I was informed of it's existence), and finally I paid the registration fee and committed to participating. I will be riding my bike 45-miles for the fight against cancer on August 23rd, 2009 around Philadelphia. I only need to raise $250 in order to be allowed to ride, but I figured I might as well set my sights high. You can visit my 'fundraising headquarters' at http://philly09.livestrong.org/andym84/. After about 9 years of being off my bike, I'm going to do a 45-mile ride after only riding for about 3.5 weeks consistently. Am I crazy? More than likely...

At least it's for a good cause.

Click Here to Donate

- Andy

Weekend Recap: 07/25-07/26 2009

2009-07-27T07:52:00.001-04:00

Since I seem to be doing fun things more often on the weekends, I thought I’d once again recap my weekend. This weekend’s adventures took place again in Maine, but this time at my grandparent’s house. The easiest way to describe what goes on when I visit my grandparents is to just say that I get to relax a good deal. I had a great time and can’t wait to go back up there with my bike to give the hills there a try.

Looking out on the lake from the deck. You can just barely see the boat at dock…

This is from one ‘end’ of the lake. We were on our way to the country club when I asked my Grandmother to pull over for this shot.

It’s definitely a beautiful course. If only I could learn to play beautifully…

My grandparents tell me I am some manner of Loon-magician. We saw more Loons this weekend than they’ve seen so far all year. Go me?

Grandpop at the helm! We noticed that a lot of the ‘younger’ people on the lake weren’t even friendly enough to wave. Damn kids.

We head towards the northern end of the lake. The lake is much larger than you can see just from that earlier picture.

This house somehow fits on that little island. It’s been there as long as I can remember, I’ve just never seen anyone in it.

More loons… The lake is big enough that this is probably a different one from the other.

The woman who lives in this house just turned 100 years old. I found this neat for some reason and asked Grandpop to do a float-by for a picture.

The middle dock is ours, however the dock on the left is also on our property, despite it not being ours. Why my grandparents allowed this…I’ve no clue.

- Andy

N2F Yverdon: The First Extension!

2009-07-24T09:55:00.001-04:00

Ok, so it’s not really the first extension, but it is the first non-sponsored extension that is ‘released’ for Yverdon. As I detail on the N2F Training blog, I was looking for a CAPTCHA solution and found this gem. In true fanboy fashion I figured there was no better way to use this than to load it up as an extension in N2F Yverdon. Within 10 minutes I had it working and packaged for distribution. If you’re using Yverdon (should work with any version we have out) and need a CAPTCHA, go ahead and download the extension and unzip it to your root Yverdon directory.

- Andy

100 Posts!

2009-07-22T22:52:00.001-04:00

After getting back from a bike ride with my dad, I noticed that I’ve made 99 posts on my blog. As I sit here and attempt to pretend that my legs don’t exist, I thought I’d just go over a few things that are happening in my life, with Zibings, family and anything else I can think to include.

Back In The Saddle
As I just mentioned, I’ve come back after a bike ride with my father. All told I racked up about 18.4 extremely painful miles while Dad logged around 16.4. The reason for the difference lies with how horribly out of shape I actually appear to be on a bike. Within the first 2 miles of the trip, Dad lost me completely. Oh well, it’s bound to happen when you haven’t really touched a bike in 9 years.

N2F Yverdon
After my busy day today I didn’t get to do this tonight, but tomorrow I am tentatively scheduling the debut of our RC (Release Candidate) for Yverdon v0.2. We’re getting some new people to help with testing and are hoping to be out of RC with a new site before the end of next month. Exciting for us!

The Zibings Network
We’ve been plugging away at a few milestones on the project as well as working on adding some new team members. We have a designer coming on board, hopefully two new developers as well as some management switches. All in all, we’re happy with the progress and will be even happier once we start having updates to show off to the world.

It’s been a pretty crazy month and it seems like months more crazy are coming up soon. Thanks to everyone who’s been reading the blog, here’s to another 100 posts!

- Andy

Back To What Works

2009-07-20T10:27:00.001-04:00

Every now and then we (as humans) need to go through a refresher course on being ‘us’. When I was younger I used to love being outdoors, going for bike rides and just generally being dirty. I loved camping, being scared to death by heights and walking through the woods. This past weekend, I did some of these for the first time in years, and I have to say I’ve not been this happy in quite a while.

Last Thursday (07/17/2009) I met up with my good friend Brendon around 8pm. We piled into his 330ci and started heading north towards Maine for the New England Forest Rally (NEFR). After driving through the night, we arrived at Sunday River Resort around 07:30. There was plenty of time before any of the rally-related events started, so Brendon and I walked/drove around the tiny town to get acquainted with the area and learn where to go for different parts of the race.

After deftly dodging the advances of two very drunk and very abrasive young ladies in a parking lot we eventually made our way to the service area for the cars and watched the first two stages of the day. During those two stages, Brendon and I made our way into separate parts of the forest to try and pick a better spot for grabbing pictures. Brendon was the braver of the two and got much better pictures, a common theme throughout the weekend. Regardless though, I started to get comfortable again with being in the woods.

This is the service truck for Ken Block and Dave Mirra (just in case the writing doesn’t make it obvious enough).

And this is Ken’s car, he came in 2nd overall for the weekend because he had a couple problems (one spin-out and a flat tire).

Finally one of the sad attempts at a picture by me on the first stage. There –is- a car in that picture, it was Ken Block’s wife Lucy Block driving an old VW.

Needless to say, I had a lot of fun on Friday. We didn’t watch all of the events -- after driving through the night it turns out your perception of time passage is greatly distorted; nothing like believing it to be 7:30pm and noticing that it is in fact only about 2:00pm -- but the ones we did get to watch were worthwhile. It was hot, we were sticky, but damn it we had fun!

Saturday was a little different. Rejuvenated from a long night’s sleep we set off to Berlin, NH to watch the beginning of the second day’s stages. We found our way into some really dangerous spectator spots, again because of Brendon’s fearless ‘leadership’, even finding ourselves standing on top of the finish line for one of the longer stages of the day. I’m waiting to get some of the footage that Brendon snapped with his camera, I’ll be sure to link to them whenever he gets them up.

Kind of wish I’d had a decent camcorder for this shot as Ken was warming up his tires and scaring the crap out of some of the locals.

Whenever you see two cars coming down the road you have to wonder which one was going slow or got into an accident…

Finally, we packed up camp on Sunday morning and headed back into New Hampshire to climb Mount Washington. I’ve been to the Rockies in Colorado, so I didn’t really expect to be very impressed with this mountain. There are times in life when we get to feel really stupid, and this is one of them for me. Regardless, we have a sticker for Brendon’s BMW and a certificate for me that serves as proof we climbed a very narrow and steep road for 8 miles to the summit of Mt. Washington. It should also be noted that despite the 35-40F temperatures at the top, we did it with the windows (including sunroof) open the entire time, without the heat on in the car. Additionally, I was in shorts and sandals in an attempt to win back some of the manliness I’d lost in the trips through the woods.

As a matter of fact, I –do- have a fear of heights. Let’s DO THIS!

Not where we were going, but damn is it a beautiful view…

We chose the one day each year that they allow cyclists to go up the road, go us.

There’s a peak up there, I promise.

At this point, I was doing my best to just stay calm.

6,200+ feet above sea level, less than 40F in actual temperature, 30+ mph winds constantly making the wind chill very palpable…oh yeah, I was rocking the shorts and sandals.

And just for a bit of scale, that guy was standing down in the parking lot where our car was resting.

I don’t know if I liked going down the road anymore than going up, was all kind of terrifying in a beautiful/fun sort of way.

Hope you enjoy the pictures. I’ll make another post once Brendon has some of his photos/videos up online to add to the Rally part of the trip.

- Andy

Food, Inc.

2009-07-15T10:33:00.001-04:00

During my usual morning routine, I noticed a link to a YouTube video on Reddit. The video was a trailer for a movie called ‘Food, Inc.’ and seemed interesting. I’m not sure if anyone else was planning to see this, but if you’re curious check out their site at www.foodincmovie.com.

- Andy

N2F Yverdon: v0.2 Database Testing Update

2009-07-04T08:31:00.001-04:00

We’ve been at it for a little while now and are finally wrapping up the tests for our new database extensions. The MySQL and MySQLi extensions have had their test sites completed and ctd1500 and I are working on finishing both the PostgreSQL and SQLite sites.

One thing that’s become clear to us is that our testing methods are relatively simple and probably will have missed some functionality as a result. This first set of test sites will be very simple for the sake of saving time and getting us to v0.2 a little faster. As we do more detailed work with the different database engines, we’ll work on expanding the test methods for our database extensions.

Until then, we’re just happy to be moving along with v0.2. Last night I also began working on the new layout for the N2F site and I have to say I’m really excited. The look and feel is much more modern and fluid, I hope that you all like it!

- Andy

N2F Yverdon: v0.2 Dev Released

2009-06-26T07:15:00.001-04:00

After well over a month (heck, almost two) of internal testing, we’ve nailed down enough of the bugs that we are comfortable releasing v0.2 to the public for testing. This is a development release and will still have bugs so should probably not be used for production development. As always, you can find the downloads on the N2 Framework website. Enjoy!

- Andy