So, Ruth and I just got back from Iowa.  We got to see the Iowa State Fair, which was pretty cool, and to see lots of corn and soybean farms.  I learned a lot about farming, probably the most significant part of which is the fact that the romanticized notion of a farm house in the middle of a field of corn is more or less bunk.  There are such farmhouses, but the vast majority of farms appear to be just 80 acres of corn with no buildings on them at all, and then the big harvesters come around in the fall and pick up the whole field in a few hours and then move on the the next

Recently, Ruth and I watched Good Will Hunting, and I was reminded of two of my favorite quotes from that movie:

In one scene, Will tries to explain to Skylar how he can do such complicated stuff without even really trying:

This has been bugging me for a while now, and it's true for corporate web sites as much as it is for universities.

I'm starting up a new web site called WikiBasics.  This will be a Wikipedia-style web site that allows people to share recipes, techniques and so on for simple living.  For example, my first contribution is going to be how to bake sourdough bread from scratch.

"The telephone was an aberration in human development. It was a 70 year or so period where for some reason humans decided it was socially acceptable to ring a loud bell in someone else's life and they were expected to come running, like dogs. This was the equivalent of thinking it was okay to walk into someone's living room and start shouting." -- Rick Webb

"The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision.  Each tends to ascribe to the other side a consistency, foresight and coherence that its own experience belies.  Of course, even two blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room." -- Henry Kissinger

So I've decided on a name for the game that I'm developing:

Feralor

Pronounced "fer-a-lohr".  Woot!  I'm still working on development right now, but I should have something you can log in to up on this site soon.

I've been working on a Gallery module for Drupal as I am totally unhappy with the other offerings out there, and I'm happy to say that version 0.1 is up and running on this site right now!  Check out my first two galleries that I've uploaded!  There are certainly more features to come and I'll post more information about them here when I'm ready.

We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgement;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness;
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet
the new neighbor.
We build more computers to hold more
information to produce more copies then ever,
but have less communication;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.

So I have actually made some progress on my game this past week.  Specifically, I've ported over almost everything I had on the stand-alone site to Drupal, and I've got a lot of administrative back-end functionality that I didn't have before.  I'm in the process of porting over the user-facing elements (the ability to create toons, view other people's toons, browse the game encyclopedia and so on) and should have those done shortly.