The old rancher says, ‘Okay, but don’t go in that field over there.’ The water representative says,   ‘Mister, I have the authority of the Provincial Government with me.  See this card?  This card means I am allowed to go WHEREVER I WISH on any agricultural land.  No questions asked or answered.   Have I made myself clear?  Do you understand?’

The old rancher nods politely and goes about his chores.

Later, the old rancher hears loud screams and spies the water rep running for his life and close behind is the rancher’s bull. The bull is gaining with every step.

The rep is clearly terrified, so the old rancher immediately throws down his tools, runs to the fence and yells at the top of his lungs…..

‘Your card!  Show him your card!’

1. Spend much time in the wordpress.com, bbpress.org, wordpress.org and mu.wordpress.org forums.     With all the work that I have been doing lately it is tough to find the extra time to spend  answering questions and helping others.   It is not something that I have quit doing and I will return to doing more when things let up.
2. Social events including weddings, golf trips and other social gatherings.   It falls into much of the same reasons for not being able to attend as many of these as I usually do.    It isn’t that I don’t want to do them, it just hasn’t been something that I have been able to schedule in.
3. Spending time on social applications.    I really haven’t been an active participant in facebook, twitter, friendfeed and other online applications either.   Part of this is because of the time and partly because I am starting to limit my participation.    I have locked down several of these applications and that will most likely continue as I move forward.

It has been work and family that occupy my time lately and when you are extremely busy this is what is most important to me.    I really love the internet, but it really has been for my work pursuits as the majority time logged.  The interesting thing to me is something I was told a long time ago when it comes to just about everything.   Either you are a player or you don’t exist. This applies to work, social networking, communities, family and just about everything else.    The hardest part is keeping balance.    When time is limited, you can only do what you can do.

After reading a great post from Mark on using JungleDisk, I couldn’t help myself and decided to give it a go.  JungleDisk is a product works as an interface to backup things on your computer and store them in a secure and cheap storage network online with Amazon web services.   Amazon is used by services like wordpress.com for storing images since their space is so cheap!     In this application though, the storage space is not accessible through the web unless specifically enabled.

Giving you an idea how this works, you tell JungleDisk that you want certain folders backed up and it checks on a routine basis what has been added, deleted or has changed and syncs itself with your folder.   There is also an option to keep files archived that you may delete on your computer that are still on Amazon.    It is great and works without problem in the background.

Right now, I am storing all my photos, music, movies, general files and business related materials on the service and haven’t given it web rights.   Not that I am scared to do it, but really I don’t mind not being able to see the data online right now.     It still is secure, but not as secure as not sharing

Another great thing about this service is that you can have multiple computers all backing up to a single account.   As soon as the last files off my main computer are synced, I plan on backing up the rest of my computers as well.     The initial upload of files is still ongoing after a week (almost 100 Gigs), it will be really simple after this completes to have a working backup solution.

I still have one of my computers using Apple’s TimeMachine and the rest still dump to a 1 TB drive from Western Digital and that will continue.    While JungleDisk will keep everything up to date in the background, I still like having a local backup of things for quick moving between computers over our local network.    Especially music.    That being said, I should be prepared for the unknown including losing everything in a fire or complete computer Hard Drive failures.

So what is the cost?    Amazon is charging $0.15 a GIG of space.    That means I expect my bill for my 100 Gigs to be around $15 a month with a little more for the transfer fees.    The first bill will be fairly large, but after that it is smooth sailing.    Pretty cheap considering how many dollars worth of data is involved.    Some of it is priceless.

You can imagine how happy I was to come across the following video of “Aaron Lewis” from Staind covering “Black” and doing it to live performance perfection.   I thought I would share as listening to this song still gives me shivers down my spine.   Love it!

This is why I am helping in another way this month.   Andrew and James have put together a specific wpmu related plugin competition to give a price to the best plugin specific to the project.   Plugins are additions written for specific tasks and functionality to enhance the project.   These plugins help people with their blogging experience and communities, often for free.    That is what is great about this competition, as it shows appreciation for the hours of work that these people put into helping everyone else.   I donated $100 to the competition and I hope that this brings out the code writers!

Special thanks goes out to Lloyd for forwarding on some great wordpress gear to my P.O. box since no one else seems to be able to ship there!    Thanks!  (no, the writing isn’t backwards, it was from Photo Booth

This is my quick recording of “Under The Lighthouse” by a great band called “Big Wreck”.

I had the privilege of attending the “chucks” both in Calgary and recently in Strathmore. Leaving a little early, I missed out on a couple of crazy events including the “Running of the Bulls”. This event is not for the faint at heart. It is much like the one is Spain, where people run around when they let the bulls out and try not to get hurt or hit. I wish I could embed the following video, but check out:

1. Go to http://wpca.com/video.aspx
2. Scroll down to the different locations on the flash player and make sure you are viewing “Strathmore“
3. Scroll through the videos to hit “Running of the Bulls: Day 2“

That video has a contact with a bull and one of the contestants that is just crazy.   It is around 1/2 way through the 3:33 video

I just installed the iPhone Wordpress application and found this nice little post here on my blog. Thought I would take this opportunity to showcase it as a bug. I didn’t realize it was there until just now, but this can’t be right. Is this known and being worked on?

Some of the big changes are new theme previews before activating, integration of Google Gears to speed up the administration on your computer and post revisions for those of us that can’t seem to keep it all straight!   Get it while it’s hot!

The ‘shift’ will transfer wealth from rich to poor, from the oil patch to the rest of the country, and from the coffers of big business to the pockets of low-income Canadians.

Even though the Liberal leader has never specifically stated that the plan was going after the wealth in Western Canada, Mr. Boshcoff had no problem saying this was the case.    The proposed “Carbon Plan” will take money through taxes from the “polluters” of Canada.  While on the surface this seems much like “Robin Hood”, it has far reaching implications as the vast majority of Canadians would be deemed as “polluters”.

As far as I can tell, this proposed plan will negatively impact not only “big oil”, but farmers, truck drivers, rural communities, large and small business owners and almost anyone that drives.    What Canadians hopefully realize is that taxes often lead to economic hardships on everyone.   Big and small companies alike might have to downsize and jobs might be at stake, from Vancouver Island to the farthest reaches of the East coast.    Besides unemployment, this plan could also drive down home and property values as an unwanted consequence.

We have to guard ourselves against plans for redistibution of wealth being disguised as as something that is environmentally responsible.   With the global slowdown of the economy, the US in recession and Canada on the brink, this plan scares me.   I hope it scares you as well.

Some of the key features of this release:

• The version number is being bumped to 2.6 rather than 1.6 because of version confusion. Minor MU versions will probably append a letter to the version.
• Signup page now has a nonce to help defeat spammers.
• Plugins in wp-content/plugins/ are version checked like in WordPress. mu-plugins isn’t covered just yet.
• Major object cache changes.
• And many more bug fixes. Check the timeline for a list of changes.

I have been using this release on my test server as we go and put it on my main WPMU site without any issues, so I believe it to be pretty safe!

Special thanks goes out to Donncha for all the wonderful work that he and many others from Automattic and the WP Community put forth to such a great product!