How many bones have you broken? Yours or someone else's?

Six ribs, one collar bone and one toe, not necessarily in that order, and only 2 of those breaks weren't from ultimate frisbee.

The last breaking was two years ago. I was smooshed by Ben at a practice, a few weeks before Sectionals. My account of the day:

[In my vox post, I copied the content from my smooshing back in 2004.]

Turns out, I was mistaken about the ribs. I had four broken ribs that took around four weeks to heal.

Kris often asks random questions. They're quite entertaining and I've been meaning to write about them for the longest time (the majority of his questions are in the growing stack of yellow index cards - somewhere).

Well, tonight he pulled out a doozy. I was flipping through logos on the website of a company I've contracted to do my personal branding. It's all part of Project Decloak, which has taken a back burner to grouphug conversions, the Master Gardeners website, two client websites, my UCPC talk, volunteering with the OSCMS summit, and quite possibly another Post-Nuke to Drupal conversion that I'm debating taking up pending the other projects' completions.

One of the example logos was for some company with a name on the variation of "Soldiers for Christ." I wasn't looking at the company names, I was just looking at the logos, trying to find ones I liked so that the logo making company had some ideas (nevermind the fact that I send them seven logos of styles I like, as well as a description of what I want (simple, geometric, recognizable as a favicon.ico)), and so didn't really notice the company names.

Kris, however, did see the company names and expressed surprise, "Why would Jesus need soldiers?"

Without really thinking about it, I responded. "Um, to keep up the killings in his name?"

"Why not just call the company something like 'Overly Dogmatic Zealots for Christ?' I mean, if you're going to kill in someone's name, you better really believe in that person."

"Uh, I don't know," I answered, distracted, looking at more logos.

"So, what would you do if Jesus Christ appeared in our living room?"

Ah, one of those questions. He suddenly had my full attention. "Probably ask him about how he felt about the hundreds of thousands of people killed in his name."

"..." Kris waited.

"Or maybe tell him, that first time you died for our sins, that was a piece of cake. You're in for a world of hurting this time around."

Kris didn't believe me. "Come on, what would you really say. I mean, if a man materialized in our living room and started talking to you, well, maybe not a man, some spirit, but it started talking to you, what would you do?"

"Assume it was the devil."

Apparently this was the perfect answer to induce side-spliting laughter. He couldn't do much more than laugh, as I continued, "What? Come on, think about it. Something materialized right in front of your eyes, why would you believe it's anything other than a migraine, insanity or a daemon?"

"You wouldn't believe it was God or Jesus?"

"The thought that Jesus would materialize in my living room is as absurd as the concept of his dying for our sins and being the son of God and ascension into heaven and all the other stuff that goes with him. No, I'd assume it was something far more sinister."

"Really? So, I'd be passed out, and you'd like, are you the devil?"

"Yep. Pretty much."

Our third Master Gardener's class was today, the second one where we had reading to do. Once again, in preparing for the class, I'm hit with the amount of reading we need to do, and how procrastination with the reading is just not going to cut it.

Janis, Karen and I showed up at 9:15, about 10 minutes earlier than normal. I suspect the difference was because I wasn't late getting out the door, so Janis and I weren't late arriving at the carpool meeting place, and Karen wasn't late driving us over. It was my turn to drive, and I drove like the wind.

We've been heading over early to set up the A/V equipment for the class, sneaking in our volunteer hours half and hour at a time. This time, the equipment was in a strange state of disarray, causing the three of us to run around madly to organize in time. I also wanted to make sure Karen was up to speed on the setup, so I told her what to do, but let her do all the work.

The presentation went okay, with only minor issues with the audio. The biggest issue of the day with equipment was, thankfully, not our responsibilty: the video camera broke sometime this past week, so no video of the class was taken. Which is a real shame, given that the presenter was, as a Master Gardener stated, "an expert in the field and the best presenter for this information we've ever had."

The most pleasant point of the entire class was seeing Tish Fagin at the class, though she had a different last name on her name tag. Tish is Mischief teammate Adam Fagin's mom, so the moment was a nice life-folding-in-on-itself, serendipity moment. I had found out last Sunday that my mom is also a Master Gardener, though not in California, so seeing Tish and knowing that another person I know is also in the program is quite comforting.

Our class was about soil: composition, quality and management. Good class.

Today, I went to my first real Master Gardeners committee meeting: the Web Team. I managed exactly zero days between signing up for the program and the committee. Given that the tasks of the committee once again couples two interests of mine, both being on the committee and doing the development work is a ridiculously easy way for me to earn my 100 volunteer hours.

The meeting was held at Apple, in one of the back conference rooms. There were nine of us there: John, Bart, Bracey, Bob, Abby, Karyn, Vera, Allen and me, each of various technical experience. Several people where technically inclined, but don't yet have the experience building sites.

At first, I was concerned that there were nine people in the room, indicating there were probably 12 people on the committee. From my experience, the larger the committee, the fewer people actually do tasks assigned from the committee. In this case, however, my fears were unfounded, as everyone had something to contribute, with opinions closely matching so discussions weren't long, ambling and off-course.

Listening to the group, it was pretty obvious they knew what they wanted for a public facing website (the members-only website being okay at the moment), they just didn't know how to get there. I wrote down each time someone mentioned a particular feature, if only in passing, and was able to summarize them, taking many breathes as I ran down the list of 20+ features, near the end of the meeting. Many are easy enough to do, some less so and will take work.

The project should be fairly easy to do, I just need to find time to do it. After my UCPC talk next weekend will be a great time to start cranking on it.

Yesterday, I was looking for information about authentication hooks on drupal.org, when I spotted a forum request for a drupal developer to rebuild grouphug using drupal. I find grouphug fascinating, but didn't think much of the post at the time.

Four hours later, there was a follow up post about how to keep the old URLs with a drupal site. Having dealt with this issue with the gallery migration from PostNuke to Drupal, I posted an answer, then realized I could probably reuse my scripts to help this guy out. I sent an email, and about one minute later, received a reply from the site creator, Gabriel Jeffrey.

We chatted for a while. I think the combination of grouphug fan and drupal expert convinced him, so I'm now part of the site conversion project. I'm terribly entertained by the prospect, and managed to finish the confessions import last night. The site has a forum, with users and discussions, and those might take slightly longer. I suspect the scripts from the gallery migration will work for them.

Today I met (as far as online meetings go) Gabe's partner in conversion, Erik Swedberg. Gabe is in Boston, but Erik is local. The meeting was quite entertaining, almost like an online blind date: here's everything about me, what about you? Turns out, Erik and I both went to the Yahoo! hackday, two ships passing in the night.

The grouphug project should be fun.

I should redesign this site quickly, though, in case I get a link from Gabe when this is over. This design has been up too long, and it's stale and BOR-ring.