Over the weekend, while I was working at a retreat, I walked in front of a tv screen and was pleasantly surprised to see that Dr. Paul won the CPAC straw poll.

Immediately, the neocons in the Hannity and Limbaugh circles started claiming that this was only because a bunch of college kids showed up.

Anytime Ron Paul has a good showing in any poll, etc., it's always because "hackers gamed the system" and other nonsense, see the YouTube below for more examples. Any poll victory is the result of mobilizing your supporters.

This is the result of new blood getting into the mix in the party. Last time around, they were fooled by the dirty tricks from Fox News, GOP party leaders, etc. I think this is the first in a series of steps to show that the Ron Paul Revolution has learned from the mistakes of the past. They are going to be far better organized this time around.

I won't be naive. There will be more dirty tricks, and they will be dirtier than before. During the last campaign, there was a concerted effort to keep Paul supporters from attending debates. Fox News even made sure Dr. Paul wasn't invited to participate in one of their debates.

Since then, he's appeared on the network over 60 times and countless times on the other cable news stations. Now, however, expect dirty tricks. They'll pull out old debunked newsletters that paint him as racist, or they'll try and link him to the most extreme right-wing supporter they can find. The neocons who have controlled the Republican party for so long won't go down without a fight.

He's pretty much the only one in the bunch that has any credibility at all when it comes to the mantra of shrinking the government. Republicans talk about these things, and then don't do them when they get the chance. They don't call Ron Paul Dr. No in Congress for nothing. He votes it down if it is not in the constitution.

If things stay as they are economically, (or get worse, as I am predicting) the only way Obama wins again is to have Palin to run against. Look for the media to really push to get Palin credibility, at least until the primaries are over, and then watch them tear her back down again.

Given Dr. Paul's age, It will be key for him to have a running mate named before the primaries even start. There are some folks out there who could run with him who have gotten enough name recognition and trust built up to be an asset. I'm hoping for Paul/Napolitano.

It's going to be an interesting fight the next few years...

What happened to these empires? The cost of maintaining them bankrupted them. They were unsustainable.

We don't like to call ourselves an empire, but look at the numbers:

There are, according to the Department of Defense's "Base Structure Report" for FY 2009, 716 U.S. military bases on foreign soil in thirty-eight countries. Yet, according to the expert on this subject, Chalmers Johnson, the author of Blowback, The Sorrows of Empire, and Nemesis, that number is far too low: "The official figures omit espionage bases, those located in war zones, including Iraq and Afghanistan, and miscellaneous facilities in places considered too sensitive to discuss or which the Pentagon for its own reasons chooses to exclude -- e.g. in Israel, Kosovo, or Jordan." Johnson places the real number of foreign bases closer to 1,000.
from Same Empire, Different Emperor by Laurence M. Vance

Follow the link, the evidence gets even more damning.

It's no wonder we're broke. We still have 50,000 troops in Germany, I guess in case the Nazis come back.

"I will promise you this, that if we have not gotten our troops out by the time I am President, it is the first thing I will do. I will get our troops home. We will bring an end to this war. You can take that to the bank." - Barack Obama

We have one ruling party in America right now, it has 2 wings: The Democrat wing likes wealth transfer, taxes, and assaults on commercial liberties. The Republican wing likes deficits, war, and assaults on civil liberties. Both sides like power; and neither is interested in your freedom, or in toning down our empire. (ht Andrew Napolitano, who likes to point that out every chance he gets.)

All this in the name of national security? I think we'd find much more security if we brought the majority of those folks home.

I had a hard time shooting it, mostly because I was laughing so hard. And when Cops: Sumatanga was finished, we thought that it was hilarious. The camp staff thought it was hilarious. The reaction from the campers wasn't quite as strong. I guess a video with a counselor being mean to campers didn't translate as well as one where a rubber bird terrorizes campers.

Back to the drawing board for next year. I now present for your viewing pleasure, my magnum opus: Cops - Sumatanga.

The Crimson Tide went 6-7 last season and has not won a national championship in 15 years. Yet a number of Alabama fans truly expect Saban to have a 10-victory team this season and be in the BCS title game within three years. And those are the rational fans.

Dear Cary:

Who is a delusional Alabama fan? I am.

Yes, and there were mp3 players before the iPod, but which one is considering the ultimate version of the technology that caused it to take root?

And there were smartphones before the iPhone too. But which one is the one that finally get things right (mostly.)

I owned one of the original tablets, the Apple Newton. I loved that thing back in college. When Steve Jobs returned to Apple, he killed off the Newton project, mostly because it wasn't his baby. Newton had been spun off into a subsidiary company and was starting to flourish. The project wasn't making money, but it was breaking even.

Newton OS 1.0 was a joke, the handwriting technology was lampooned and with good reason. It was lousy. The product was released before it was ready. Newton OS 2.0 was no joke. The handwriting technology actually worked.

In college, I used to carry around a Newton 120 running Quicken and I would log all of my purchases into it. I would use it for taking notes in class.

On last week's MacBreak, Leo Laporte made a great point about the Newton. The technology in it was fantastic. It was way ahead of its time. They're still impressive machines to this day. But it was the perfect product to highlight the difference between an Apple with and without Steve Jobs. Apple with Jobs has a track record of finding that nexus of form and function that is so crucial.

There have been Apple tablet rumors since 2002. The iPhone actually originated as a "Safari Pad" idea:

"Apple's multitouch technology began life not as a cellphone, but as a notepad-sized skunkworks project internally dubbed Safari Pad, run by Tim Bucher, then Apple’s head of Macintosh hardware. To his credit, Mr. Jobs seized on the technology and morphed it into the iPhone."
New York Times, June 2007

Apple clearly had the technology to release such a product. Most companies in the tech industry would have already done so. This thing has been in development for years and years now. If it comes out and it does indeed look like a big iPhone, that's not necessarily a cop-out design-wise. The hype machine has been in overdrive for a long time now on this thing, so I think that the first reaction might be disappointment from the tech blogs. If they had come out with this thing with the exact same interface as the iPhone 2 years ago as the iPhone was introduced, people would be drooling. Funny how quickly what was revolutionary seems passé.

Apple stock tends to drop a little when they introduce a new product. I'm betting it drops a bit today.

I was there in San Francisco when they introduced the iPhone. A Steve Jobs keynote is a pilgrimage all Apple geeks should make. I hate that they don't do them at Macworld anymore, where the fans can attend. It was indeed a landmark day... what will today bring?

I'm predicting:

10" screen (LCD, not OLED)
Wifi
3G support (hope this doesn't cost an arm and a leg. I already have a data plan, let me tether iPhone to it for $5 a month)
iPhone OS 4.0 with new gestures
Pressure sensitive screen for sketching
No stylus, but it will support handwriting via 2 fingers gripped like a pen
Won't be named iPad or iSlate. I like Canvas.
Will support scaled iPhone apps, but will have apps that are built just for it
Front facing camera, but no rear one - do you really want to carry this to shoot snapshots?
Apple sets Bing as default search on iPhone 4.0 over Google
Google Maps replaced with Apple's own mapping app with Turn by Turn GPS
Cost? $800, which is too much, but it will drop

I guess it's just that I couldn't really related to it. I had never unexpectedly lost someone that I was more than just an acquaintance with. I guess I really should consider myself very fortunate. Death has not been anything that I've had to deal with in a long time. Two of my grandparents died when I was in high school and that affected me, but not in this way. I had another grandparent that I wasn't close to die in college. Didn't really affect me. But hearing yesterday that my friend Matt Miller had died hit me like a ton of bricks.

I knew Matt through working with him at Camp Sumatanga. There's just something about the friendships that are forged in those circumstances. The intensity of a weeklong camp has the effect of hanging out with someone for a month. Sharing a religious experience like that create a bond of friendship that is stronger than most any other I've experienced.

Matt was in Memphis during the week attending Memphis Theological Seminary, so he and I would have lunch from time to time, talking about our mutual love for the Crimson Tide and Sumatanga and more. On Wednesday, he was over at our house, telling us stories of his crazy experiences as a church pastor who moonlights as the Assistant Chief of Police in rural Alabama over a bottle of wine and some steaks. Three days later, he was gone, having drowned in a duck hunting accident in Arkansas.

As I read through the comments posted on his Wall on Facebook last night and through the status updates of our mutual friends, it made me wonder if he knew how loved and respected he was. Maybe we should all take the time to let the people in our lives know how we really feel about them while we still have a chance.

Nooma - Matthew - Rob Bell

Suffering the loss of a loved one can be the most difficult thing we face. Sometimes all the reasoning and comforting words in the world just aren’t what we need. What might help us, however, is to understand how Jesus dealt with this kind of loss.

Nooma - Matthew 1 of 2:

Nooma - Matthew 2 of 2:

• Cracker - Sunrise in the Land of Milk and Honey

Cracker was one my favorite bands in college. In the 90's they released some of the best albums of the decade. Catchy songs with quirky subjects. In the 00's, they seemed to have lost their direction...until this album.

• The Decemberists - The Hazards of Love
Proof that the album isn't dead. This one was meant to be listened to in one sitting. I included a song in my mix below, but to get the full effect, you should listen to the album.

The Best Songs of 2009

Download zip of all songs | Preview Songs in iTunes

1.	Phoenix Lisztomania
2.	Matt & Kim Daylight
3.	Idlewild Younger Than America
4.	The Decemberists The Rake's Song
5.	Wilco You and I
6.	the dodos Small Deaths
7.	Manchester Orchestra I've Got Friends
8.	Sonic Youth Anti-Orgasm
9.	Yeah Yeah Yeahs Dull Life
10.	Ra Ra Riot Ghost Under Rocks
11.	Tegan & Sara Hell
12.	Neko Case People Got A Lotta Nerve
13.	A.C. Newman Like a Hitman, Like a Dancer
14.	Cracker Turn On Tune In Drop Out With Me
15.	Roman Candle Why Modern Radio Is A-Ok
16.	Metric Satellite Mind
17.	Animal Collective Brothersport
18.	Thao with the Get Down Stay Down Know Better Learn Faster
19.	Passion Pit To Kingdom Come

See Also:

The Best Music of 2007
The Best Music of 2008

So now instead, we're going to end up with these nude scanners in every airport and Lieberman says we should be considering a pre-emptive strike on Yemen. Someone is going to make a lot of money off of this.

Instead we should be taking a long look at WHY this is happening, and making the changes that we need to make to stop this. People aren't doing these things because they hate us. Terrorism doesn't develop in a vacuum.

I had been meaning to share some of the Joomla knowledge I have gained over the last few years on my blog for a long time. Some of the best knowledge out there comes from researching a topic via Google. There's not a whole lot out there about using Joomla to build a school website. I hope this helps get someone started.

If you decided you wanted to change the size and color of all of the H1 (heading 1, the largest headline size) elements, you had to make that same change on hundreds of pages. If you decided that you wanted to add an element to the navigational menu, you had to also change every file on the site.

Part of the reason for this structure is that it’s the easiest and simplest in terms of required knowledge to implement. It’s also the most inefficient way to do it. Ideally, content is divorced from style and layout. The layout is defined in the website’s one and only page. The style is defined in a cascading style sheet (CSS), and the content is populated from a database based on what the end user is requesting to see.

Static sites are easier to develop (up to a point…size does become an issue pretty quickly), but harder to maintain. A dynamic site is harder to develop, but easier to maintain.

The first school websites were pretty simple, but as the website has moved from a supplemental item in the school's overall communications strategy to the primary medium of communications between school and parent, a powerful site that is easy enough for teachers and administrators to contribute to is a necessity.

The question is whether or not you should develop this in-house, or outsource it.

There are a lot of advantages in using software that was designed with schools in mind. There's far less time spent on reinventing the wheel. With an outsourced site, the hosting, server, and security issues would be the problem of our vendor. And features like email push pages (really just a fancy way of saying ‘newsletter’), calendars, and parent directories are are better integrated into the overall site.

The problem with outsourcing is the cost involved. I found that it would cost us over $100,000.

We chose to continue to develop our own site. Not every school has the option of going it on their own, but if you have someone with the right expertise on staff, it’s absolutely achievable.

Joomla

In 2006, after investigating several other options, I settled on the Joomla content management system (CMS) as the basis for our school’s site. Joomla is the tool that we use to manage all of the content on our site. It’s the engine on which the body of the site is built.

I don’t know of too many elementary schools using Joomla, but several universities are using it, including the University of Nebraska, and Oklahoma State University.

Our current site is actually our second Joomla site. From 2006-2009, we used Joomla 1.0 for our site. Joomla 1.5 was a significant enough change in the codebase of Joomla that I elected to take the lessons I learned from building that site and make our current site that much better.

One of the advantages of Joomla is the healthy add-on community. These add-ons extend Joomla, allowing it to go beyond just hosting articles. There are add-ons to implement calendars, accept reservations and donations, and for web stores.

I know of some other schools that using a competing open-source CMS called Drupal.

The Design of the Site

PDS Website

In 2009, when it was time for a redesign and re-architecture of the entire structure of the site, I decided to not start from the zero since a great deal of time can go into creating a good site layout. In 2006, I created the site’s layout from scratch, which can take weeks to tweak. I'm a one-man show. Implementing all of the new features I had in mind was more than enough work to keep me busy in the Spring and Summer, so I started with a template and customized it to fit my needs.

Even though I could have coded my own, it was far more cost effective to use one of the many commercial Joomla template providers as a starting point. Many of them offer menu systems, and special features that add a great deal of polish to the user experience along with the style of the site. As I mentioned in the requirements section, knowing how to customize the template to make it look like your own is essential. Just think of how many Blogspot blogs you come across that all look essentially the same.

In the independent school business, you are offering a product that your customers can get for free from a public school. Your brand helps reinforce the prestige and perceived value of your organization in the public eye.

The resurgence of Apple has proven that the design of a product matters. More than ever, we make decisions about products and companies based on the information we can find about them online. Schools are no different. The design of your site can communicate volumes about your organization.

As a parent, one of the things that frustrates me about my daughter’s school is a lack of organization of news on their site. I only have a limited amount of time as a working parent to spend reading news.

One of the guiding principles behind the design of the PDS site is to have the majority of information that parents need in one place. Not only that, but organize the information in such a way that parents of JK students don’t see news that only applies to parents of SK students. Don’t waste your customer’s time. If all of the content is relevant, you’ll condition them to not ignore parts of the page.

Required Knowledge

Here are the skills that are required to pull this off at your school:

HTML: When I started getting into web design back in the mid 1990’s, my dad told me that it would never go anywhere. He demonstrated software that would build your website for you. Microsoft Front Page, was the program. It’s 15 years later, and there is STILL no tool that will create a professional site where you don’t have to get your hands dirty by going into the code. Understanding HTML at an intermediate to advanced level is a pre-requisite.

CSS: An intermediate to advanced understanding of CSS is also a must. CSS is the best way to layout and style website content.

PHP: PHP is a scripting language used to run a great number of the sites you visit every day. You don’t need to know how to program in it, but a basic understanding will help when you find an add-on extension that almost does everything you need. With a little bit of tweaking in PHP, you can get it to do exactly what you need. Plus, many of the other open source content management systems are built on PHP.

MySQL: MySQL is a free database system. You don’t need to know that much about it…until something goes wrong. Understanding how to back it up and restore it, and how to repair a corrupted user session table are handy. Plus just a basic understanding of the structure will speed the process of importing information into your site.

Design: While there are professional, highly polished templates sites available for sale, most aren't well-suited to school sites. When you do find one that is close, making it look like your school’s brand requires design skills and expertise in Photoshop and Illustrator (or Fireworks). It’s also important to understand how typography communicates the importance and hierarchy of information.

Server Administration: This is one of those areas where I am a novice at best. You can always go with a hosting service, but I’ve had issues with that in the past. An on-site server gives you easy access for backup, and speedy uploads. 100% of your content providers are in the building. Having a quick in-house connection to the site is a major benefit. This is one of the areas where I lean on a college friend. I’m getting better at it, but I don’t pretend to be anything but a novice.

The Tools

If, after all that, you still want to go it on your own using Joomla, here are some of the add-ons that I found useful.

JoomlaPack

This free backup utility will backup your entire site in one step. You can then download the backup and easily move the entire site to another server in only a couple of steps. With the previous version of our site, I didn't have a way to test out major changes on the site. JoomlaPack allows me to create a backup of the current site and have it up and running somewhere else on my own personal hosting space, or on our backup machine in a matter of minutes.

Display News by BK

The built-in Joomla blog functionality allows you to display content from a section or category. Display News allows you to display it from multiple sections and categories. And you have fine control as to how it is formatted. You can have it output just headlines, or headlines and just the introduction, or output entire articles. It is indispensable.

Acajoom Pro

The newsletter engine for the site. Allows our users to manage/subscribe to news from their son's classes via email.

DT Register

I use this to allow registrations and RSVPs for events. It also has support for PayPal, for payment options.

Online Parent Directory

This is a feature I had been wanting to offer for a long time. It was one of the features I thought we'd only be able to offer if we went with one of the school site companies. Late in the summer, I figured out how to pull this off using an add-on called SOBI 2, but next summer, I will be reworking this using one of the social networking add-ons for Joomla. Community Builder is free, and JomSocial is commercial.

NinjaContent

Provides an interface in the front-end of the site for creating and managing articles. Joomla has a front-end interface and a back-end administrator interface. Our faculty and administration doesn't need to see the back-end. NinjaContent allows for them to create their homework and news items in the front-end of the site. It also allows me to limit some of the areas where they can publish items.

ExTplorer

A file system browser. You can upload, rename, move files, change file permissions, and more.

QuickFAQ

I use this to run our Question and Answer system. Our goal this year was to have a repository for the questions that get asked over and over again.

Costs

Other than the man hours required, which are significant, this is a far more cost effective way to build a site for your school. Don’t forget to build in the amount of hours you will need to spend on maintenance. You need to especially be vigilant about security. One of the benefits of using a popular CMS is the multitude of add-on options. One of the drawbacks is that with popularity comes hackers. I spend the first part of each work day reviewing the latest patches for all of the my add-ons, which are usually the weak spot in the security of a Joomla site.

Hosting/Hardware

You need to determine how you are going to host the site. Don’t make the mistake I made, thinking that a shared business account is going to work. These companies claim that your only limitation is the amount of bandwidth per month and the amount of space you use. Don’t buy it. We used 1&1, one of the larger hosting providers, and they shut the site down because of us using “too many resources on the system.” Worse of all, they didn’t notify us about it, they just crippled the site. It took me hours on the phone to figure out why our site suddenly began crawling. Your hosting costs won't be of the $10 a month variety.

We host our site in-house on an Apple XServe. We also have a Mac Pro that serves as a backup site. You could probably get away with a Mac mini as a backup. You just need something in case of an emergency.

Cost: $3500 for server + $1000 for backup + Hosting costs (ours is hosted internally, at no additional cost)

Software

While the core Joomla CMS is free, some of the add-ons and templates are not. Most are fairly inexpensive. I would estimate that we spent around $1000 on software for the site.

Conclusion

There are plenty of reasons why you shouldn't go this route. A company that specializes in website for schools will have insight into best practices for school sites. Security, backup, and maintenance issues are taken care of.

There absolutely is a learning curve involved in setting up a site like this as well, but it is a far less expensive way to go for an organization looking to keep costs under control.

One of the things that the doctor interview rightly pointed out is that the area is full of a lot of poorer people who simply can't afford the foods they would need to change their lifestyle.

Jamie and I really changed our lifestyle a couple of years ago. After yo-yoing back up a few years ago, I decided to try something different. Atkins wasn't sustainable, I tried it. You can do it for a while, but the variety of foods just isn't there. You can only take that much meat and green vegetables for so long.

And exercise alone is not enough. Unless you change what you eat, it's not going to work.

So we did the South Beach Diet, and that's pretty much what we still eat now, a couple of years later. And it is expensive. Sure, we could get rid of some of the more expensive South Beach brand convenience/comfort food items, but that's what has worked for us. My main snack is a mix of nuts. Those things are crazy expensive.

Mint says that we spend more than twice as much on groceries as others in our state. Though we spend about a third of what most folks in the state spend on restaurants.

The general rule of thumb really is that the vast majority of the foods you eat should be found on the perimeter of the grocery store, and not in the interior aisles. But despite what the Federal government says, things ARE getting more expensive.

It's just going to be really hard for Americans to lose the weight with the costs so high.