First of all, let me say Mary and I were very happy to get our luggage from Hawaiian Airlines. It arrived in San Jose last Thursday, nearly 4 days after our trip. It had been inadvertently tagged with someone else’s tags, and so went from Honolulu to Sacramento. I had figured this out the first night upon closer inspection of my baggage claim receipt, but it still took them many days to track them down. Anyway, the bags traveled from Sacramento to Salt Lake City to San Jose but everything seemed to be in order.

Now, while I’m trying to figure out what to do with my career, I’ve decided to help my friend Greg set up a website for a project at the science museum he works for. It a paying gig, so it will be my first paycheck in nearly two years. Pretty exciting stuff. For more details on what I’m doing for that project, check out my latest Geek Valhalla blog.

I’m still working on Review Summaries, but it has not progressed much recently. Hopefully Ron and I will get that back in gear soon.

I’ve been having trouble getting back in to my gym routine in 2007. I only went twice last week (and didn’t do cardio either time), then I skipped Monday this week. I did manage to make it to the gym today and even did cardio. I did my Monday routine today in hopes that I will catch up by going again tomorrow. I usually go Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday. I did at least play basketball on Saturday.

As much as I don’t like making posts without pictures, I guess I’ll have to get used to it. I don’t seem to get out to take them much any more…

Well, I haven’t started working on any of the Linux projects I blogged about last time. Right now I’m trying to help my friend Greg set up a web site for the science museum he works for. I haven’t really designed a full web site before, so it’s a bit of a learning experience. The main requirements are:

• Easy to maintain
• Provide a discussion forum
• Allow registered users to blog

I’ve looked into a few different Content Management Systems. I found a few really helpful sites for this process:

• CMS Matrix - which provides comparisons of various CMS solution in (you guessed it) a matrix
• Blog Software Breakdown - another comparison matrix, but more blog software oriented
• Wikipedia - what can’t you find here?
• Open Source CMS - these guys let you demo all sorts of CMS software

At the moment I’m leaning towards Joomla. It’s PHP based and runs on top of MySQL and Apache. I have installed it under Kubuntu on my laptop. It has a lot of plugin modules for blogs, forums and such. Maybe I’ll install it to manage my main bluevalhalla.com webpage. I know it has a bridge to Gallery2, my photo gallery (which is also PHP based), but I’m not sure what I’ll do about blogging since I use Blogger at the moment.

I tried to install Drupal, but for some reason the automated installation through Kubuntu failed. I didn’t bother tracking down the problem, I like the Joomla administration interface better. I guess we’ll see how it goes…