Today, NoLessDays.org is four weeks old -- just an infant. To date, we have 19 users and 83 contributions. This may not seem like much, but consider: more users means more content, more content means more attraction, more attraction means more users... It is a snowball affect that we can expect to see because our community is growing exponentially.

Initial growth rates may be greater than long term growth rates, so let's assume a linear increase in our user base; eventually, even a slow exponential growth will reach the linear projection. So where will we be at the end of one year? The numbers say we'll have 247 users and 6474 posts!

At your social meeting last week, the saying, "No pain, no gian" was repeated frequently. The troubling thing to me was that I wasn't suffering any pain -- thus there must be no gain in my life. Friends, I am pleased to announc that this has changed! It seems that frustration, disatisfaction, and perhaps even anger have been brewing among colleagues. I didn't notice it because I was too busy working to keep them happy. What a way to shoot myself in the foot.

Yesterday my boss kindly shared with me some of the frustration that he has been hearing about -- it seems that most people here are unfamiliar with the concept of addressing persons they have problems with directly. I decided to take some action to try and remedy my decline in popularity, but now I'm thinking it may all be too late.

My mind is busy.  Things have been crazy at work.  Been working on a project to provide Internet access to VMRC residents via cable (i.e. cable TV).  The deadline for service is the end of the month and today was the first day I actually got a computer to browse the Internet via the cable system...  a lot left to do there.

Last Sunday we had some folks over -- the Ivins -- to record some music in the studio.  It was fairly simple, mostly vocals and guitar.  They wanted to record twelve songs; we recorded only six songs.  Still, impressive progress.

This morning I spent several hours editing, mixing, and "mastering" one of the six songs.  It was probably the most complex of all the songs; it has a harmonica track.  The Ivins would like the songs on a demo CD by next Wednesday.  I don't know how that is going to happen...  The music is all very similar so if I can get back over to the studio, perhaps I can finish the rest fairly quickly.

Technology bore a promise of perfection; the culmination of man's ingenuity.  It was the one thing that we could thoroughly understand and perform; the one thing we could build machines to do for us, perfectly and fast. It was math with 1s and 0s. After all there are fundamentally only three things that can be done with 1s and 0s: NOT, AND, and OR them – but that's not the point here.

The point is the dream. If I can make a machine that can do a thousand of those operations per second I can set it to solving problems that I could never solve; If I know how to solve the problem, the machine is able.

I've really been excited to get more people on NLD.org... but it's been a challenge. There are several of us working to create more content so it'll be a more interesting place. If we can get more people on and fire up some good discussion we'll be in good stead.

Better yet, we need to get media on here. I talked to Stephanie this evening and encouraged her to sign up. She did. I showed here the song Press On but she's heared it from garbonzo.info and wasn't too excited. What she'd be excited about, she said, would be more songs. I guess that makes sense -- gotta get more of what we've got on here; and a good way to organize it will help a great deal.

I have an opportunity to implement Drupal> at work. This will be mutually beneficial as what I learn working on one will help me when working on the other. Perhaps the most amazing thing I have discovered about Drupal so far is how fantastically simple it is. It is 

• well organized
• well documented
• thuroughly abstract
• very usable

and I am sure there are many other positives that I will be discovering.

Today I worked my way through a tutorial to create a basic block -- a block is one of those things on the right or left of the screen that has something handy in it. I was amazed at how logical and straight forward it was. Perhaps this is because of my last CMS experience. That experience was with Mambo and I was very new to web developement. I dont' have a great deal of experience yet, but Drupal is making me feel like I do. I hope it really is as easy as it seems when I get to actually creating the code to handle music and other forms of artistic expression that will form the outer core of what NLD is all about.

Spent a fair bit of time fixing up the site today. Joe gav e me some pointers that got me fiddling with podcasting. It was exciting to discover that the way I submited the Press On song was adequate for a podcasting RSS feed. I tested it out with Juice -- a podcast receiver. This is the first time I've ever tried such a thing.

I also looked at some extension modules for Drupal. We may be closer to having a site that does what we want than I thought. There are a number of modules available for handling various media content as well as audio content. I'll be experimenting with that.

It wil take some time to find the best way to allow for posting media content. For the time being, media can be attached to other content, i.e. blog entries or stories. This story has a song attached as an example of how this might work.

The name of the song is Press On. It was written by Adam Williams and was recorded at Paulington Studio.

I was inspired by http://www.ardour.org's new website powered by Drupal. I have been planning the NoLessDays.org website for quite some time; work has progressed slowly. Before finding Drupal, I was planning on writing the whole engine myself -- I had already designed the database schema. But Drupal looks very promising. It appears to be very carefully designed, and the desing structure lends itself well to the goals of the NLD site.

I'm excited to learn more about how Drupal works, and to find tune it for NLD. But in the meantime, it is exciting that a web presence that provides for c

Paulington Studio functional again with a repaired monitor system and computer upgrades. The main amplifier board in one of the monitors was replaced to clear up a nearly four month problem that rendered the monitoring system useless.