New Home

| Thursday, February 19, 2009
We are buying a new home! Our first one! Most of you already know this, but I haven't written this until now because I was waiting for the loan to go through. We do all the official closing stuff on Wednesday the 25th so hopefully all will go well that way. The home is in North Salt Lake. Here are some pictures (I know they are small, but that is what I have for now. More will come later).







We are both super excited (obviously). I do have to give a big thanks to Tyler. He recommended Margaret Malherbe to us as a realtor, and we could not be more happy. She was absolutely awesome and she made sure we understood all of the contracts and what we were getting into. Her number one motto is honesty in real estate. She wasn't worried at all about making a sale (which in this economy is pretty impressive). She only worried about the fact that we were getting a great home. It was lots of fun with her and I will gladly recommend her to anyone (I recommended BJ to her already) - especially first time homebuyers because she takes you through everything that is going on.

Oh yeah, the home is brand new (no one has ever lived there). We love the idea that we will be the first time people living in the home. There is pool and work out facility just across the street that is part of the club house. We made the offer at the beginning of February so to be in the home by the end of the month has meant a lot of stress, but it looks like everything will work out. More to come later!!!

Specs: 3 bed, 2.5 bath, 1700 sq. ft., 2 car garage


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Who's your hero?

| Sunday, February 15, 2009
One of my friends, Brad, found the hero website, where you can make your own hero. Here's me (yes the balding nice guy). Make your own hero here and post a link after uploading it.

Awesome Service

| Friday, February 13, 2009
I came across a hilarious service the other day. It's called "Let Me Google That For You" and it is just that. So the next time you are on a forum or anywhere, and someone asks one of those questions that they could easily have found out by a quick search, let them know by searching Google for them!

Mission Photos

| Saturday, February 7, 2009
I recently found a couple of disks from my mission. On there, I found a ton of pictures. Most of them were taken by other people because I didn't have a digital camera on my mission. All the same, I went ahead and uploaded them all online at Photobucket (one of the only places where I could create embedded albums). Check them out here: http://s705.photobucket.com/albums/ww51/j_ten_man/Mission/. Just as a note, the albums listing is on the left hand side of the page in a "block".

Photobucket

Drupal Install

| Monday, February 2, 2009
Recently I was at my parent's house and my Dad asked me about setting up Drupal. He had read my Nimfahtography post and was wondering what it took. Since I use Drupal almost everyday, I suppose I take this for granted. Here is the easiest way that I have found in setting up Drupal on Windows XP. This setup will be similar on other systems as well.

1) Setup a LAMP server (Apache, PHP, MySQL). The easiest way to do this is to grab a pre-bundled version of all of these using WAMP. Run through the install and the standard setup should be fine.

2) Create a MySQL DB. Once you have WAMP up and running, you can create a new database by visiting http://localhost/phpmyadmin. Your best option is to probably create a new user.

This will aid your setup when installing Drupal. Remember the username and password.

I usually like the above options when creating a new user in MySQL.

3) Download the lastest version of Drupal. Unzip it and put it in your root directory (if you used the WAMP defaults, then this should be C:\wamp\www) under a directory called "drupal". Just to make this clear, once you have the files there, you should see index.php inside the "drupal" directory. There will also be several other files.

4) If everything was done correctly, you should now be able to visit http://localhost/drupal/install.php to install Drupal. You will need the username and password for the MySQL db that you setup above.

5) That should be all you need. You should have a basic Drupal Install with all of the defaults.

6) From there, I would recommend a few modules. Admin Menu, SMTP, CCK, and Views. Make sure to put these modules under the following "drupal\sites\all\modules\contrib". Likely all these directories don't exist, but be sure to create them. You can install the modules at http://localhost/drupal/admin/build/modules.

7) Play around from there. I will post more later. If you have any questions, feel free to leave them here and I will try to answer them. You can also search Google for your questions.