Added videos to the front page and did a bunch of other tweaks, but mainly "behind the scenes".

I just finished scanning a bunch more artwork, I'll be uploading it soon...

This blog post is a bit unusual for me, I've decided to take the opportunity of Ada Lovelace Day (http://findingada.com) to blog about a new hero I've found, Emma Jane Hogbin (http://www.emmajane.net).

A little less than a year ago, I acquired a copy of Front End Drupal (thank you Adrianne), I found it to be an awesome book that was a great stepping stone to bring my Drupal development skills to the next level. It's very easy to read and has an awesome sense of humor.

Then, a few weeks ago, an interview popped up on the Ubuntu Fridge: http://fridge.ubuntu.com/node/1993,
it was an interview with Emma, and wow, what an eye opener! Not only was she an advocate for Open Source (to the point of releasing her knitting design under the GPL: http://www.emmajane.net/craft/drupal), she was also passionate about helping develop technology based businesses in rural areas: http://www.100mileclientroster.com.

Her own business is not too far from me either, just down the road in Owen Sound, check it out: http://www.hicktech.com

So it's pretty easy to see why she's become a hero for me- Open Source and rural, 2 passions close to my heart- and, just like Ada Lovelace, is a woman who is blazing new trails in technology!

Yes, come on lets play :-)

Well, never one to stop once I get started, I've been continuing with the tweaking here- Dark Cheese now hasa popup player, the other albums will follow- takes a while to set up when there are 23 tracks per album- yikes! Also, I'm going to register my albums with various online databases and such- yeah, fun, we-ha! Online releasing joy, but once I get a workflow, I'll start helping other audio artists to do the same.

One of the tasks I accomplished was setting up Google Analytics so I can see a lot more detail about who's looking at the site here- shout out to whoever it is in Outremont (or at least their ISP is there) that's been enjoying my output :-)

And hey folks- remember to leave some comments, I love feedback and the comments seem to be working for sure now...

Of course, this major push here has got me figuring out a ton of stuff, so I've got a whole new layer of skills to offer my clients!

Until next time, stay in the groove!

All right, what busy month it's been! Just managed to get the "backend" of this site updated, my client sites tend to get priority. From your side, you won't notice much difference, but it lets me do more, so you might see some new things happen here soon :-)

Today we managed to sort out the domain issues for the PAU site, so it's now available through both http://www.pauart.com and http://www.pauart.ca.

Over the last few days I've also reinstalled my operating system on my laptop- last month I did something very foolish, after walking home with my laptop in -30 C weather, I started it without letting it warm up and immediately the hardrive started acting a little funny, leading up to the S.M.A.R.T. system informing that a hard drive failure was imminent and that I should backup all my data :-/ I immediately picked up a nifty SATA/IDE to USB connector to do just that- a very useful purchase that has also enabled me to access a couple old hard drives I didn't think I would ever access again! And over time my hard drive started acting worse and worse locking up on a more and more regular basis, now I have a new one, on which I have just rebuilt my sysytem.

The install of Kubuntu 7.10 went totally smoothly- about 30 minutes from starting the boot to the live cd to having a functional system, including installing the restricted formats/drivers- after the cd finished it's thing and I shutdown, I made sure to plug in my ethernet cable because the wireless card in my laptop has a Broadcom chipset, so the proprietary firmware needs to be downloaded and installed before it will work. It was a breeze to set up though, once I had restarted, the restricted driver manager popped up automatically and asked if wanted it to enable the necessary repositories to download and install the drivers (as side note, the software update manager also popped up at the same time, but I canceled it until after I had the restricted drivers installed), this also included the ATI drivers for my graphics adapter- I just had to say yes and off it went, when I restarted the computer, everything was working :-)

Since then though, I've been doing all the tweaking and installing to make it just the way I want it- I do a lot with my machine and I'm very picky about how it all fits together :-D

Last week I was the projectionist at the library for the local Traveling World Community Film Festival, crazy fun time with a lot of movies... One of my favorites was Red Without Blue, but there where plenty more that touched, stirred and informed!

I'm also excitedly preparing for a performance i n the upcoming Emergency #16: Festival of New Dance and Performance in April, my proposal for a solo perfomance was accepted last month :-) The festival is sponsored by the Peterborough New Dance. I'm looking forward to finally premiering being in front of an audience- pretty much anyone who knows me knows that I like to dance, so I'm finally stepping up :-)

Anyhoo, that's a lot of typing, so I'll leave it there for now, maybe it will be soonernext time so I won't have to type so much...

The comments should work now -fingers crossed- so leave one...