I just purchased this Betamax of Return of the Jedi.

Browsing through a used bookstore, this diamond in the rough caught my eye and I couldn’t resist.  I’ll miss the $.50, but I think it will be well worth it in the end.

“With old favorites like Chewbacca, Yoda, R2-D2, C-3PO and Lando Calrissian, plus the furry, friendly, fierce Ewoks and the most ingenious spectacular effects yet, RETURN OF THE JEDI, is the greatest “STAR WARS” adventure of them all.

I Can’t wait until Betamax makes its comeback so I can find out what the hype is all about.

I haven’t taken it out yet because my paddle hasn’t arrived from Walmart.com yet, and because (until yesterday) I had no way to get it to the beach.  I figured I could build my own Kayak cart (damned things are expensive to buy), so I went to a thrift store to see what I might be able to find there with wheels on it…lo and behold, a walker for only $5!

I didn’t know exactly how at the time, but I figured I could make a kayak cart out of it…so here’s what I did.

Parts:

1. Walker ($5).  This is the tough one and obviously the one that makes this tutorial pretty useless, unless you happen to have one of these sitting around.
2. 6′ Luggage Straps, pack of 4 ($7 at home depot)
3. Miscellaneous Zip Ties and a couple of 2.5″ bolts ($1)
4. x4 Pipe Clamps (not sure if that’s what they’re called, you’ll see in a minute) $6

Step 1: Saw the back two legs off of the walker

Step 2: Using the pipe clamps, fasten the wheels back onto the walker as shown here:

Step 3: Once you’re satisfied that the wheels are on correctly and as straight as you can get them, drill a hole and run a bolt through the two poles so it stays in place

At this point I used some zip ties to clean up the pipe clamp part

Then I used some more zip ties to attach the straps to the frame

And voila, we have an easy  $12 kayak cart!

I spotted this Pet Boarding sign in Oceanside and I couldn’t resist.  On a side note, this is the first thing I’ve ever made with Gimp…and man is it awkward to use software that is both so familiar and so foreign at the same time.

If you’re using Zen Theme for Drupal 5 or 6 and your page is loading incorrectly in Internet Explorer IE6 or IE7 (namely, your page is loading without css), consider that Internet Explorer can load a maximum or 31 .css files.  Boy that is interesting…wish I’d known it before.  Zen theme without any modules gets pretty close to this out of the box.  This is a very easy fix in a drupal install, just turn on css aggregation in /admin/setttings/performance.

I learned this after completely validating my css, ripping the guts out of my .tpl.php and template.php files, eating a sandwich and disabling 6 or 7 modules.

I am a Drupal developer almost full-time now, and on my development server I have two subdirectories in the public_html folder:  /drupal5 and /drupal6.

Try as I might, I have never been able to get the combination of $base_url in the settings.php file and the RewriteBase directive in the .htaccess file to correctly display sites in either of these subdirectories.  In the best-case scenario, the sites would show up almost correctly, but any linked files or embedded images would not contain the correct path (ie /files/images/x.jpg instead of /drupal6/files/images/x.jpg).

My workaround?  A little bit of htaccess voodoo.  Essentially I modified an existing htaccess script  that allows you to run drupal in a subdirectory–all I did was add some conditions that let the server know whether to route the traffic to the d6 directory or the d5 directory.

The fix is a three step process:

1) Name all of the sites in your development server differently depending upon whether they are on the drupal6 or drupal5 platform.  All of the sites in my /drupal5/sites folder are named “locald5.site.com“, and all of the sites in my /drupal6/sites folder are named “locald6.site.com“.

2) Modify your Hosts file to reflect any site you add to your server.  You’ve probably already done this, but if you haven’t here is a tutorial on modifying your hosts file in Mac OS X, and here is a tutorial on modifying your hosts file in Windows.  For my fix, every additional entry in my hosts file looks like 127.0.0.1  locald[6 or 5].site.com

3) Insert the following into the .htaccess file in the ROOT of your webserver:


Options -Indexes
RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^locald6.*
RewriteRule ^$ drupal6/index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/drupal6%{REQUEST_URI} -f
RewriteRule .* drupal6/$0 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*wiki.*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^locald6.*
RewriteRule .* drupal6/index.php?q=$0 [QSA]

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^locald5.*
RewriteRule ^$ drupal5/index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/drupal5%{REQUEST_URI} -f
RewriteRule .* drupal5/$0 [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !.*wiki.*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^locald6.*
RewriteRule .* drupal5/index.php?q=$0 [QSA]

Do this and your server should correctly route all of your drupal5 and drupal6 development sites!  Good luck.