Matt Henderson's Blog

Today we (my buddy Arto and I. Ok, Arto with me looking over his shoulder) made some major under-the-hood changes to this blog, namely, migrating from the Wordpress blogging system, to Drupal. In particular, Drupal version 6.

Why the change?

• Capability. Drupal is an amazingly capable platform. For example, I’d like to have a content type on this blog called “route”. For articles of that type, I want to include some common data elements, such as a GPS track file, that can be displayed on a Google map, and downloaded by others interested in following my route. In Drupal, I can do this by creating a new content type (node type in geek-speak).

  So in this respect, Drupal is quite a future-proof system (relative to the others), in terms of having the infrastructure to do things in the future, that you didn’t foresee today. (Not to mention some cool technologies coming the Drupal way…)

• Eating my own dog food. My company has been working for the past year or so developing (in collaboration with the US government) an advanced communications and collaboration platform, based on the Drupal platform. All of our work on that project gets released back into the Drupal community as open-source, and so I’ll be directly benefiting from our own work.

• Available support. As a consequence of the above, I’m surrounded by people every day that can resolve nearly any weblog issue I might have. :-)

There may be some initial bumps (I think anyone subscribed to my blog will see the first ten posts marked as unread when they refresh the feed), the migration appears to have gone very smoothly.

I’ve been a happy owner of a hacked “Jailbroken” iPhone for a long time. My iPhone has been running perfectly well for me on version 1.1.1 for, well, since I bought it several months ago.

I also work with young people who live (and sometimes cut themselves) on the very bleeding and dripping edge of technology. One such “yoot” (taking a line from My Cousin Vinnie) told me the other day:

“Matt, I can upgrade you to 1.1.3 in about 30 seconds. It’s smooth, and easy, and risk free.”

So I caved. A day and a half later, my iPhone was running 1.1.3, and in my case, this carried both benefits and drawbacks.

Benefit: I can now manually reorganize the icons on the screen. If I don’t like the SMS icon at the top, I now have the power to do something about it. I can drag it to the bottom.

Drawback: The telephone ringing sound no longer works, so I now miss all calls. (Same with the alarm sound; so I now get up late and miss appointments.) According to the Apple Support website, “This is an issue with Jailbroken iPhones running 1.1.3.”

And, of course, there’s no way to go back. So, I now spend my days re-organizing icons, staring at the screen and waiting for phone calls to come in.

As my buddy Niall said, “Who needs a phone to do something as old fashioned as RING for goodness sake. I mean, you can drag your icons round.” Lucky me.

Man, I’ve been on some kind of good luck streak lately! First the brown belt a few weeks ago, and now, this past weekend, I competed and won the gold medal in the Brown Belt, Senior 1 division of the European Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Championships. Woo-Hoo!

In the picture below, the guy on the right is my coach, Edson Jorge, who I believe is the best BJJ coach on the planet, in addition to being a world class competitor in BJJ and MMA. On the left is some dude we met who’s interested in signing up for some BJJ lessons with us in Marbella. ;-)

Just kidding, folks! As any self-respecting BJJ aficionado will quickly note, that man on the left happens to be none other than the very best BJJ and grappling practitioner walking on the planet today — current world champion, Roger “The Man” Gracie!

To celebrate the new BJJ brown belt, as well as a couple other things, (and in part due to the breakdown of our 10-year-old Honda), I decided it was about time to splurge on a lifelong dream I’ve had to own a Jeep Wrangler, in particular the new Jeep Wrangler 4-Door Unlimited.

Given that I normally get around town on a Honda Scooter, we realized that our usage of the car was about 99% off-road, on our weekend outings to the mountains. The need Jeep’s going to allow us to get to some of the places we couldn’t before, and it’s gonna be a heck of a lot fun!

We took it for its first spin today, going up and down the muddy dirt roads around Jubrique. Man this thing can get around! I’m wondering how long it’ll be before I’m comfortable enough to try some of the stuff you see on YouTube!

December 14, 2007 was a really big day for me, as I was awarded the brown belt by my brazilian jiu-jitsu teacher, Edson Jorge (of Gracie-Barra). There’s only five belts in BJJ — white, blue, purple, brown and black — so I’m only one step away from the BIG ONE. By no means do I feel like a brown belt (especially since I seem to sometimes still forget some of the very basics), so it’s going to take some getting used to I guess! In theory the brown belt represents the bridge between purple and black, where the student needs to focus on leading and teaching, so those’ll be my objectives this coming year.

On the same day I got mine, my long-time training buddy Mike Rios also got his brown belt. So all in all, it was a very special day!

Growing up in the US, I remember how annoying it was to receive commercial sales calls on the telephone late in the evening, when the family was sitting around trying to enjoy some quality time together. This problem was later solved (mostly) through the introduction of the “Do Not Call,” registry — a legislated service which marketers must consult before they can call you. If your name is on the “Do Not Call” list, it’s illegal for them to call you.

A similar problem exists today with paper catalogs. American consumers are simply inundated with unsolicited, undesired paper catalogs from a multitude of merchants. While receiving these catalogs can be just as annoying as receiving the marketing phone calls, there’s a deeper, more concerning problem. The production of the 19 billion paper catalogs sent each year in the US takes a huge toll on the environment.

19 BILLION. We throw around terms daily like million, billion, trillion, without really having a feel for the magnitude of those numbers. Consider this, it takes 11 days for a million seconds to pass. It takes 32 years for a billion seconds to pass! So, 19 billion catalogs — that’s a lot of wasted paper!

Earlier this year, my company MakaluMedia was offered an opportunity to participate in a project backed by some of the US’ largest environmental and non-profit organizations to help address this project. Today represents the culmination of several months of hard work on this project, and I’m proud to announce the launch of Catalog Choice:

http://catalogchoice.org

Catalog Choice is a free service, that allows people to find and opt-out of the undesired catalogs they receive. The concept is very simple; you sign up, search for a catalog you receive, and opt-out. We take care the rest, and in about six weeks’ time, you should no longer receive the catalog.

I’ve written more about the project over at our company blog.

We tend to spend a lot of weekends river-walking in the local mountains.

Last night I was out on a bike ride, from Monda to Tolox. About 8:30 PM, I was on my way back, and had just turned the corner at junction to Guaro. My eye caught what looked like a mouse on the side of the road. As I approach, I saw it was a little abandoned kitten.

I hopped off the bike, but it ran off the road, and into a pile of large rocks.

The United States offers a lot of conveniences and advancements with respect to (certain parts of) Europe, but I find the level of automation and corporate cost reduction a bit disturbing. Most calls to American customer support lines recently are a bit too consistent with my call yesterday to Earthlink:

Earthlink: Hello, can I have your name.

Me: Matt Henderson

EL: Thanks, Matt, how can we help today? We’re here to help.

Me: I live outside the US, and would like to arrange internet and TV service for a house in Georgia that I’ll be visiting this summer.

On March 26, 2007, I ordered a pair of Oakley Half Jacket sunglasses from the UK-based Chain Reaction Cycles, who claim to be “Europe’s Largest Online Bike Shop.” At almost $180, this purchase represented the most I’ve ever invested in sunglasses, but I’d always understood that Oakley made top-quality sports sunglasses, and, hey, if they’re good enough for Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France, they should be good enough for my jaunts around the hills of Marbella.

A bit less than three weeks later, having heard nothing, I