One of the first tasks when I got my new MacBook (13" Aluminum, non-Pro, OS X 10.5.7 Leopard, 4 Gb RAM), was to set up a local server so I can do some local web development and testing with Drupal. Now this is a little tricky on the Mac since it comes pre-installed with Apache and PHP (I couldn't find any MYSQL on the machine), although much of it is only accessible by using the Terminal window. My first thought was to just use that and add the MySQL into the mix. It was weird but everything I read online about this recommended not using what was on the machine, but compiling it yourself. So next I thought I would download them all separately and configure them to my liking. After thinking about this and then running it past my own everything web/database consultant (thanks Roger), I decided to just download MAMP. Since I had done this on my home machine before (iMac, late 2006, OS X 10.4.11 Tiger) I figured it would be easy. Well it was to install but I did run into a few glitches along the way.

I had a WAMP stack on my old Dell that I was working with (thank you easyWAMP) and I needed to get my Drupal sites over to the Mac. In the end it worked out, I just needed to figure out how to change the configuration settings for everything properly.

First, I went to the MAMP website and downloaded the latest for OS X. This puts the package in your applications folder. At first I thought this was kind of a weird spot for it, but it really helps keep it separated from the other web server files already on the machine.

To get phpMyAadmin working, I moved it out of the default location and dropped it into MAMP >> htdocs. This made it accessible by going to /yourlocalsite/phpMyAdmin. I could then set up the database that I was going to import into. I copied over the Drupal directory files from the Dell and also put them into htdocs. In Drupal, adjusted the sites/default/settings.php file to include the new database name and password. I changed the address to localhost:8889. This was an important step to get things working right. You can change this port number if you like in the MAMP preferences by launching the application from Finder.

At this point I thought that everything should be working. I was wrong. First, I followed the directions that I found here http://drupal.org/node/66187 to help set up the user on MAMP. I'm not sure if this is necessary since I made a couple of changes at once but I think it was. I got things working on a fresh install of Drupal, but it wouldn't work for my existing site, all I got was the white screen of death. I checked the logs for php at MAMP >> logs >> php_error.log and noticed I was running out of memory. I was skeptical, but I upped the memory limit to 32M in MAMP >> conf >> php5 >> php.ini. I stopped the servers and restarted and viola! it worked. This is a nice thing about MAMP, it puts all the config and log files together for you.

The other main hitch I ran into was not emptying the caches on the databases before I exported them from the Dell and importing them into the Mac. Make sure you do this by going into phpMyAdmin. Good luck in all your web pursuits!

For Ruby's second birthday we took her to the Oregon coast. We love only being about an hour from such a beautiful and inspiring place. It is nothing like the beaches where I grew up in Florida. We have to wear jackets all year round! Crazy. And this is why I don't call it going to the beach and say the coast instead. The videos are over on Vimeo but I'll embed them here for your viewing pleasure.

Ruby on the beach for 2nd birthday from John McQueen on Vimeo.

This one is more about where we stayed

Ruby's teaparty from John McQueen on Vimeo.

Ruby dancing with the Byrd from John McQueen on Vimeo.

According to the USDA agriculture census, the average age of farmers in 2007 was 57. So I wondered, is the average age of farmers getting older every year, or does it roughly stay the same every year as some farmers retire and younger ones come into the business/lifestyle? As it turns out, the average age of farmers is getting older in each census.

According to my quick calculations based on trying to get numbers off of a bar graph and then simplifying them even more, it will take 32 more years before the average age of farmers reach 65. This would occur in 2041, when I am 65 myself. Interesting. Usually when I see that the average age of farmers is 57, I'm thinking, well in just a few years most of the farmers will be retiring and there will be this huge shift in farm ownership. While I still think much of that is true I would need to know what percentage of farmers is actually around 60 right now, not what the average age is. What seems to be more important than the average age is which generation does this average age represent and how does that generation differ from the previous one. This is similar in respect to law makers and the like. I'm sure their average age doesn't change much but the generation they come from does, like Obama vs. McCain.

How will the next generation of farmers be different than the current generation? Some ideas are that they will be more comfortable with using electronic means of communication for peer-to-peer and person-to-consultant (whether government or private) interaction. The majority of farms are quite small and list off-farm income as their primary income source. As more businesses adopt online networking as a part of the daily activities, this will undoubtedly have a spillover effect into farm life. This quiet revolution is already taking place as one can see with the boom of farm blogs, farmer social networking websites, and the increase in use of technology by public sponsored information sources like the Extension Service. In the current economic atmosphere, face-to-face interaction, for better or worse, is going to occur less frequently and the ability to learn in a virtual environment is going to be a necessity to access information that can benefit a farm financially and/or ecologically.

As you can tell, I haven't been blogging much recently. I've been absorded into my latest after hours project. Ooo, that's sounds naughty, but really it is pretty tame. I've been building a website for one of Megan's endeavors, the Meet Your Maker Craft Show that is held monthly in Eugene, Oregon. 

Up until now, they've been using a wordpress.com account. It was time to move them into something a bit more flexible. I built up the site in Drupal 6 and the process has been pretty smooth so far (hope I'm not jinxing myself here.) It's been giving me lots of practice with CSS, icon/logo making ala Inkscape and GIMP, and of course, managing Drupal on the backend. It has been a fun process and I've learned alot. Thanks to Megan and Amy for giving me this opportunity. And thanks to Roger for working with me as well. 

So we made the trip across this great big continent of ours the other week. Man, that thing is huge! It is so humbling to see the land from the sky and realize how vast the USA is. It is also very sobering to see the incredible sprawl that has taken place around urban centers. My god, it seems to go on forever. It is especially apparent at night when there are clear flying conditions and you can see the little twinkle of the city lights from way up high. It is also amazing how big the deserts are. That has always astonished me.

Our time spent in FL was one full of family and the hustle of life there. Ironically, as we were enjoying our family visit, a friend of ours from Oregon was close by, spending what must have been the most difficult of family times. Our hearts go out to you Lane.

On Easter Sunday, Ruby had almost her entire family (minus one Uncle) in one place. From her aunts, cousins, grandparents, and her great-grandpa Hubert (now a great-great grandpa at 92). I was really glad that everyone could be there to see us and Ruby. It wasn't that difficult since everyone lives really close by. That is, everyone but us. Yes, it was hard not to face our decision to move 3,000 miles away when almost your entire family lives in the same town. It seems like we have to justify it to family, strangers, even ourselves quite often. Our response is usually the same: it is hard, but it is the right decision for us at this time. Will we always live this far from our families? I don't know. But for now, it is what we have decided to do. I hope everyone can understand and not judge us for it.

Megan and I traveled to Oregon on our honeymoon, before we ever thought that we would live here. We instantly fell in love with it. It has everything that we have always wanted in a place to live. And when you come from a place that you have never really connected with, it feels amazing. That feeling, combined with the pace of life that we want to raise our daughter in, and the economics to allow Megan to stay home with Ruby and for us to buy a house, all on a sufficient but small salary, has made Oregon the best place for us to be, for now.

But at the expense of leaving our family and friends behind? This is something that we constantly struggle with. Sometimes life leads you to a distant shore to make a new life. Fortunately, in our modern times (which may or may not be coming to a close) we have the ability to fly 3,000 in one day to see our friends and family. Ruby was so amazing during the flights. Whenever it comes up she still says, "airport...more." Maybe its just that she knows where the planes take us.

Recently I used Inkscape (v. 0.46) to create an image for the Meet Your Maker logo contest. Inkscape is the open source vector graphics editor, similar to Illustrator. It uses the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format. I'll just preface this post with the fact that I am not a designer, have never taken design classes, and I don't do it very often. I just wanted to highlight some awesome free software that you can use to make some cool things with.

Here's the final results:

The first thing to consider when creating a new image with Inkscape is the size. I choose 3.5" x 3.5". I figured this would be a nice sticker size and would be able to be rendered on a web site just fine. To do this go to File > Document Properties. Here you can set the size by all types of measurements like inches, cm, mm, and pixel.

The main text and spool drawing is pretty straightforward. The trickiest part was creating the string and then applying the text to the path of the string. Well, I won't say it was necessarily tricky since Inkscape did it all for me.

I used the Draw Bezier and straight lines tool to make the string. I chose to just draw straight lines and then turn them into curves. You could use the tool to make the curves as you go, and after playing with it some more that is what I would do the next time around. Either way I think it would have taken me the same amount of time. After making the line select it with the Edit paths by nodes tool and a new toolbar will show up allowing you to turn a path into a curve. Just select the two nodes where in between them you want the straight line to become a curve. Some handles will appear allowing you to do some nice line bending.

Once you have your line, add the text to the drawing somewhere. This is the text that you will apply to the curve. Select both the text and the curve at the same time. You can do this on a Windows machine by holding shift while clicking (might be same for Mac). Then choose Text > Put on path. Easy peasy.

Once I was satisfied with the image I exported it as a bitmap. If you don't add a background color the image will be transparent. This is great for making a website logo, but if you view the image (a .png) with IE 6 it will have a gray background. This is due to the fact that IE is crazy and doesn't support the transparency of the image. It is not a problem in other modern browsers though. I exported the image with 300 dpi so it will have good quality for printing. I have read that you can go as low as 72 dpi for web work.

Good luck with your Inkscape work!

I was lucky enough to have 3 days off at the end of last week. Well, actually, these were making up for days that I worked extra in Jan and Feb. Things have been pretty busy for me the last couple of months. All of it culminated in submitting the CSREES OREI grant proposal that will hopefully get funded and keep the eOrganic project going, keep me employed, and give jobs to about 15 other folks as well. As you can imagine, getting the grant submitted was a somewhat stressful endeavor, especially when it came down to within a couple of hours of the deadline and I was the one overseeing the submission. This was last Monday. I thought I was going to pass out at one point. But everything got done, all the i's dotted and t's crossed and it was successfully submitted. Now we wait. I'm not sure when I'll find out if we get the award, but probably some time in June. Once that is announced then i will know whether or not I need to start looking for work. I should still have 50% of my job covered as eOrganic is only 50% of my time right now, but filling that half time could be tough. And I don't need to tell you what the economic situation is right now. Fingers are crossed.

The time off was nice. We had 3 days of really great weather to go along with it. I worked out in the yard pulling weeds and mulching and getting the compost ready to start accepting our kitchen food waste again. I also got the Christmas lights down, better late than not at all. Oh, and the taxes are done. Yay! We started with TurboTax online, but ended up doing it ourselves and getting quite a bit more money back than we would've if we finished with the TurboTax.

I really enjoyed getting to spend so much time with Ruby. As a working parent it amazes me how little time I get to spend with her since I'm out of the home all day. We went to the new Albany library (really nice), went on bike rides, and just played all the time. Here she is with her typewriter.

I made this bread last night. It is Continental Coffee Bread from the King Arthur Flour Whole Grain Baking Cookbook. I'm not going to post the recipe, but if you want it I might be able to give you my version of it (wink). This is my new favorite bread. Not great for hummus sandwiches mind you, but is perfect for a gift, or to eat during the holidays. It is loaded with nuts, raisins, and dates.

 Here's Ruby showing off in the kitchen

Dancing little yogi from John McQueen on Vimeo.

I am really fortunate that I get to ride the bus. It picks me up only a couple of blocks from my house and drops me just on the edge of campus. Sure it adds about 30 minutes to my commute each way, but it is free. Once I moved out of the town where I work, so we could afford to buy a house, we also decided to go down to one car thanks to this bus.

There is one problem: I get car sick pretty easily. This makes met jealous of all of the other riders who get to read as we ride. I have pushed through this wall, that if I get the right seat, I am able to work on the computer some. Mostly, I sit and listen to different podcasts. Which is fine by me. I love listening to podcasts. Currently my favorites are: This American Life, Radio Lab, Sound Opinions, Living on Earth, Lullabot, and as of late Planet Money and Fresh Air. Seems like a lot when I type it out but I do listen to most of these every week. Not all of them have new programs each week so I'm not listening to all of them each week. My iPod mini (not so mini any more) is hanging in there. It doesn't keep a charge like it used to, but its B&W screen makes me feel old school, if having an iPod is old school in any way.

The bus riders are usually quiet, but there are some who have been riding it for 10+ years and they all seem to know each other and things can get rather chatty. It is always so obvious when an non-regular rider gets on the bus. They kind of look around, not sure where to go, and usually end up in the front.

The air inside the bus can get pretty stinky. I read about this one study of the air quality on airplanes where the researchers found that the amount of off gassing by the seats was enough to make people sick. Hmmm, I do usually end up with a headache by the end of the ride. Connection? But I think the poor air inside the bus is more likely coming from exhaust fumes. Yuck!

photo from flickr by conner395