How do I get my gravatar.com URL

This is a really easy one, but since I had to crawl across the gravatar site to find out how to do it, here is a quick introduction to get the URL for your gravatar. No thrills and frills, but it does what most of us will need.

First, you need to create a gravatar account, if you don’t already have one. Gravatar is a site that aggregates avatar images for the different social networking sites (like Facebook, MySpace, etc.) and blogs (like Blogger). It works by storing an image of you (of your choice) and associating it with your email address.

2008-01-24 Whistler

What Caused the Mortgage Crisis?

It’s amazing to sit here, see the economy tumble down at the pace it’s going, and see the connection to the mortgage crisis. My friends and my family back in Europe ask about it, want to know how it happened, why it happened, and how to get out of it. I tell them that as soon as I am President… No, ok, I don’t tell them that.

At the same time, I listen to their explanations, read those of the pundits here, and particularly check the solutions proposed by people either around me or in Washington. And all of that leaves me baffled, mostly because the situation seems so much simpler than described to me. So, here it goes, Marco’s Theory of the Mortgage Crisis:

Moving right with Delancey Street Foundation

{moszoomimglink:delancey_restaurant}Well, usually a move would not warrant yet another blog post – I guess everybody goes through them, and many of us have gotten used to the whole process. I wanted to highlight, though, the movers I used this and the last time, and recommend them to everybody that cares about their stuff.

Preparing for the Move

First things first: anyone who moves has to take care of the process. Take a calendar and mark your desired move date, choose the movers and get a confirmed date. Try to get the first appointment in the day, since you don’t want to be waiting in case something goes wrong with the move before you, and let that be a priority over the date.

Moving

{moszoomimglink:44. house}Well, it was about time. After two years in the pretty house in Westwood Highlands, the fog and the obsessive-compulsive neighbor have finally done me in and I am moving again. This time I am going to be a denizen of an area that I’ve always loved but never actually lived in: SoMa.

For those of you who don’t know, SoMa is South of Market, a formerly industrial and now very lofty and trendy area of San Francisco. It’s close to everything, including coffee shops and the gym, which alone covers 90% of my time outside the house.

Write locally, deploy globally (or: synchronizing Joomla sites)

Once in a while, I am somewhere where even my Verizon USB dongle can’t help me get connected: in n airplane, in a remote location, in a nuclear bunker… In those cases, I would love to be able to work on my site, but how do I do that?

Enters Blogg-X, a nifty little Java app that allows you to edit content locally, and then synchronize it globally to a Joomla site. It even allows you to synchronize to multiple sites (or at least it allows you to write for multiple sites). See: that’s what open source is all about! Problem solved!

His Dark Materials (P. Pullman)

I had completely missed out on this series, and if it hadn’t been for the movie The Golden Compass and the resulting review in The Atlantic, I would have probably gone on with my life without ever getting to meet Mr. Pullman’s writing.

I read the trilogy in Hawai`i, on my last trip. As a matter of fact, I spent most of my daylight time reading the three volumes, and I sincerely regret not having made more of it. Sure, the books are a good read, but they are after all for a young audience, and it shows.

Back from Whistler

{moszoomimglink:sunny_for_a_change}Thanks to the virtually infinite generosity of my friends Paul and Justin, I got to hang out at their place in Whistler this year for the second time. What was different this time? Well, I knew the mountain already, and so had much more fun exploring. My crazy friend D. (who wouldn’t want to be named) was there, too – he shoved me up the worst couloirs on the mountain, and together we conquered some really fun terrain on Blackcomb.

Registered Project and Released 1.0

Ok, that’s not new news, since it’s been done last year. Still, this site didn’t record the change to the work that happened on the password store component on a purely organizational level, so here’s my chance to catch up:

• Password Store is now a component registered with joomlacode.org. Go to the com_passwords project if you want to download the latest and greatest, or if you want to log bugs, suggest improvements or (God forbid!) help out with development
• Password Store is now an extension registered with extension.joomla.org. That’s an important step, since most people don’t use joomlacode.org directly. This second step actually just started, as I filed today, but I am hopeful the administrators will give me a chance to publish this.

Next, of course, the plugin/mambot that searches within notes. And, even more of course, improvements to the terribly lame user interface that came with the underlying content store.

2007