Month: January 2003

John Robb touts Manila as the only CMS you’ll ever need

Had a long chat with Jupiter’s Matthew Berk this morning. He is the senior analyst that set up the weblog effort (although he doesn’t have a weblog yet) at Jupiter. He’ll probably make the switch to an enterprise weblog product like Manila soon.

We talked mostly about the content management market and how you don’t need to spend tens of thousands of $$ to build a modern, full featured, easy to manage, dynamic Web site. Manila provides almost everything you need out of the box and is a system that can scale to hundreds of thousands of pageviews a day (good enough for 99.99% of all Web sites). [John Robb’s Radio Weblog]

Slip shopping, Steve Earle, sailboat racing–It doesn’t get any better than this!

I had a great weekend. Friday night I kicked back with the wife and kids. Saturday morning I got the kids up, got them dressed, and then headed out to give mom a break. We took Dad over to Pier 121 to shop for slips for his new boat. It was windy and cold but the kids had fun looking at the boats and it was exciting looking at slips knowing there’s a boat in Marina del Rey with Dad’s name on it.

Saturday afternoon Dave rolled in to town. He came down for the Steve Earle show. It’s always good to see Dave. He played with the kiddos and we got to talk and swap music. He also brought his Apple powerbook and he showed me a few cool tidbits in OS X. It got me psyched up about the G4 we appropriated to use as part of our internal KM efforts.

Now, that right there would be a great weekend. But Sunday Dad and I headed over to Lake Ray Hubbard for the alumni sail at “ntssweb”. But they were running a regatta and weren’t doing the alumni sail. (Normally, folks that have taken classes there can sail with other former students and instructors on Sunday afternoons on the J22’s for a reasonable price. Good stuff). So Dad and I ended up crewing on a couple of the boats. Dad got on an Irwin 30 and I got on an S2 7.3.

It was a great day for sailing. 60 degrees or so with a stiff 14 to 18 knot wind. Unfortunately for me on the S2, we were a little overpowered. We reefed the 150 Genoa to about 75 and eventually even less but we still had too much heel sailing upwind. Still, I got good practice working the jib sheets under race conditions, setting the whisker pole, and handling a self-furling headsail. The boat was immaculate and the skipper, John, was friendly and helpful.

All of this and I still managed to get in good quality time with the kiddos. An awesome weekend for sure.

Steve Earle rocked the Gypsy Tea Room

Steve Earle was awesome last night at the Gypsy Tea Room. He opened up with Amerika v. 6.0 and then played several more off of Jerusalem. They didn’t play much from Transcendental Blues but they did play a wide range of my favorites from just about every album I could think of.

The sound was great and the vocals were extremely crisp. They had two drum sets–one was more of a percussion setup which his brother Patrick played. They had an inverted garbage can Patrick played with a couple of mallets that went perfectly with Ashes to Ashes. Steve’s electric mandolin also sounded pretty cool.

An unexpected surprise was the opener, Garrisson Starr. I hadn’t heard any of her stuff but my friend Dave said her album last year was one of his favorites for 2002. She has a sweet voice with a Mississippi southern drawl. Her simple three-piece set up (Patrick Earle played the drums for her–they couldn’t bring their normal drummer for “financial reasons”)–was tight and commanded the attention of what is usually a bored and distracted pre-opener audience. The best part, though, was that Steve incorporated her into his own set. They sang together on a couple of goosebump-inducing duets.

He played two encores. The second one included two covers: Time (The Chambers Brothers) and Get Together (the Youngbloods). Both were crowd favorites.

I’d highly recommend catching a show if you’ve never seen him.