Dave Slusher on the Uplifter site asked if I'd open source my Uplifter poster.

Everything I do on this site is open source by default, unless specified otherwise, under as liberal (BSD-style with only attribution required) of a license as I'm allowed. However, in this case, I know what he meant, which was access to the editable files.

Unfortunately for those who don't have or won't use Photoshop, it's in a PSD file, but that's because that was what was on the machine I was using when I made it.

Regardless, I put up both the Minneapolis PSD and PNGs of the Minneapolis poster and a version without the location area filled in, which you can then import into whatever non-Photoshop software you use as a background.

Also, since I was using Photoshop Elements and not the full version of Photoshop, I actually did the kerning of the bottom portion using CSS/HTML and screenshotting it, making the logo not really having a source file per se at the moment. If the project wants to use it more than just this quick bit I did, I can redo it in Illustrator to get a proper set of vector source files for use by anyone who wants them.

So, the files are there to be used however someone wants. These are as editable as I've got available.

Yesterday, Amazon made a new recommendation to me: David Gilmour's "On an Island". I had somehow entirely missed that it was coming out and that it *did* come out a couple of weeks ago. I got up nearly immediately and figured I'd run across the skyway to the Sam Goody and pick it up, thus filling my afternoon with some new tunes while I worked.

So, I walked in, and headed to the racks in the "G" section. It wasn't there. OK, maybe someone filed it under "D". Nope, not there either.

I look around at the sections to see if maybe Pop/Rock isn't the most likely place to put it. There really wasn't any obvious place and the front endcap didn't have it either.

So, I went to the counter.

"Do you have the new David Gilmour album filed in some strange place?", I asked.

"David, who?", said not one, but 2 clerks behind the counter.

"Gilmour. You know. The guitarist and vocalist from Pink Floyd. I'm looking for his new album 'On an Island'. It's selling pretty well and I figured it'd be on an endcap.", I replied.

That's when it got scary. They actually had blank stares about Pink Floyd. It was like I was asking for some artist that sold 10 copies to his friends. Now, I don't expect everyone to be a fan. I also don't expect a music store employee to have an encyclopedic knowledge of music.

However, this particular album is currently the #3 seller in Amazon's music section. That means that I *do* expect to be able to find one of the top selling albums in the country in a fairly easy spot to find it.

Fortunately, their script kicked in and they asked me to spell his name. After repeating the "our" part of his last name 3 times, they finally found the album in their computer.

"Yeah, we don't carry that album.", she said.

"Really?", I asked.

"Right. But, we can order it for you. It will be here in about a week or 2.", she answered.

"I can special order it myself through any one of dozens of online stores and get it by tomorrow.", I said.

"But you'll have to pay shipping.", she said.

"Yes, but when the online place only charges $9 for it instead of $19, I can practically pay them to send it by secret agent and still spend the same.", I said.

She didn't have much to say after that and I just left. I went back to my desk and did exactly what I said I would. Except I had forgotten about Borders. They'll let you order, pay for it at Amazon and go and pick it up.

So, this morning, I'm listening to a fantastic album full of new songs by David Gilmour. And, Sam Goody is out a *full price* album sale. Because, David Gilmour is on a list of artists where I will not only buy any album they put out, but will buy a physical copy, at full price, in a retail store. But only if you bother to stock the top 10 selling albums in the country.

But hey, they do have prepaid cellphones and 900 copies of the Gorillaz album (currently at #72 on Amazon's top sellers.) So they've got that going for them. And people wonder why the mall music store is a dying breed.

Photo: megan

With snow on the ground here in Minnesota, "spring" on the calendar doesn't mean much. That means that while much of the country is already out enjoying spring directly, most of the people areound me are in the full grips of spring fever. Lots of people have their little spring fever "habits". Shelly starts wanting to take the dogs out for long walks, lots of folks start tuning up their motorcycles and I start buying grill/smoker merchandise.

While I am not a fan of warm weather, in one respect, I like it getting a little bit warmer. That's the cooking of meat over fire.

I never really give it up, keeping the big gas grill within reach of the sliding glass deck door all winter long. We eat grilled chicken and steak in January. As long as the propane will actually flow (it can get cold enough that it won't), I consider it fair game.

However, my winter grilling is still just a proxy for how I handle it during the other seasons. 10-12 hours of tending a smoker just doesn't work well in a Minnesota winter. Besides the difficulty of managing the exact temperature range, that's just too long to deal with when there isn't even that much daylight available in a day.

So, my spring fever symptoms involve me ordering things like . . . this Front Load Electric Smoker, applewood and hickory wood chunks and chips, meat thermometers, etc. It starts to pile up in March and early April until I finally go to the butcher and get piles of ribs, pork shoulder and brisket and watch the smoke come billowing out past the meat.

I bought the electric smoker to make those longer processes go better without having to manage the fire so carefully to keep the temperature where it should be. I'm also curious to mess with it and see how easy it would be to make something similar that's between the really simple one Alton Brown built in a garbage can and the $500 ones that lost out to this one.

The Alton Brown design puts the burner and wood underneath the only access you've got to the food or the fire, meaning you have to move the food, move the grate and then mess with the wood and replace it all whenever you need to add or modify the smoke source. This front-loading design lets you leave the food sit, which is a MUCH better approach. However, this has got to be possible to build for a lot less than the $100 it cost to buy and ship.

A week or 2 ago, Garrick sent me an invitation to an sort of a "digital stone soup" meeting in Minneapolis.

For those who don't remember or weren't in a 2nd grade performance of the story, the "recipe" for stone soup is a stone and water. Of course if the villagers bring some carrots, celery and onions, some potatoes, some salt, etc. and season it, it will end up much better. In other words, the soup is entirely what it is because of what everyone brings. This is the shorthand I've been using for things like BarCamp and grass roots organizing and it applies to this particular meeting as well. The focus is to help people get started in blogging, podcasting and videoblogging as a start, but to sort of bootstrap themselves overall. Those tools are essential in helping people share their knowledge, and otherwise take control of their lives.

Part of the Uplifter concept, this Minneapolis meeting is actually one of the 2 innagural meetings for Uplifter: the other in the Carolinas.

I took a longer look at the Uplifter materials and information to better have a handle on what the meeting would be about. The overall idea really embodies much of what I talk about on this site. That things like DIY have value. That nearly in all human endeavors, competance can be reached by nearly anyone, etc.

The motto of the meetings/movement is: Bring What You Have, Teach What You Know, Learn What You Need.

I took a listen to a couple of interviews that talk about what inspired Uplifter. One on Garrick's First Crack podcast and the other on the Small World podcast. Both are worth a listen to get a better idea of what it's all about.

Inspired to not just attend (which I'd agreed to before much research), the logo at the top of this posting is one I whipped up while on a conference call (wasn't needed as a participant, but needed to be there "in case"). I also made up a poster/flyer for the Minneapolis event using that logo. I went for something simple that would look good at small sizes and used the "Bring, Teach, Learn" bits from the motto.

If you're curious about these topics, consider attending the meeting or a future meeting. I hope to see you there.

For something like 5 years, I've been using EditPlus as my text editor and coding environment. If you used code that I wrote in the last 5 years, there's about a 99% chance it was hammered out in EditPlus.

I used it for a variety of reasons:

• Integrated FTP client. Opening a live FTP file and just saving it to commit changes was great.
• Cliptext. I have lots of these with routines like a PHP file write and others that wrap a given word in a whole bunch of HTML.
• Customizable keybindings. CTRL-W closes documents. If your text editor doesn't let me do that, I'm likely to repeatedly do whatever CTRL-W does instead and curse like a sailor.

There are many more, but I was introduced to it, it clicked with me and I've been using it ever since.

Until the recent multiple new PC issue. With new workstations onsite with the client and a new laptop, I had to reinstall everything (a list is still coming, but proving much bigger than I actually thought it was). This meant finding my license keys for EditPlus. Turned out I couldn't.

Now, I could have bugged the author to re-send me my keys. But, I took my stupidity in losing them as an opportunity to look at the text editing landscape more closely.

I've used most of the major ones available: vi, emacs, UltraEdit, EditPad, Crimson, jEdit and dozens and dozens more. All of them failed in some major way to click with how I work. That's nothing against them; I'm just stuck in my ways. However, then I tried PSPad and I have made the switch.

It's not without it's quirks either, but it hasn't been getting in my way, which is the single best feature of any text editor. It allows some remapping and customization (much of which I haven't yet tapped into) that helps me mold it into my processes. It also has a great bookmark feature (for flipping between portions of a complicated "if" statement), and other more IDE-like features, without losing the fact that it is, at its core, a text editor.

On a workstation for my purposes, there are 3 GUI apps that dominate my landscape: email, web browser and text editor. I'm starting to feel a bit weird as I've switched 2 of the 3 in the last couple of months. But, ever the pragmatist, the fact that the new tools are doing the job better than the old means these were the right decisions.

If you're frustrated with your text editor or are looking for one to try out, give PSPad a try. The fact that it's free doesn't hurt either.