Magnetic tape isn't just dead, but it is also deteriorating. 

It is breaking down, falling apart, and what was once thought to be nearly permanent is proving to be extraordinarily fragile. 

Audio tape was used for decades as a way to disseminate music, seminars, audio histories, speeches, news, by folklorist, in short--our culture.  Hydrolysis, the breakdown of the glue that holds the little magnetic bits to the tape, is becoming more prevalent.  The life span of tapes, under the best circumstances, is up to 15 years before things start getting sticky.  In other words anything created before 1994 has almost certainly started to lose its fidelity.

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Drupal's taxonomy system is one of its most powerful features and also one of the more tough things to wrap your head around.  Taxonomy can be used to categorize content -- tags that identify what the content is about -- and this can extend to showing only content that fits that category.  For example, you could identify books by subject matter and then on different landing pages only show that kind of book.  Taxonomy leverages the power of labeling and that power can then be let loose using merlinochaos' excellent Views module.

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Professionally, this past year has proven to be pretty amazing.  I've continued to work for pingVision - an interactive media company that has a pretty heavy focus on Drupal.  It was Drupal that brought me to pingVision nearly two years ago.  I was learning about Drupal on version 4.7 in Vancouver to leverage the CMS in a site I was working on for WESTAF--I was, at the time, Senior Director of Technology.  I was moving my blogging activities from Blogger to my own domain, which my wife and I have used since 1995.

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This morning was an interesting one.  It was an extremely windy night last night in metro-Denver.  It was howling, the dog door was opening and closing on it's own.  The trees were creaking and branches from the shrubs were rubbing against the windows.  All in all, a little eerie and quite loud.

I got up this morning to all this noise and started the kettle for a cup of tea.  I sat down at my computer to check email, look at the weather, and read the headlines in the news.  Sitting here, I suddenly heard a cracking sound so loud that I nearly jumped out my skin--it was 7 am.  I was sure that a tree had hit the back of the house.  It was loud enough that my kid woke up yelling, my wife was up like a shot, and the dogs nearly had a conniption.

Outside, I started looking around and found a piece of flashing hanging off the side of the house. It was dangling from a single nail.  I kept looking around for the source of the noise when I looked up slowly and pointed at our roof to my wife.

The wind had peeled about 1/8th of the shingle from the roof and folded it over toward the centre of the roof exposing the underlayment.

We called the insurance company and got in touch with a roofer.  The insurance--at 8 am--assured us that an inspector would contact us by the end of the day.  The roofer said he would be here by afternoon to assess the damage.  The roofer arrived, but no insurance inspector.

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