Leaving myself exactly two days to get a gift from 4,000 miles away into my mom’s hands forced one option: flowers, especially since one pound fortune cookies would not be available in time. (Who doesn’t like good luck/karma delivered on their doorstep?)

After pouring over which local florist would best get daisies out to my mother, I noticed that each website’s bones were structured just the same. Some hack must be sitting at home right now, atop a fortune of PHP flower petals.

Unique Flowers, Flowers by Deb, and Flowers by Jeannie were three of dozens of sites I dropped in. Check out your local florist- and see what their site looks like.

So what is on that disk? Let’s see… I have all of my original Photoshop (PSD) files from old projects, including some proper photo shoots and other bits and bobs. There is loads of music that I ripped from CD’s that I have now rid myself of.

But the loss I expected to feel just wasn’t there. I was reminded of a magazine article I read in the break room at work:

We are generating more information than ever before, and storing it in ever more transient media. Much of what it is being lost is hardly essential – future generations will probably manage fine without all the family photos and videos you lost when your hard drive died…

One of my favourite blogs, Indexed, is published weekday mornings as the coffee brews. That is the most sensible use of that eternity between filling the coffee filter and waiting for that last drip to drop.

Was email just a fad? I remember how to do it, I guess I am just as guilty as the others, in killing it. But I do send the occasional thoughtful unsolicited email… and then tend to get a response on Facebook.

I spent so much time pruning myself from mailing lists, painfully extracting myself until they became quiet. I overdosed on flavorpill. I stopped worrying about Tree Hugger when my pants started to feel like hip huggers. Doctors Without Borders, good cause, goodbye.

Besides, there is always RSS. What could be more convenient than opening up your favourite reader and seeing that you have 1,000 items unread?

However, there is one person that emails me regularly. He is a politician from Michigan and I have given up trying to get off his email list. So, thank you Senator Buzz Thomas: despite of my efforts to erase you, in the end, you are the only one I have left.

Twenty Ten almost looks as if it came from the Woo factory floor. Look at the big crisp fonts! Wow, that banner is HUGE! Is that four widget slots at the bottom for ads and other things? I am really excited to watch the quality of themes that start to emerge from the developer community with this new platform.

This theme isn’t exactly perfect- where is the blue Twitter bird or bright orange RSS icon? But, it is these things that are going to allow me to feel like I am developing when, really, a bunch of smarties have already done the work for me. I imagine the blue bird will look pretty good no matter where I decide to place it.

So here is the new Almost Punk theme, which is exactly the new WordPress theme, which is just dandy for now.

I remember touring the General Motors Technical Center during high school. While walking through row after row of low-slung cubicles, we wandered past one whose nameplate had my name on it! Imagine finding one of my own while wandering through an awesome technical campus that eats up an entire square mile of suburban Detroit.