Hira’a Center for Qura’an Memorizing

Thursday, January 19, 2006

Okay. So I had my first Design Expo with Clay Shirky class today. And it rocked. Good stuff all the way.

But.

I’m going to write about it and the whole experience during my entry after the second class this Thursday. It’ll be better that way.

Beside that, I spent my morning at the Leonard Bernstein Office working on their site. From about 10:30 until 2:30 or so. Then class from 3:30 until 6:00. Then Michael Jascz from 7:00 until about 8:45. Then the DriveBy at 9:15. Busy.

Dan Phiffer and I run the DriveBys this semester (and next Fall, I guess). Dan suggested that we kick it off with a DriveBy about PHP and MySQL. I suggested we talk about using those things to build a simple blogging app. And, so, that’s what we did. With nearly no preparation, I might add — at least on my part. Dan took the first half of the presentation and explained what PHP and MySQL were and how to install them, etc. I went through the custom weblog code I wrote for this very site — waragainstevil.com — during the second half of the presentation. We had a great crowd. Room 404 — packed with, like, thirty or thirty-five people. I thought my part was a disaster, but a few people mentioned to me later that it helped them understand a bit better, so I guess it was okay. Whew.

What a day. Then out drinking at the TNO at a tiki bar in the East Village that had an actual (sad) parrot in a glass cage at the front of the bar and a karaoke lounge in the back that got plenty of ITP use until they pretty much had to kick us out. At, like, 2:30. What idiot bar owners kick twenty rowdy drinkers out of their bar at 2:30 on a Thursday night? Let us spend our money! We’re all completely willing to stupidly spend $5-6 on a drink. Let us.

Oh. And the title of this post. During the DriveBy I started to type “Hi!” as the title for an example post. And my copy of Safari tried to auto-complete it for me to “Hira’a Center for Qura’an Memorizing” — the title of one of my photographs from Israel. Got quite a laugh. So. Here it is.

That is all.