My experience with a software organization

Many of my peers are well aware of the voluntary role I serve for a web software organization that I provide much of my free time for. Those that do not know me so well probably aren't so likely to be aware of this, which happens to be one of the primary things I commit my available time to.

The role I serve is a team leadership position for a message board software called SMF. SMF stands for Simple Machines Forum, but it is virtually always referenced by its abbreviation when brought up in discussion. What my primary function for SMF is to write documentation and maintain the primary place where official documentation of SMF is stored, the Online Manual. I am the Documentation Coordinator for the currently very small Documentation Team of SMF.


A screenshot of the new SMF 2.0 Admin Panel.

Now, SMF is a free software, period.

Yes our organization has had some heat thrown at us by a small group of minorities that go around advocating an Open Source license called GPL, with an attitude very much akin to that those who do not use a GPL license but release software for free are 'evil'. That at least is the impression I get, from what I have understood, these people aren't necessarily so against commercial products, but they feel all software that does happen to be free as in 'free beer', should also be 'free' as in complete freedom. What this means in our context is that currently we do not allow others to modify our software and redistribute it under a different name ("fork" the software) which is one of the key components of what the GPL license would allow. We have had legitimate reasons for not allowing others to fork our software. SMF traces it's roots back to a predecessor message board software called YaBB SE, which was released under a GPL license. Sadly YaBB SE had a fork, and while I know that I wasn't around back during those days, I know that the fork hurt the software. Granted SMF is a much more of a mature product than YaBB SE happened to be back in the day, so SMF would most likely survive a fork of itself without leaving a big wound, but we still have many reasons to be against completely going with a GPL license. Reasons that I either feel I am not an expert enough to discuss, or are internal matters that I would not feel comfortable providing to the public without permission first. Mainly the former, although we have had some bad experiences with some people trying to fight us over the 'GPL battle' that I will not discuss.

Now let me be clear that I, am by no means, anti-GPL. I think for instance GPL is really great for Linux. I think the problem is, GPL just was not designed for web scripts. I will save the argument for another day, but essentially the GPL was not made with the idea of web software in mind. I admit that I am again no expert on this, but I have had colleagues who are very experienced in the programming and licenses who have explained to me before as to why the GPL does not fit in well with the web.

Now some of you may wonder why I spend a lot of my time with SMF and how I discovered it for that matter.

First of all, SMF was not my first message board I ever used. I believe phpBB was, and at the time I didn't mind it. But the version at the time, phpBB 2 was quickly becoming obsolete as it wasn't at the time able to catch up in terms of development with its main competitors. Now, I have a huge amount of respect for those behind the phpBB Group, like SMF, phpBB is also a free software. However phpBB 2 just did not offer a lot of the features I wanted for my own message board that free competitors of phpBB did offer. I eventually found my way to Invision Power Board, another quality forum package and was quite happy with it until the whole huge thing of IPB becoming a paid only software occurred. I will refrain from mentioning the circumstances as I still have respect for SMF's competitors and don't want to make this blog post into a bashing post about other software, but I will leave it that I, like many other users, was upset over what happened, and had no other choice but to find a free forum software alternative (I just did not have the money at the time to pay for any of the software that I used, I was younger back then for one).

So eventually I crossed paths with SMF, and almost instantly fell in love with it. Now I do not want to turn this into a post praising all the things that I think are great about SMF, I may want to save that for another time. But in general, I was impressed with all the administration options and the user interface of SMF.

I think what inspired me so much to contribute to SMF was the friendly user community behind SMF. I was essentially a young "newbie" member when I first signed up, but the community really never made me feel this way, or made it easy to forget that this was the case. I remember being impressed with how many ordinary users would go around helping other SMF users, providing support for using and installing SMF among many other tasks. I realized then that I found something that made me feel good. Sure there is the sentiment about feeling good about giving back to something you believe in and that has helped you out, but I think more so than anything else, I found a place where I could help other people that had to do with something I enjoyed very much and at a place where I felt comfortable and welcomed by others.

But, really what do I do? Do I just get my head in writing documentation?

The truth is that documentation is only one of the many things I do for SMF. The list can get quite extensive, but I will try to keep it simple, highlighting what I do the most.

Documentation would be the number one function I do for SMF. I write documents, and update documents. I also maintain the Online Manual, upgrading it every once in awhile so it uses the latest version of SMF, as well as write some code for it so that we have some special features specially needed for handling our documentation, since obviously SMF was not designed to be a wiki-type piece of software.

In the past I have written a few modification packages. For those who are not very experienced with message boards, modifications (often abbreviated as 'mods') generally are third party packages of code that either directly modify code in the software (in SMF's case), or provide find and replace code instructions to modify the software. The modifications I have written have provided some additional features and functionality that SMF currently does not have by default. One of the modifications I have written has been made into a default feature in SMF 2.0, but was not available as a default feature for the version I wrote it for, which was SMF 1.1.

A long time ago I even released a few themes, but my theme designing skills are not the best and in general the themes I released essentially faded away to a point where they stopped being updated for more recent versions of SMF.

A huge thing I do with SMF when I have the time is provide support for using SMF to the community. I often like to focus in on areas where there is high demand for a certain type of support, but low supply of those able to help. Such examples often include people asking for minor tweaks that require editing SMF's code to achieve a certain functionality or feature. Many users are not that skilled in regards to coding, and these questions usually take a lot longer to answer, so I try to hop in and help with such questions when I can.

Of course a huge aspect of my involvement with SMF is providing advice and my opinion to the team behind SMF. I also beta test the software and report bugs that I find in SMF so that they can be fixed. There have been some events and concepts that would not have taken place if I hadn't been the one to initially come up with a certain idea. I take pride in helping SMF move forward and making the community a more and more friendly environment. I have often suggested ways of getting the community more involved, through contests and other ways. I think maintaining a friendly community that is able to connect with the team behind SMF and feel welcomed is virtually the most vital thing for SMF to remain a strong message board software.

So a public version of SMF 2.0 is finally here

Note: This post was originally posted here.

---

The day many of you have been waiting for is finally here! Congratulations!

SMF 2.0 is available to the public, in beta form. While I personally feel it is really quite stable for a beta product, I would advise everyone to be very careful about using it. At this point the official advisory of the SMF Team is that it is not recommended to use on a production site. That being said, I know many of you will jump the gun and upgrade your production sites to use it. I would strongly recommend that those who want to use it to first install a carbon copy of your forum, upgrade that forum, and play with the forum to see if there aren't too many problems running it. What I mean by this is creating a copy of your 1.1 SMF database tables and perhaps copying them over to a separate database (so you don't have to worry about changing the prefix of your tables).

One major disadvantage to upgrading as this point is that you will lose any customizations and mods that your forum has. The majority of the mods have not been upgraded to be compatible with 2.0. Many mod authors will upgrade their mods in due time, perhaps shortly after they themselves get to use 2.0 for the first time. Other mod authors will wait until 2.0 hits a final state, that is, they will wait until 2.0 is no longer classified as either a beta or release candidate product before they update their mods. There is logic behind those that do this. One, there is the potential for a number of changes that could take place between any beta or release candidate release. This could create an overhaul requiring constantly updating the mod to be compatible with each release of 2.0. As well, some mod authors may recognize that 2.0 as a beta product really should not be used by anyone other than those testing the product for bugs. Some may view updating their mods as providing more encouragement for users to upgrade to 2.0, when they personally feel people should not be doing so just yet.

What will I be doing with my mods? I will probably update them to work for Beta 3. I will hope that I won't have to make significant changes for them to be later compatible for Beta 4, RC1, and etc, but if that is the case, I will accept the fact. I do know I have one mod that is now a built in feature of SMF 2.0, so that mod will be discontinued.

So what excites me most about 2.0 personally? Some users have been a bit critical about 2.0 not introducing too many new features to the regular users of SMF forums (the non-administrators). While 2.0 is admittedly more of an update for admins, there still are many features that have been added for the convenience of the users that use SMF powered forums.

Some of the new user features include:

• WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get) post form - What does this mean? Most people are familiar with word processing applications such as Microsoft Word. This is similar to that, when you format text you get to see the text actually change in the post form.
• Personal Message Rules - Think of this sort of like an email filter system. When an incoming personal message sent to you meets a specific criteria that you set, you can either apply a label to the personal message or delete it altogether. So for instance if you wanted you could have any personal message sent by a member in the group "Administrator" with somewhere in the subject the text "[Important]" to be applied a special label.
• More Personal Message Display Options - In previous versions of SMF you could only view personal messages in an anchor like system where a list with the subjects of the personal messages would appear at the top and then clicking on one of the subjects would anchor you down the page to the corresponding personal message on that same page. All personal messages would appear on the same page. This option still exists, but now you can view personal messages one at a time, as well as in a conversation format, where replies made to a personal messages can be shown together.
• Custom Profile Fields - This sort of ties in between being an admin enhancement and a user enhancement. The admin can create custom profile fields that the user can fill out. This allows users to give out additional information about what type of person they are.
• Calendar Visual Improvements - The forum calendar now shows mini-calendars on the side of the main calendar for the month you are viewing. In total 3 miniature calendars are shown. One for the current month you are viewing, one for the month before that month, and one for the month after.
• Viewing a member's posts, topics and attachments - In previous versions of SMF you could only view a list of all the posts a member has made. SMF 2 takes this a step further, allowing you to view a list of the topics started by the member (not the replies made to topics), as well as a list of attachments the member has added to their posts. All of these lists can be viewed by going to a member's profile.
• Configure how many posts to show per page - What used to be a global forum wide admin setting can now be individually configured by the user. The user can select in their Look and Layout section of their profile from a list of numbers for how many posts to show per page inside a topic as well as a separate setting for how many posts to show per page when viewing the listing of topics made inside a board. As a side note, I personally made a mod that did essentially the same thing for 1.1 which I am very pleased to not have to update for 2.0.
• Notification digest - Previously you could only get notified of replies to topics you subscribed to either; instantly, that is, immediately as the reply was made, or instantly but only for the first reply made. SMF 2.0 adds two new options into the mix, which are getting notified of all topics you are subscribed to in a daily manner, as well as an option to only be notified weekly instead.

As for administrator features that were added, there are just so many. I will mainly mention some of my personal favorites:

• Admin Settings Search - There is now a search field for searching for admin settings. This expands to also being able to search the documents on the Online Manual.
• Custom Profile Fields - As mentioned above. It is possible to have the fields show up on registration, inside of topics next to the member's posts. Each individual field can be shown only to admins if desired.
• Moderation Center/Post Approval/Warning System - You can now setup certain boards to be post moderated; that is, members have to wait for a moderator to approve their post before the general public can actually see the post. This is accompanied nicely with a moderation center, which will show the posts awaiting approval. Members can also now be warned. Depended on their warning level they may be just added to a watchlist, or may be post moderated for all their posts, or even post banned. The warning system can be configured so a certain number of warning points for a member decreases each day to a point where they would eventually return to a normal member state automatically. This can however be set to be done completely manually if desired. The moderation center will also show a list of these warned members as well as show information such as the warning message sent to the member (if one was sent). Additionally the moderation center will show reported posts, the moderation log (previously only available in the admin center), and group requests (explained next).
• Joinable Groups - Admins can now setup groups that members can join by one of the following methods; the member is able to join the group automatically, or the member can request to be in the group, or the group is not requestable but a member selected as the moderator of the group is able to add members to it.
• Scheduled Tasks/Mail Queue - Certain tasks for the backend of your forum can now be configured to occur during scheduled parts of the day. There is also a mail queue to help soften the server strain for forums with many members that want to email their members.
• Permission Profiles/Group Inheritance - This one is not that easy to explain quickly. Basically each forum has a permission profile selected for it to use. A permission profile is a profile created of permissions for each membergroup of your forum. This greatly simplifies the permission process by making it much easier to assign common permissions sets (profiles) to multiple boards that can share the same permissions. Basically before "Global" was pretty much the only permission set you could assign to multiple boards. To accompany this, you can now have a group's permissions completely inherited from another group.

A Personal Special Thanks

---

I would like to take this moment now to thank everyone who has helped make SMF what it is today. When I discovered SMF back in 2004 my life was dull so to speak in many regards, I didn't have much of a social life, didn't have too many friends. I quickly however was embraced by the people of the SMF community, from team members and non-team members alike. When I became an SMF Team Member in 2005, for the first time I felt like I was a part of something that felt real to me, accepted into an entirely new family. I have built an even stronger bond after getting to personally meet many of the team members behind the project in Arizona a few months ago. Today I feel my social life in many senses is coming together, but I will never forget what SMF has done for me, and I will always appreciate it.

This is my thanks to SMF.

It really does put a tear in my eye to see how much this project has matured and developed since I became a part of it years ago. And I am filled with nothing but excitement for the future of the project. I know I will unlikely be able to remain on the SMF Team forever, but I have the utmost confidence this project will be able to move on without me when my time finally does have to come to an end.

To the Developers
Yes, I admit I have always had a desire to become a developer for this software someday. Well, for quite some time at least. I am beyond fascinated by the level of commitment that the development team brings to the project. They are all incredibly talented in coding and most possess an extraordinary amount of patience to keep the flow of development steady. At times it is hard to do it, but you all come through time and time again to deliver a secure and stable product that 1000s of people from all around the world get to use and enjoy. Be proud.

To Support
The community is growing at an alarming rate. Yet the script we have that let's us find support posts that still need attention always seems to have a relatively small and stable number of topics. The ability to keep up with this demand is incredible and you all deserve to be proud of what you have accomplished. The work can be tedious and feel unappreciated, but always remember all these "users" you are helping are actual human beings and what you do for them actually does put a smile on their face, and many people couldn't have gotten very far without you guys.

To Project Management
Coordinating the entire team to work together, I personally know can be a very difficult and at times frustrating task. But yet you really are ultimately successfully at managing this project and the team behind it. You make many of the tough decisions that we put you in power to make because we firmly trust you that your judgement will be the right thing for the project. You all deserve a pat on the back for the often hard and behind the scenes work you put into SMF day after day.

To Marketing
Your job require immense creativity and smarts in order to effectively get your job done. I have always been fascinated by the ability of pushing this project forward you guys have in promoting SMF and trying to present the most positive image for this project as possible. One thing I love is that you do not try to use dirty tricks for our own advantage. You guys respect our competition immensely and do not try put harsh words at any of our competition just to get people to use SMF.

To the Customizers
Your themes and mods are amazing! The work you put into approving themes and mods is also very impressive. The support you do for the community is also very helpful. Your job requires many different tasks that can get overwhelming at times, yet you all always seem to hold it together.

To the Documentation Writers
Well, this is my area. But I will thank those past and present who have helped write documentation for SMF. Documentation in my opinion is crucial to any project, and can serve as the most effective tool for supporting a project. If more and more people read documentation, it would cut down on the number of support questions asked by a whole lot.

-John Thorsen, more commonly known as Jack Thorsen, or even "Buggy".

Anything new from the team member you love to hate?

Note: This is a repost of what was originally posted here.

---

Hey everyone! It has been awhile since I've done any blogging here.

First of all, we decided to archive the MotM blog board which held all the blog posts that were made. I hope that we can make it publicly accessible again, but I did repost my entries if anyone wants to see them (or look over any of them again). You can find them here - http://jaybachatero.com/aka/motm/.

Now, is there anything new with me? Well I haven't been as active as I used to be, no doubt about that. I think I am going to divide this blog post up into two sections; my personal life (nothing too personal however), and my SMF life (because as we all know when I login to SMF, there is a life in its own awaiting me).

The Boring Stuff: Personal Life

---

Well I have been on break this week. It hasn't been too bad, maybe a little boring at times, but ultimately I take whatever I can get! I am fairly proud of myself, because I have created a fitness program for myself and have worked hard at trying to get myself in shape. I have heard from a few people recently saying that I am "skinny." Which is good. Now I'd just like to get a bit more muscular! Music has really motivated me and gets me in a groove while working out.

I saw the Lunar Eclipse yesterday, it was kind of cool I must say. My brother is the one who is really into astronomy, so I imagine he must of really enjoyed it!

I've gotten myself a little bit of a cold recently. Hopefully it goes by quickly. I've been sure to get a lot of Vitamin C and have been working on trying to feel more comfortable while it is there.

I watched a good bit of the Democrat debate tonight. I won't get into who I support, but I was proud to be able to vote for the first time during the primaries in NY. If only we had a larger voter turnout. One interesting story is the person standing behind me had been voting for I think around 30 years and he told me he had never seen such a long line at a polling place ever. Even in a General Election!

I am working at getting a job. There is a possibility I may get a job working with a friend. The job doesn't sound terribly exciting, however it is a job, and my family could definitely use my help financially.

The Fun Stuff: SMF Life

---

Yeah! The fun stuff indeed. So what's new with me in the world of SMF? Well, I've been here and there lately, but today I have dedicated some time in getting back in the quality control area of SMF 2.0. I came across one legitimate bug and posted a potential code fix for it (the fix worked for me at least), and have made several suggestions (often aesthetic-related) to improve certain areas of SMF. Some of the bug reports I opened cover really quite minor things that I could imagine the developers grabbing their hair and screaming "make...it...stop!"

I am very proud to have Alundra on the Documentation Team. She has been a great help to me and I have seen few as dedicated as she has proven to be thus far. In fact I see some of her in the young youthful version of me those few years ago when I first joined the SMF team! Back then I was ready and determined to do a lot of work. I wanted to impress my peers and not make them feel like they made a mistake putting me on the team. Ahhh...the dear memories.

I have started taking a look at the Help section of SMF. That's right, it just may actually get updated for SMF 2.0 after all. If not, you know who you can blame. I merely say that to add some pressure in the mix for me to actually get it done.

I have also started working on a paid theme for SMF. As much as I would love to make it available for free, I really could use money right now so I am trying to think of creative ways to get some money. You can see a screenshot of the board index of the theme here - http://jaybachatero.com/aka/pics/boardindex.png. I am not too thrilled with it at the moment to be honest. I am just not that good at graphics. At this point I am thinking of charging perhaps $20 for the theme and $15 for Charter Members here at SMF (so a $5 discount to show my support of those who support SMF financially). I may even consider doing a 6 month cycle where the theme would eventually be free, perhaps compromise with those who pay by offering an improved updated version of the theme at the time it is made free.

Pretty soon I am really going to need to get my head dirty in 2.0 documentation. Time is running short really and would like to have documentation available ASAP to the public after 2.0 is actually released to the public.

---

Well that's it from me. I hope everyone here is doing decent and is enjoying their SMF powered forum as always. Feel free to leave me a comment. I will be famous someday and so now could be your last chance for me to actually reply back to comments made for me!

The Final Days of the MotM Trip

It's been awhile since I've blogged about the MotM trip, and now that it is long over with, my memory may be a tad rusty, or very rusty even. But I don't think I did too bad of a job actually.

The Trip Nears An Ending (Days 7-10)

• Thursday, January 3rd, 2008
• Friday, January 4th, 2008
• Saturday, January 5th, 2008
• Sunday, January 6th, 2008

Monday, January 3rd, 2008

---

Today we set out to go casually view the Grand Canyon. We would not be hiking down it but rather taking some pictures of it, from well, the area where you have a lot to look down at. I recall as we drove there that one of the team members who had previously been to the Grand Canyon told us that you could drive right where the Canyon is, without even noticing it until right when you get there because of how they go straight down like a giant hole. "You may not be aware of this, but if you look to your right, there is a giant hole" was said over a walkie talkie by someone in our group behind us in the car. I look, and sure enough I start to see it. And just wow it is hard to put words into how amazing it was. From the start we split up, a few of us decide to take a bus tour of the Canyon, while the majority of us including myself went on a trail around the rim of the Grand Canyon. I was constantly awed. Some of the team members made a few risky moves to get good shots of them that would make you wonder, how did they get all the way over there? I was not gutsy enough to do so myself, or maybe I was just too smart, depending on how you look at it. I got very excited to be there, for once in my life I was somewhere where I felt very exhilarated. We eventually headed back to our hotel. The internet at the hotel was horrible. I still managed to send a few messages to some friends, being very excited to share some of my excitement with them. Eventually I got together with a few others and we started discussing the possibility of hiking down the Grand Canyon. It was suggested by someone that perhaps we could hike down the entire Grand Canyon, see the Colorado River in front of us, and go back up. The total distance of hiking would be 16.1 miles (although at the time I thought I heard it was 16.7 miles). And honestly I didn't know what I would expect. I haven't even done much hiking in my life, let alone know exactly how safe the trails would be. But I jumped on the bandwagon quickly. Initially it was planned to have two groups, one group of us would go about halfway down and then back up, while the other group would go the whole way down. I wanted to know how many people would go on each one and frankly figured I would go with whichever one had more people committed to it. I wanted to spend my hike with a lot of team members. I was more than a little nervous when I promptly declared I would hike the entire distance, but was extremely excited at the same time. Late that night we went to a little grocery store to get some food. We tried to get plenty of salty food. I went to bed anticipating what very likely would be the wildest day of my life.

Tuesday, January 4rd, 2008

---

The day had arrived. I had to wake up fairly early so I would be able to eat a decent breakfast. I had a bagel, some juice among a few other things. Not too much later we left, a group of 7 of us, all planning to hike all the way down the Grand Canyon and back up in the same day. Would we all make it? We didn't know for sure, but all of us had been told to not let pride get in our way. If we couldn't go any further, we had to say something. I couldn't even begin to describe how I felt as we started the descend down the South Kaibab trail to begin our long day of hiking. I was nervous, excited, and scared all at the same time. I felt safe however, being with several people I trusted very much. The beginning of the trail was actually one of the worst parts. It was icy at the top, and rather narrow. But as I got a little more calm just a few minutes into it, I started to really get happy and excited. I would run down parts of it when I deemed it safe enough to do so and when no one was directly in front of me. I started taking pictures, but it was dark so they didn't come out that well at first. We continued our descend down the trail. Our goal was to rush down the Grand Canyon, because we knew the way back up would be much more difficult. We were tight on time, we did not have much time to waste. Breaks weren't all that frequent. I still took a lot of pictures. A lot of them I even took on the move, although many of them didn't come out that well. Not many of the others seem to take many pictures, but that didn't stop me from doing so myself. I wanted to try to share part of the experience I was about to have with my friends and family back at home.

As we got closer to the bottom, we ran into a few hikers going up the trail. We also came across a group of people riding mules. The mules looked dishearteningly sad, but they are basically that way by their nature. One person passed us on our way down, and she looked like she knew what she was doing much more than us, as she flew by us with hiking sticks in both hands. None of us brought any sticks. In fact the most we brought was ourselves, layers of clothing that we could strip off as we got closer and closer to the bottom, food, and two backpacks that held several bottles of water. Near the bottom, we started to see the Colorado River, snap snap I went as I took some pictures of it, a few miles away from when we would actually be standing right next to it.

Eventually we made it down to the bottom! We crossed a bridge and took a short break at the bottom before venturing back up. I was already somewhat tired but all and all was in pretty good shape. The view of the Grand Canyon from the very bottom was very beautiful, I continued to take many pictures. The hike back up was as expected, tedious. We easily got separated into two to three groups as we had varying paces going up. After a few miles up the front group which I found myself in for the entire way up would take a 5 to 10 minute break to let the others catch up with us. One of the team members was having a difficult time by this point, he had many cramps. I was worried for him and feared that he would likely run into further problems as we got closer to the top.

When we reached the 4.5 mile mark to the top, we took another break. This was a pleasant break, with a water fountain to refill our water bottles, a bathroom outhouse as well as benches to sit on. At this point we encountered a wild deer who we were able to get very close shots of, as well as a cute little bird that probably came inches from my feet. This would be the last time that my group would wait up for the three that had been quite a distance behind us. From here on out, it would be us 4 in the front, determined to make it up before the sun would set, and then 3 in the back. I was almost one of the 3 that would stay in the back, but someone else offered to stay behind with the one that was struggling and I decided to accept the offer. The 4 of us moved on, and the trail up got progressively harder as we got higher and higher up. We met two male hikers and had a conversation with them, told them about our software and told them about our situation with how we split up into two groups. We would keep running back into them, at some points they caught up to us, and at others we caught up with them.

By the 3 mile point I really had to go to the bathroom, but because I hate going outside I held it in. This was extremely painful. It did not help that I was limping quite a bit, my left knee hurt a lot so I tried not to bend it much. When we finally made the 1 mile point there was fortunately a bathroom. The hike became much easier after I was able to pee, but the pain I was experiencing became worse as we moved on. The last mile seemed very long. It was much more narrow, and much more icy. It was a lot of work for me to do. I kept expecting that we were about to reach the top, only to learn that we had a little more ways to go.

But eventually, we made it! That is the 4 of us in the front. Unfortunately the one team member that struggled simply could not go on futher, plus it was getting dark and none of us brought flashlights. So they backtracked their way back to a camping ground to spend the night. I was very much guilty that I wasn't there with them.

As it got dark, I agreed to go out with a few of the team members to a pizza restaurant. There I got some pizza but declined to drink any beer. The walk over to there was very difficult for me because I literally could hardly walk. They offered to drive me there, but I figured I could handle the walk, and I did, even if just barely. The walk home would prove to be that much worse. As I got back to the hotel, one of the team members noticed how badly I was limping. They examined me a little bit and asked me some questions. In the end it was determined that it wasn't anything too severe. When I got to my room I took a nice shower. I then went to bed an extremely tired yet proud man. I roomed with jerm for the second time of the trip because both of our roommates were still down at the Grand Canyon.

Wednesday, January 5th, 2008

---

I knew that it would hurt a lot getting out of my bed that day after a 16 mile hike. I had not improved all that much over the night. Today I would like to call a "Rescue Mission" where those of us who were back at the hotel would drive back down the Grand Canyon to wait for the 3 team members who spent the night to come back up. Little did I know how long the wait would be. We got lunch at the Bright Angel restaurant, since that was close to where they would be coming up. We spent our time waiting there. The weather was really bad. It was snowing, raining, and you could hardly see anything. It would have been a really bad day to view the Grand Canyon, and had it been the day we were going to hike down it, we would have not been able to. Yet the 3 down there had a few miles to go. It did not seem like an easy task. Two members started to head down the trail to meet the 3 on the trail. I really wanted to go, but it hurt an awful lot for me to walk, so for me to attempt to hike in my condition with how bad the weather was, would probably have been close to suicide.

We ordered lunch, and eventually the others returned. I was very excited to see them! The one who had the problems going up was extremely good natured about it all too. He did not complain or feel embarrassed, and I was pleased of that. Our "family" was at last back together. We spent the rest of the day driving back to Tucson, where we would spend one final day at the same hotel we were at the majority of the trip. The ride was I believe around 5 to 6 hours. We got back probably at around midnight. We stopped by a Jack in the Box and had dinner there. It was my first time there, and I thought the food wasn't bad for fast food.

The next day we would all be leaving home, so we took some time to reflect on our trip, all of us gathered in my room this time. We discussed various things which would include things like what was our biggest fear about going on the trip. It was a very heartfelt moment, and I am glad it happened. I went to bed extremely late, leaving just a couple of hours of sleep before I would have to wake up and begin my long journey back home.

Thursday, January 6th, 2008

---

If I thought my travel to Tucson was rough, this one would not be much better. We were running late that morning. When we got to the airport, to our shocked surprise, we were too late to catch our flight. I was no longer going to be flying at all with the 3 people I was with. One of us got on the next flight to Dallas, the other one got on the one after that, and the last one got on the flight to the same place awhile after that. They were all heading to Dallas, I was now going straight to Chicago. I originally was suppose to go to Dallas as well, but as it worked out I would get to fly on one fewer flight. After Chicago, I would be able to go straight to my final destination airport. From there I learned, I would go on an hour and a half drive to my home with my brother and a friend of his.

So for awhile it was just me and Harro waiting for our flights. I was leaving quite a bit later than the other 3. Poor Harro had to rebook his entire flight to Belgium, would have to spend overnight and over 24 hours in New York City, and be over a day late coming back to where he lived. I felt really sorry for him, but at the same time couldn't help to be concerned for myself. We were all put on standby, and I was a little worried I would have trouble getting out of Tucson. If I did get the flight, I would be able to get on the same plane home as originally planned. I eventually learned that it looked like I would have very little time to catch my plane home because my departure flight from Tucson was delayed about an hour. This of course got me more worried.

Shortly after Harro left, a bigger group of team members arrived to the airport. I had to leave shortly after they arrived, but it was nice to see them and say goodbye to all of them. I felt kind of funny, like I was some important person with all these people saying goodbye to me there.

Away I went on the flight to Chicago. I eventually arrived of course, and didn't have quite as many problems as I expected I would have catching my flight from there. I ended up with over an hour of time to catch my flight even. Eventually we landed! I was finally back home! I was relieved, exhausted and anxious all at the same time. By the time I got home it was just about midnight. I set up a little display of something for my mom to see when she woke up that included two rocks I got from the Grand Canyon, and other little SMF goodies I was given on the trip with a small note included with it all. I went to bed, about to go back to my routine patterns of everyday life.

MotM Days 4-6: The Adventure Continues

The Trip Continues On (Days 4-6)

• Monday, December 31st, 2007
• Tuesday, January 1st, 2008
• Sunday, January 2nd, 2008

Monday, December 31st, 2007

---

New Year's Eve had arrived. I was in my room the previous night alone, and set my alarm for 7:50 to be sure I would wake up on time for the meeting at 9. I took my shower and got dressed and then headed down to get my breakfast, a bowl of corn flakes. When I got there I saw Oldiesmann. When I sat down, juggling my laptop in its case and my bowl of cereal and cup of orange juice, I spilled some of the milk from my cereal on my pants! I went upstairs to get a change of pants and stayed up there for a little while as there weren't many people in the conference room yet due to me being early. As was becoming common, some team members stopped by my room, my room had become a little bit of a hangout area for me, JayBachatero, rickC, and jerm and others.

We had another meeting that was again, I felt, rather productive. Following the meeting the team went to the Kartchner Caverns and I was really excited! I don't really recall going to any real cave in my life. The drive to there wasn't too short and it was fun talking with some of the members up there. I progressively was getting much and much more comfortable with the team members. I exchanged some stupid jokes with pmp6nl during the ride. When we arrived to the state park of Kartchner Caverns, we first had a brown bag lunch of tamales. It was the first time I've had them and I didn't think they were all that bad. We waited around a bit and then split up into two separate tours, we would be going on two tours of the caverns during the trip, one called the Rotunda, and the other called the Big Room. The first one my group went through was the Rotunda. We traveled up in a long cart, and even that was pretty neat because of the beautiful view of the mountains and other sights around us. As we entered the caverns, it was, as we were warned, extremely humid. We had a really good tour guide, and immediately when I started to see what was inside I became rather excited.

What sights there were! It really is an amazing sight to see all the things the inner depths of a cave have to offer, it just has a magical little touch that nothing outside of it seems all that similar to.

Two team members late at night are dead tired on New Year's Eve
Image from photo gallery

Monday, January 1st, 2008

---

So the first day of a new year had begun, a new year of my life had just arrived, and it was exciting to be where I was to start off a fresh year. I grew more homesick around this time however, and started to miss my family more and more. When I woke up, it was around 10, as we were allowed to sleep in later than usual. I took my shower and shortly later, rickC came with a breakfast from Carl's Jr for me, which was rather nice of him I thought. Although later we ended up going to a breakfast restaurant, but because of the time it served more as brunch for most of the members anyway. I got an all you can eat buffet and took quite a lot of food. Bacon, scrambled eggs, a croissant, you name it. I sat next to Gazmanafc and we talked for awhile. While in the restaurant jerm talked about the support on SMF, and what direction he would like that to head.

Later on as we got back to our hotel and we did our TalkShoe show. We immediately ran into problems connecting our computers from the same place all at once and eventually just ended up passing a phone around to most of the members who talked on the show. The show admittedly did not go as well as we would have liked and I couldn't really hear what people on the other end were saying when they called in. I participated once in the discussion talking about some of the new things I liked in SMF 2.0 but I wasn't really prepared and was confused and distracted about what was going on around me so I stumbled a bit and stated only a few "big" features that are going to be in the software like post moderation, and the moderation center.

Sometime after our TalkShow meeting, we held a regular meeting, our last real official one and it was my turn to talk, being the representative for documentation and with a small team I was expected to talk and didn't want to disappoint the team, so I tried to bring up important issues and thoughts. I had my agenda for my little speech prepared on a little piece of paper and I think I did an okay job presenting it, I didn't really get nervous at all, and probably just a year ago I would have broken down in sweats doing something similar to what I just did. The team brought up some important things as well and one thing was brought up that I had forgotten to mention but was a rather important topic.

Later on that night we went out to get Italian for dinner. What I got was quite good! I ordered a plate of ziti. I often cook homemade ziti back at home, so I rather liked it. Again we had some nice communication at the table, throwing in some laughs along the way. When we got back to the hotel, several of us hung out in the same room again and we set up one of our team member's Wii gaming console and had a lot of fun playing Wii Sports. I did horrible in the bowling game, won in the baseball game 1-0 and didn't do too great on the golf one but didn't end up doing so bad in ranking.

Later that night I switched rooms with another team member so that two of our members who had to fly out early the next morning would be able to share the same room. I got to room with jerm. I thought jerm was cool though and we talked about some random stuff and joked around a bit before we both went to bed. On the TV was some show about some man who weighed more than 1000 lbs, but I wasn't really watching it myself. Right before I went to bed I thought about my family and how much I missed them. While I was having a great time, I was definitely looking forward to seeing them again.

Tuesday, January 2nd, 2008

---

Today was the day we had to leave our hotel. We were heading out to the Grand Canyon, a long 6 hour drive would await us. When I woke up I took my shower and finished packing my luggage. It took us awhile for the rest of the team to all get together, but eventually we did and we all left. Part of the time waiting, jerm turned on the TV and we watched some of an episode of Saved by the Bell, those who watched some of it laughed at all the stupid stuff that was on the show. When it was finally time to leave, somehow we managed to squeeze our luggage into the back of our van, and of course there was quite a lot!

We went out to a place to eat that served breakfast and lunch and it kind of reminded me of the place we went to yesterday. I ordered a plate that had a mix of scrambled eggs, home fries, cheese, and some other ingredients. It was rather good, and I was fairly hungry at the time. Not unlike the other times we ate, we had some nice discussion about various things. At one point we stopped by a small gas station store and a few of our team members decided to buy themselves 52 oz drinks that had all kinds of weird smoothie flavors. I wasn't very interested in having one at the moment, but I admit with all the colorful flavors it had to offer, it did seem fairly appealing! I don't know how they did it, but appeared that most of them managed to drink all of the drink too!

The drive felt rather, and I was fairly tired through much of it. The AC sort of blew into my eyes and made me really want to close them. I did every so often, as did some other members. JayBachatero was sitting in front of me, and when he looked back we both kept making funny looks at each other (think of winks and nods and you get a good idea of what it was like). Closer to the Grand Canyons, JayBachatero pulled out his PSP, and he, jerm, pmp6nl and I played some home run derby on a baseball video game he brought. Eventually we reached our hotel, it had become too dark to view the Grand Canyon at the time. We entered the hotel and I was roomed with JayBachatero. We had some nachos and tacos for dinner in one of the rooms and the rest of the time we sort of did our own things, either alone by ourself, or with a group of some of us. I spent some time in a few various rooms of team members, but then did get to my own room, where I wrote much of this blog right here. Not too much else happened, JayBachatero came to the room, and we talked for a little while. The internet was working really poorly and it was real hard to access any page online. I was really excited about going down to see the Grand Canyon in person. The experience I am sure will be simply amazing and naturally I have heard good things about the Grand Canyon from various people. For the first time in the whole trip, I went to bed at a fairly reasonable hour to help catch up on sleep that I really needed.

MotM Days 1-3 (plus pre-meeting thoughts)

Pre Trip (Preparing for the trip)

• Midnight Thursday, December 27th, 2007
• Thursday, December 27th, 2007

The Trip Begins (Days 1-3)

• Friday, December 28th, 2007
  
  • Finally in Tucson
• Saturday, December 29th, 2007
• Sunday, December 30th, 2007

Hello everyone! With the trip to Tucson underway, I want to document my experience to the best of my ability. It will help me remember it better in years to come, it will be a nice thing to show to future children of mine, and I thought it would be a nice thing to share my experiences with the entire SMF community here, my family, and my friends. I have decided two things right from the start in writing this. First, I am going to write it in a sense, like a story, so it may seem more formal than a normal blog would typically be. I also am going to try my best to not get too silly throughout it which I have had the tendency to do in the past. However, I want to capture the mood of the trip to the best of my ability, so if a lot of the time we are having a fun time, telling jokes for instance, I will try to capture the essence of such times in my accounts of the trip.

Midnight Thursday, December 27th, 2007 (Late at night)

---

Tomorrow is the big day, the day I have been looking forward to for months. I set myself out to Tucson to meet the people I have worked with for years, some who almost feel like family to me. I sat in my chair, past midnight, and I felt anxious, yet I was excited. I had just finished doing a little exercising, perhaps in part in an effort to calm my nerves a little bit. I knew that at the point of waking up, my countdown to the first plane I would board would be about 24 hours. 24 hours until my adventure would begin. Could I bring myself to sleep I wondered, or would the excitement swallow me in? I just continued to sit there on my laptop, but why? Was there anything stopping me from sleeping? I figured it was the excitement. As the time drained down some more I finally decided to wrap things up, I shut down my laptop, and made my way upstairs to my room. I plopped myself on to my bed, turned off my light, set my alarm (just the usual routine), and shut my eyes, followed by some routine prayers that I make every night. Would I sleep alright that night?

Thursday, December 27th, 2007 (Past 7PM)

---

The previous night came and went by. I did not sleep particularly well. I scrambled about trying to get all my things together, my mom offered in a hand. I had my suitcase selected and cleaned the night before, and had started loading my laptop bag with certain tech devices that could come in handy at some point, my old Nintendo DS, an old handheld PC, some seasons of television shows on DVD and anything else I came across that could be of use to me. I was waiting for my nephew, sister and brother-in-law to arrive to my home, they were coming in from my brother-in-law's family's house where they had celebrated Christmas. It had been awhile since I last saw my sister and nephew, and much longer since I last saw my brother-in-law. I had not eaten any dinner yet, my mother and I were waiting for them all to arrive and then we would get some pizza. On my laptop now, my sister phones in to announce that they are in Ithaca, meaning they will be home in minutes. I am excited to see them, albeit for a very short while. I was thankful that they would be driving me to the airport early in the morning the next day. It was really nice seeing my nephew again and the big smiles he had to offer me. I gave him the Christmas gift I had bought for him, and he did play with it a little bit! I knew I would definitely be missing him when I left, among of course all of my family as well.

Friday, December 28th, 2007

---

The day was here, the big day, and I felt its presence, the magnitude of all that was about to happen, with a strong excited state of mind. I woke up at around 6, left my house at around 8. When I arrived to the airport and got to the security checkpoint, I was now on my own. I boarded my plane leaving Syracuse to Chicago at around the scheduled time, however after about an hour or so waiting on the plane, they made us all get out. The weather in Chicago was looking bad, and they were canceling and delaying a lot of flights. A few hours later, we finally departed Syracuse, many hours late. When we landed in Chicago, I started to get nervous as to what I would do. The plane I was suppose to have left on apparently left on schedule or close enough to it. So I was stuck there, and for one of the first times in my life, I was entirely on my own, left to take care of my own problem all by myself. And with a sense of confidence, I became determined I would get through this hurdle in one piece.

Shortly after arriving to Chicago, I called an 800 number for rebooking flights. After what seemed like 15 minutes, the person on the phone said there was simply no openings for the Tucson flight leaving Chicago at 8:25. However, the person booked me a flight to Phoniex that was to leave at the same time. I then called a team member who was helping coordinate the meeting and told them about my situation. I was told that I should get on standby for the flight to Tucson, in case an opening showed up. When I went to the desk to ask about getting a standby, I waited about 30 minutes or so as a woman working there was trying to find any possible connections to Tucson. Things seemed doubtful, but all of a sudden there was an opening for the flight to Tucson! I was beyond relieved.

After waiting a few hours, I boarded my flight and then we left. The flight took almost 4 hours and time did not go by very fast for me. It was interesting to see all the different people on the flight. Many of them seemed generally like nice people, and I could possibly get a small sense of what type of person some of the people were. I became quite tired, and had my eyes closed for much of the flight, but couldn't get myself to sleep, nor did I particularly want to fall asleep then. The flight finally landed...

I was finally in Tucson, at long last!
I went down to baggage claim to get my luggage. I phoned in the same team member again and two people picked me up in a matter of a few minutes. After a little drive we drove to the hotel. I got out of the car and then came a bit of a surprise. I heard some noises from above, I looked up, and there looking down from the balcony were the team members of SMF who attended the meeting, almost to its entirety, except for a few people. It was a little awkward to say the least! Since I was the last member to arrive that day, they kind of put me on the spot right then. They had me guess what username belonged to each person there. I guessed a lot of them wrong! JayBachatero and I ended up being roommates and we had a pretty nice discussion about various things (mainly related to SMF) until quite late at night, and it was really nice getting to know Jay more. Of course the discussion did eventually turn around to a brief bit on girls as was anticipated. JayBachatero inquired about whether I ever asked out any of the girls I liked. With a big geek smile I told him that I had not done any such thing (I'm a chicken and a little ugly, you'll see my pics soon enough to determine that ).

Saturday, December 29th, 2007

---

I woke up at around 8:30 in the morning after the phone in our room rang, it was one of the team members trying to wake me and Jay up. We were running a little late, and Jay took his shower quickly and almost right after him I took mine. We went down and peered in the conference room where we were holding our first meeting. Most of the team members were already there! We first went to get a quick breakfast though before going back to the conference room. The meeting was a productive one and we covered some important matters (Not going to go into detail, especially since a lot of the material needs to be confidential). After the meeting Jay and I along with a couple other members went to the Carl's Jr. right next to our hotel. The food there was not much different from McDonald's. After some time of a lot of us hanging out in the same room, we eventually drove out to go to the Desert Museum. The experience there was really quite amazing for me. I have not been to that many museums in my life, and it was a pleasure to see some of the things the museum had to offer, especially things I would not see back at home! We saw live snakes first, contained in there own little simulated habitat, and saw much more, including animals like mountain lions and bobcats. Towards the end, we saw Prairie Dogs. I thought they were really cute and did a lot of funny things!

The Prairie dogs, aren't they so cute?
Image from photo gallery

Later on we went out to get some food. I had some nice discussions with the members at my table, and it was overall a lot of fun. We cracked out several jokes but also did discuss various SMF issues at hand, and our own little stories involving certain things about our experiences with SMF. We joked about handing out SMF cards that we were given, to girls. Wouldn't that be great I thought, if I could hand out my SMF card to girls with my number on it and have the girl actually reach me back? Whether it actually had to do with SMF, or the girl just liked me! One of these days, I thought, I will hand out a few of these cards, but it will be as a joke and I'll probably just end up handing them out mainly to my friends at home.

Later on that night in our room, Jay and I discussed a project we had started working on a long time ago. At the same time I was working on writing some of the blog, which I had little time to write the entire day.

Sunday, December 30th, 2007

---

My second full day in Tucson started fairly similar to how the first day did. I woke up, took my shower, and went down to the conference room for our second meeting. When it came time for me to do some talking about my experiences with SMF and why I wanted to become a team member, I think I stumbled a little bit. I sometimes have a problem coming out with the right words on the spot, but I don't think it went too badly. The meeting was a rather interesting one in getting to know the team members a little more. We eventually went to a place to get subs, and I got myself a meatball sub, and sat with rickC and JayBachatero to discuss our little secret project we were working on. I felt we covered some decent ground on that.

Later in that day we went to Old Tucson Studios, and boy was that quite something for me. I really loved it! It had a lot of cool Western props and such and was used a long time ago to film 100s of old Western movies. There was a lot to see there. We came across some women working there and it was rather hilarious when a few of the team members talked to them, one of them handing them one of our SMF cards. As the idea behind SMF was being explained, it was funny looking at one of their reactions as it clearly seemed they had no idea what we were talking about, but tried to play along with us. They were rather friendly to us, but it comes from the nature of their work. We snapped some pictures early on, and went through a few of the stores there.

Team member with two of the workers at Old Tucson
Image from photo gallery

One of the highlights of the visit was getting a picture of several of us together, dressed in various customes. The picture ended up looking pretty cool and funny, with a lot of us doing something silly. I had myself a toy gun!

Near the end of our visit at Old Tucson, we went through a little horror ride called the "Iron Door Mine Adventure." It was almost scary at certain parts, but I was laughing quite a lot the entire way through, it was funny! The ending was really neat, there was a bridge with a special illusion of lighting on the wall around it that made it look like the bridge really was spinning around like a vortex as we walked by it, it was quite neat. We even ended up going through it again, but the second time was a breeze for me and we all went through it much quicker that time. Also near the end we saw a little Western show put out for us with actors and it was really quite funny and definitely amusing. People kept getting shot, and didn't die very easily though!

One of the strange things popping out on us during the horror ride
Image from photo gallery

We ate dinner after the visit to Old Tucson, and that was also fun talking to the members at our long table, this time there was probably far more horseplay than SMF discussion, a lot of us just had a lot of fun there and continued to get to know each other better. When we returned back to our hotel, I had a pretty nice discussion with BlackMage about various concerns both of us had. As I got to my room at long last, I started working much more on blogging the experiences I have had thus far. Around that time I started thinking about the team members that came on the trip and felt overall that I really rather liked them all. Everyone of them seemed rather nice and respectful. And in the end, not all of them were quite as geeky as one may expect (that does not mean some of them were a tad bit geeky to say the least ).

I went to bed a tired man, yet was able to reflect in my head some of the experiences that I had had so far, even if my drowsy head could hardly think coherently.