JuliaKM.com

Yesterday, I biked further than I ever thought possible. I took part on the 3rd Cup 'n' Cone Tour, which is part of the MS 150 training series. With friends from Godiva and Crystal's MS 150 training group, we biked from Cary to Chapel Hill in search of ice-cream. There was Maple View Farm ice-cream at the half-way point and Goodberry's ice-cream custard at the end. Strangely enough, my legs aren't tired a day later; just my thumbs. I am guessing that my crazy death grip on my handlebars wore out my thumbs.

Eric and I have spent the last couple days in New Hampshire mourning the loss of his grandmother, Lavinia Thomson. During the service, the topic of community was frequently mentioned. Lavinia, who the family called Nana, lived on a main road and could often be seen waving from a chair on her lawn at passing cars and chatting with neighbors. It is amazing to think that this small act brightened the day of so many passing motorists.

Before most people hit the snooze button on their alarms, Crystal and I ran 11 miles yesterday. I woke up at 5 a.m. and met her at Rock Quarry Park. Except for some patches of running through the darkened woods, the run felt easy. We even discovered a fantastic new drinking fountain hidden by the tennis courts at Duke.

Since graduating, I have been on a hunt for reasonable health insurance. It has been a frustrating process. First, due to an obscure IRS code, I found out that I could not join my husband's plan at Duke until January. Next, Assurant Health made me an offer that would make Michael Moore proud.

One of my first frustrations with Drupal was that I could not seem to get the search module to work. I searched my new Drupal site again and again and was irked to find that each search returned the unhelpful response, "Your search yielded no results."

After searching the forums, I realized out that the search module only works if you have set up a cron job on your server for cron.php. The easiest way to do this via Dreamhost is to go to the control panel (panel.dreamhost.com). Here are the steps to take once there:

Although Wordpress has served me well, I decided that it might be fun to try and rebuild my site using Drupal. For the most part, switching has been easy. I started off with a version on my local computer using MAMP and then transitioned to my Dreamhost account. Dreamhost's databases are slow running Wordpress, and seem to be just as slow running Drupal. But, I didn't expect a speedier site with Drupal.

I had my first run-in with the paparazzi yesterday while visiting my family in Los Angeles. My friend Erika and I were waiting outside a local breakfast place for a table and all of a sudden we saw three guys with huge camera lenses chasing a woman into her car. It was like a horror movie come to life. Erika explained that the celebrity was a woman from Desperate Housewives.

I graduated from SILS yesterday with a Master's of Science in Information Science. In addition to learning a ton about user interface design and web development over the past two years, I have learned a lot about things to do with out-of-town guests in the Durham/Chapel Hill area. All of the activities listed are affordable on a student budget.

Places to Eat: