This weekend is DrupalCamp Colorado 2009.

I use Drupal for several websites I have built.

Daughter Amanda and I went to a Denver Drupal Users Group meeting 18 months ago.  Since there were several Drupal “newbies” the group kept it basic.  I understood about half of what they talked about.  We decided this group was way too technical for my level of use.

Last summer I went to DrupalCamp Colorado 2008.  It was a great experience.  A highlight was a presentation from Warsaw, done via remote access and Skype, and done by a 14 year old.  There were enough non-technical sessions to make it a very worthwhile experience.

So I’m looking forward to learning new things about Drupal.

Microsoft’s Excel 2007 added an amazing new command not present in previous versions, Remove Duplicate Data (its just right of center on the Data ribbon).

Removing duplicate data before 2007 involved either Visual Basic programming or a manual comparison after sorting the data.  Both solutions are time consuming (and error prone in the case of manual comparison).

Remove Duplicate Data can search unsorted tables with thousands of rows in less than a second, pulling any duplicates that match in every column, or in a user defined group of columns.

However, Remove Duplicate Data is scary.  You click on the button, decide what columns must match, and almost instantaneously its done.  Your only confirmation is the number of rows deleted.

I know Excel 2010 is about to be released to early testing, so here’s my wish list of improvements to Remove Duplicate Data in order of difficulty to implement:

I got an ASUS eeePC 900A for $150 and have been playing with it.

With only a 4 GB SSD "hard drive" it doesn't have a large capacity.

I can see why so many have been returned and show up now as refurbished units, after about half the updates that were downloaded automatically when I booted the machine, it was out of disk space so the rest of the updates wouldn't install (and the error message wasn't clear why, just it wouldn't work).

I reformatted the SSD and installed an eeePC Ubuntu configuration with Open Office 3.1 and have about 900MB left.

I'll also install Windows XP (without a lot of options) on a SD card so I can dual boot either to Windows or Linux

I got a DXG 581V in February, just in time for a trip to Bangkok!

It is amazing.  1080p, and so tiny…

DXG 581V

I have to admit that up until now I’ve pretty much viewed flash memory as a commodity that is purchased largely on price.  I also have been very lucky, I haven’t had a flash memory failure that included any information or pictures.  If I got a bad memory card (or drive), it either didn’t work from the start or it worked fine as long as I used it.

So I was a little surprised when a 4 GB SDHC card I put in the DXG581V worked for a little while then gave me a memory error when I was recording a video.  I tried reformatting the card and that worked fine.  The card worked in another camera.  But after 10 seconds in the DXG581V I got the error.  Another SD card worked fine.

When I thought about the “failure” on the flight home it dawned on me what the issue was.  1080p video is a lot more data per second than a digital still or 640x480 video I’ve recorded before.  My memory errors weren’t a failure in the card, they were the result of the SD card not being able to keep up.

I saw a Google Blog post about their new toolbar labs.

Since I love the Google Toolbar in Firefox and less frequently Internet Explorer, I clicked on the link while in Firefox.  I got an interesting message so I opened Google Chrome and tried the same URL, that’s when I got this:

Ok, I know Chrome isn’t supported by Google Toolbar (which I find odd because I love my bookmarks and autofill), but still to have a message that the toolbar is only available for Microsoft Internet Explorer…