In less than two weeks from today, I’ll be leaving St. Jean Pied de Port, France and starting my 800 kilometre journey to Santiago de Compostela. People keep asking me if I’m excited, and a small part of me at this point definitely is. But I typically don’t start feeling real excitement or butterflies until I’m on the airplane heading to my destination. The Camino de Santiago, Puente la Reina. Photo by aherrero on Flickr (http://tinyurl.com/hvgyl3m). I have most of the logistics for my trip figured out, including a late night shuttle from Biarritz, France to St. Jean, and a nice bed and ...

While I still have roughly two months before I head to St. Jean Pied de Port, France to start the Camino de Santiago pilgrimage, I have been focusing a lot of time recently with packing. I’d like to start being able to do some practice walks with a full pack shortly, which means I need to get my pack to roughly the same weight as it will be when I arrive. Of course, I could just fill it with rocks for now, but since I already have many of the items with me at home, I thought I’d just finish buying what I need and have it done ahead of time. As a rule of thumb, most people try to bring around ...

In about 90 days, I’m heading to London, England, to spend my birthday. As you get older, birthdays become less and less important I find, certainly not enough to warrant a huge drunk at the bar. So I thought this year I would spend my birthday in another country, hopefully meeting a few new people and maybe exploring the countryside. A few days after my birthday, I’m heading to Spain to start the Camino de Santiago, a famous Christian pilgrimage that ends in the city of Santiago, Spain. Historically many people attempted the long walk as penance for their sins, but nowadays people walk it ...

Anyone who has attempted to design a website before knows that not all browsers are created equal. In terms of web development, a lot of my time goes into making a website work on Internet Explorer 6, since many people still used it even though it is hopeless broken with regards to being standards compliant. To help make browsers more compliant, several initiates have emerged over the last few years. The first is an effort by the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) to have the source code for websites validate against W3C standards. While several exist, most developers attempt to conform to TRANSITIONAL ...