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Colorado is not known as a rainy place, but in the spring and summer months we do get our fair share of downpours — especially in the mountains. This past spring my good friend Libby and her man Reid took off to Central America. But before they went, they were kind enough to hook me up with a great a-line rain skirt!

The Rain Skirt Story - at least as I know it

A while ago Libby made herself a rain skirt. The idea was simple - skirts are so useful and keep cool even on hot days. When you’re wearing a cute skirt, how do you make sure that it stays dry? Why not combine her favorite piece of clothing with some protective goodness and a lot of time at a sewing machine trying out different designs to come up with the ultimate wet weather wearable? So, she did. Libby’s rain skirt made her extremely happy and led to lots of envious looks from friends who had uncomfrotable rain pants or drenched legs when their long jacket failed to protect them fully. So, Libby started thinking about making them for other folks.

The Rain Skirt Evolution

Libby has thought a lot about the best way to bring Rain Skirts to the masses. She knows that she needs them to be professional, that’s for certain. So, she started exploring vendors that make outdoor apparel and found a great company that creates lots of items for some of the big brands. They went back and forth with ideas for designs - both to make them more functional and more fashionable.

Rain Skitrs are Born

I recently attended a training that Kevin Kempter hosted. It was a really great two night session aimed at experienced DBAs/Developers so that they could learn PostgreSQL. Kevin has a lot of experience with postgres and wanted to help share that experience with other folks. He’s finding a growing need for PgSQL developers in the Denver area and wants to build up a user group and network here so that companies deciding whether to use PostgreSQL or not will see an available local talent pool here in Colorado.

PostgreSQL for my uses in Drupal

His presentation was thorough and well prepared showing Kevin’s experience and knowledge of the subject. Personally it wasn’t clear to me that PostgreSQL would be better for my needs than MySQL. In some quick tests MySQL was about twice as fast in my benchmarking of a local drupal site (using ab -c2 -n1000). I tried a couple different settings inside of drupal (cache enabled or not) and MySQL was consistently quite a bit faster. Kevin seemed to feel that PostgreSQL by default isn’t very fast, but with tuning it can be much faster. However, you can always tune the database and get many times better performance - so if you tune both PostgreSQL and MySQL then which one will be faster - it’s hard to say?

Either way I was very please to learn a lot more. PostgreSQL’s need for vacuuming seems like a real pain - but apparently autovacuum is on its way to take care of this automatically.

PostgreSQL Training and Services in Denver

If you are interested in training or services with PostgreSQL in or near Denver, I definitely recommend getting in touch with Kevin.

Well, I didn’t have any idea two months ago when I first wrote about www.angieslist.com that it would have quite such a strong reaction. There have been about 50 comments on the post and it has been growing daily. Yikes.

My friend Michael Hawley started doing Real Estate in Salida, Colorado a little while ago. If you don’t know, Salida is located at the exit (Salida means exit in Spanish) of a high mountain plain in Colorado that includes Buena Vista, Poncha Springs, and several other cities. It’s the “banana belt” of Colorado meaning that temperatures in Salida remain pretty moderate all winter long. There’s still skiing at Monarch - one of the few low price, low pressure, high quality ski mountains left in Colorado and snow-shoeing and other activities aplenty all winter. But you can also ride your mountain bike on a nice winter day.

Mike is a really great guy and I definitely recommend him for any Salida real estate needs. And really, if you’re looking for mountain living in Colorado it’s hard to think of a better location than Salida.

Our good friends Kaycie Rosen and her fiancee Steve Grigel just moved down to Colorado after spending a few years living in Anchorage. We’re really excited to have them around again and, perhaps even more exciting, is that Kaycie is a Naturopathic Doctor and just opened the doors of her own Holistic Medicine Clinic in Golden, Colorado.

I’m a big believer in small business in general and of course in healthy lifestyles so seeing a medical clinic using a holistic approach so close to me in Denver is a really great thing. Kaycie had a ribbon cutting ceremony which included some delicious foods. She has also shared these recipes on her website such as this Quinoa Salad Recipe - both healthy and delicious!

She’s going to be writing more about Holistic Living in Golden Colorado in her blog, so you may want to subscribe to the RSS Feed or the newsletter.

Welcome, Kaycie and Steve!

Living in Denver’s Baker Neighborhood is interesting for me - there are many many artistic people who choose this neighborhood which makes the landscaping, home painting, home architecture really neat. The other benefit is that lots of my neighbors are artists and grahpic designers - handy when I do web development.

2 Fold Studio - Graphic Design and Art Instruction

A friend and naighbor of mine has recently expanded her work and updated her website. The company is 2 Fold Studio and it’s run by Lisa Scheideler. The two major offerings are all sorts of Graphic Design kinds of work and also Art Instruction. She’s planning to offer an art studio in the summer of 2007 which should be really neat for folks in the neighborhood.