I have never understood the excitement behind Drupal install profiles. They purport to cut development time significantly and bring Drupal closer to the masses. Kris at The Worx Company calls them "a game changer for the entire CMS market." The patterns project has been long in development to provide platform to deploy install profiles to multiple sites.

Over the last two years, I've been realizing how similar poker, business, and life are. Here are 5 nuggets of wisdom I've been noodling on:

1. Don't operate from a position of fear
Fear is a natural reaction to the unknown. Fear of failure, fear of the unknown, fear of disappointing people, the fear that you might go broke -- these are all pretty normal things to be afraid of. But when you start making decisions out of fear, your judgement gets tainted by that fear. When you get to a tough decision, ask yourself, "how is the fear of X affecting this?"

The wife and I flew to San Diego last weekend for my buddy Christian's wedding. We left on Thursday evening for the Friday rehearsal; we booked 4 roundtrip tickets on United from SFO to San Diego, and an additional 2 one-way tickets from SD to SFO, as we were flying back with some more friends.

Flying out of SFO, the 1 hour trip was easy -- until we tried to land. All of a sudden it felt like we were falling out of the sky, then we nosed up and took off out of there FAST. The captain came on and said there was too much fog to land the 737-200, so we were going to LAX.

In almost every job I've had -- from Staples in high school to WorkHabit now -- someone's told me to "act like an owner." It's this big push about building company culture and getting employees to do more than clock in at 8 and clock out at 5, there are at least a few books written on it. I'm not exactly sure where I stand on this concept, but I'm leaning toward "it's total BS." First, I don't have access to the company's books or cashflow, so any financial decisions are right out the window. I don't have access to client projects that aren't mine, so decisions about those are out.

Last week I paid for my coffee with a $100 bill and got shorted $10. I doubt the cashier was risking getting fired over $10, so I have to assume she just didn't know how to count change. This morning, a cashier at Arco surprised the crap out of me and counted back my change properly. It doesn't seem to be related to the "classiness" of the shop, or even the age of the cashier -- properly counting back change has somehow become a lost art.

If you're reading this post, you probably have an idea of what World of Warcraft (WoW) is -- the most successful massively multiplayer online roleplaying game of all time. Blizzard claims more than 11 million subscribers (!) but the real number is estimated to be somewhere around 5 million (still !!!) To cut right to the point: I'm just not having fun anymore.