The worst manufacturer’s website I’ve seen? Mitsubishi! Who the heck sold them this thing? I’m looking through a keyhole at the information. The nav buttons are scattered everywhere. The sliding screen makes me dizzy. Additional nav pops up and covers half of my keyhole site picture. All I want to see is a good picture of the rear seat legroom. Absolutely maddening!

So, with a casual thought, I checked the wireless coverage map to see how many far-off places I could visit while downloading to my new e-reader. What I found was, although I could enjoy lightning-fast 3G downloads while visiting our Choroa Safaris office in Arusha, Tanzania, I would have to drive over an hour north of my small, but cosmopolitan town of Bend, Oregon, to reach the edge of the worst coverage. Nice.

Kindle…sometimes works better in remote eastern Africa, than sitting at a Starbucks on a major US highway.

At least they talked me out of spending $259.

Whatever the reason, it happened again. I was helping Laura with some graphics for her blog, and what I needed was a good vector graphics editor. I often use Gimp for most of my graphics needs (another awesome open source program), but for the intricacies of these particular graphics, raster just wasn’t going to cut it.

A quick read through some bulletin postings, and I found Inkscape. Still in its relative infancy, this program was able to take a raster copy of the graphic I was trying to duplicate and quickly traced it into a multilayer vector image that I could easily manipulate.

Like most full-featured graphics programs, the litany of tools and options will take me weeks to explore, but that’s half the fun. The other half is, of course, turning out cool, clean vector graphics.

There are a number of different options today, in large part thanks to the greater capacities in storage media. However, my favorite option right now doesn’t even use storage media. (Well, not in the traditional sense you’d think of.) Mozy.com will back up an unlimited amount of data from your home pc utilizing nothing more than your internet connection. You just download a small application, checkbox the folders you want backed up, and it does the rest automatically. If you’re doubtful as to how easy this can really be, they’ll let you backup up to 2Gig of your files for free. That’s the service package I’ve been using, and I’m really a fan.

Now, I normally do not like anything with a monthly recurring fee (it’s like being pecked to death by a duck), but I think that unlimited backup for $4.95/month isn’t bad. On an annualized basis, I’d probably spend more than that on any other solution. Maybe not in dollars, but certainly in time and fuss. They even offer a nice discount for those that would pay for a year or more up front (as I will.)

Cheapest Flights from Redmond – FareCompare.com – Airfare Comparison Engine.

Long ago, I saw a website that allowed you to pan around the globe looking at the cheapest fares from a particular departure point. I think it used Google’s API, and my best guess is it was an early version of Kayak. I’ve many times looked for that site, but to no avail. Now I have FareCompare. Not quite able to look at the whole world at once, but I’ll get over it..eventually.

More recently it has provided a platform for the BuddyPress social networking plugin that, quite impressively, offers average users the opportunity to host their own Facebook-like social network. (OK, it doesn’t have that many features, but it’s still pretty darn impressive.) In literally just a few minutes, you can have an install of WordPress Mu (a version of WordPress that allows multiple blogs to be hosted and administered by the same system) and BuddyPress working beautifully together.

Oh, if it were only that simple. What I have said so far is, of course, true…assuming you don’t want forums within this new site. BuddyPress accommodates forums as part of its feature set, but to actually get the forums running you have to install bbPress. That alone is as easy as the rest. bbPress is a forum package written by the WordPress guys, and it possesses the same ease of installation and clean, well thought out, administration. But here’s the rub. You have to get everything talking to each other. And that my friend is no small feat.

You need to hook get bbPress using the WordPress user table, link the cookies through a variety of authorization keys and salts, enable xml-rpc, insert some code in both your WordPress config file and your bbPress config file (although many argue what exactly this should say), download and install a variety of plugins into both WordPress and bbPress and activate them, go in an create some new directories that were not created in any of the installs and move some files to them which erroneously get placed in other locations with no apparent explanation, and the list goes on and on. You carefully do all of this. Check-marking each step in detailed sequence. All to find that you’re now throwing a dozen header errors and can no longer log into your admin. The closest I have come so far is being able to post in bbPress and read the posts in BuddyPress, but not being able to post the other direction or reply to any of the posts.

Enter Trent Adams. While others have shunned us fools, like me, that still cannot seem to get our forums working, Trent has spent countless hours trying to figure out why we can’t get it right. He’s like the Mother Theresa of the Holy Trinity (WordPress, BuddyPress, bbPress) install. And if his actions ever contribute to my eventual success in this endeavor, then my Nobel vote goes surely to him.

PS- I hear that getting these systems working together is painlessly simple to those that understand it. I’m thinking some one with a free Saturday and a PayPal account to make a quick $1,000 at $50 a piece. I’d gladly spend the money.