I lived on the same street as my elementary school for third and fourth grade so I would often pass the school in the afternoon as I went about my various activities. There was a white iron fence in front of the school separating the sidewalk from the grass. The paint was chipped and worn and a few of the white metal balls on top of the square posts were missing. It was on one such post that a friend of mine told me existed a secret message. He brought me over to the post and silently gestured toward it. I moved closer to see what was there, and read the following handwritten poem in black ink.

I was here but now I’m gone
I left my name to carry on
Those who knew me, knew me well
Those who didn’t can go to heck (use your imagination here)

To our young minds it was mysterious and intriguing. We wondered who had written it. Visions of a suicidal teenager, drifting from place to place and angry at the world, came to mind. Where had he gone? Why had he written it there? Did he hope someone like us would find it? Was it a cry for help? Should we respond to the message?

We talked about it for a long time, finally agreeing that it was an unsolved mystery, but it was ours to ponder. We felt grown up and important to have discovered it and I even considered the possibility of being called into court as key witnesses in the case of a missing person.

Years later, I still have a vivid memory of that breezy summer evening when my friend showed me the poem. The late afternoon day had begun to darken by the time I walked slowly home, mesmerized by the poem and the mystery behind it.

Now that I’m older and looking back, I realize it was probably written by some local kid, alive and well, who was bored while he waited for his mother to pick him up from school. He had probably heard the poem somewhere else and thought it would be fun to pull out his magic marker and write it down.

It takes an active imagination to make such a seemingly inane occurrence seem almost magical, and I miss those days where simple things could produce such a heightened sense of adventure and mystique. Even now, I sometimes wonder if there was anything more to the story. Maybe our imaginations weren’t so far off the mark and it really was as we had envisioned.

To this day I remember that afternoon with fondness, and though I’ll probably never know the real story, I still enjoy thinking about what might have been.

Firefox 1.0 has been released, get it while it’s hot. Oddly enough, the default start page is a customized Firefox page on Google. I wonder what’s cooking there…

I just found out about an incredible looking open source CMS called Mambo.

They’ve been nominated as the Best Free Software Project in the 2004 Linux Format Awards (which I hadn’t heard of before but if you’re a Linux user you would probably enjoy voting), and from the short time I’ve looked at their product, I can see why. It’s remarkable.

You can try it out by managing the demo site. You just log in to the administration page (even the login page looks great) with username: admin, password: admin, and away you go.

You can also demo dozens of other CMSs at OpenSourceCMS (including Mambo) to get a feel for how they work before you spend time installing them yourself.

I’m just floored at how complete and professional Mambo appears, and yet it’s free. It feels like a high-end, super-expensive CMS that would be used by big web sites. In fact, on Mambo’s front page they say Porsche of Brazil uses Mambo to manage their site. It looks nothing like the demo templates which tells me it’s customizable. They say that the US Porsche site is not powered by Mambo, although I think it looks great the way it is.

Anyway, back to Mambo. I highly recommend you try out the demo and change things around. You have full administrative privileges to manage the site, so you can do almost anything. I created a poll, wrote a news flash, changed the template of the site and poked around in several other areas to get a feel for it and as you can tell, I was very impressed.

I followed a long and winding road to find out about Mambo, but I’m glad I found it. It started by reading William’s post about how much he liked Total Choice Hosting. I looked at their hosting plans to see what they offered and was impressed, but then I remembered looking at Blue Host a while ago which had an even better deal than TCH, but I wasn’t sure if they were a reliable web hosting provider. I looked around for people who were using BlueHost and came across a post at Huddled Masses asking if BlueHost was a good hosting service (others seem to like their service) and mentioned in passing that Mambo was an amazing CMS, so I took a look. I’m glad I did.

I feel like creating a brand new site about something just so I can use Mambo and find out if its functionality lives up to its user interface.