IT Infusion Inc.

My Dad just bought a new Apple iMac and we wanted to upgrade him to 4GB or RAM since he’ll be using VMWare Fusion quite extensively. There was an option to upgrade to 4GB at the point of sale, but it was a $900+ upgrade so we decided to do it later. I hadn’t priced out RAM in a while, but I was sure that $900+ was ridiculous. It was, but I had no idea how ridiculous…

So we head over to Memory Express in Calgary to get a price on 2 x 2GB DDR2 667 SODIMMs for a 2.4GHz iMac. The guy at the till says “that’ll be $140″. Okay, so $280 for 4GB of RAM seems like an okay price. I mean I can remember when I would have paid $280 for 512 MB of RAM. I was wrong, that was $140 TOTAL. I just assumed that he meant $140 per stick of memory! That was $140 for 4GB of Mushkin OEM approved Apple RAM. When did RAM get so cheap?

The moral of the story? Unless you have $750(ish) in your pocket that you’d like to DONATE to Apple, do yourself a favor and upgrade your RAM after you bring home your new Apple computer.

The 18 hour work days are over for now!

I’ve been working my brains out to get RideBooker.com out before the winter vacation season and we just made it! The site is a booking engine built on cakePHP and integrating with WordPress for the blog portion. The site is designed to allow travelers to book their ground transportation online. Need a shuttle from Vancouver International Airport to Whistler? Want to book a chauffeured luxury SUV from Seattle (SeaTac) airport to Whistler? We can do that too.

Its been really fun to work with my buddy Lee as we meld our skill sets together. He’s the PHP coding stud with the mad cakePHP skillz, and I’m the html/css/php hack with the SEO and web marketing background. Together I think we’ve put together a pretty serviceable little site. Its early days in terms of the functionality and the SEO, but It sure is satisfying to sit back and watch the bookings roll in!

Here’s a few sample pages:

• Ground Transport | Vancouver International Airport (YVR) to Whistler, BC
• Book Online | Whistler Airport Shuttle | Vancouver Airport to Whistler
• RideBooker.com Blog (WordPress)

I just launched a new version of TransportationWhistler.com using Drupal 5.3 and the Deco theme. I must say that Drupal has come a long way in the last couple of years! I’ve been a WordPress guy for the some time, and I’ve used it for all kinds of site, but Drupal is definitely a great alternative if you need a CMS that isn’t blog focused. WordPress is still king of the hill when it comes to a dedicated blog site. Not to say that you can’t have a great blog on Drupal, but that really isn’t its focus.

The best thing about Drupal is that it is ridiculously flexible and powerful. The worst thing about Drupal is that it is ridiculously flexible and powerful. As a result, there is a learning curve. It may take you a few days to figure out what you’re doing, and you’ll probably rebuild your site 3 or 4 times in the proces, but it is all worth it. What a powerful tool!

I’ve got a couple of other non-blog sites on the go and I’ve now decided to build them using Drupal over WordPress.

So if you’re heading off to Vancouver on vacation please feel free to check out the following:

• Tranportation Whistler – Getting to Whistler
• Transportation Whistler – Transport From Vancouver Airport to Whistler
• Transportation Whistler – Transport from Seatac (Seattle) Airport to Whistler