If you were given 2-5 years to live, what would you do?

I found out today that motion graphics freak and all around good guy Patrick O’Brien (aka Transfatty) has come down with ALS (or Lou Gehrig’s disease). News comes by way of mutual friends and an announcement of the launch of The Patrick O’Brien Foundation.

The Patrick O’Brien Foundation is dedicated to promoting awareness of a currently incurable illness, Amyotropic Lateral Sclerosis (known also as ALS or Lou Gehrig’s disease). It is established in honor of Patrick Sean O’Brien — an artist diagnosed with ALS at the uncommonly early age of 30. Support is provided to those diagnosed with neuro-muscular illness for life’s work projects that provide a unique insight into the experience, mind, and heart of living with their disease.

While it may have slowed him down some the disease hasn’t stopped him yet… he’s hard at work on a full length documentary of his struggles and this summer will take part in a 100 mile trek across the state of New Jersey by wheelchair.

Good luck and much love man. Maybe I’ll chase you down this summer.

So I’ve started working on a little content app for the sites here and thought it would be a good sized project for a trial run of a few things including the CakePHP rails-like framework.

A few places I’ve stumbled and broken my toe so far…

Mostly for my own benefit I’ve added a new site wide comments feed thanks to the ajw_comments_feed textpattern plugin. There aren’t many comments (particularly since I’ve enabled a few anti-spam plugins) but the ones that were around were just too easy to miss.

Also on the to-do list is bringing a recent comments list into the main template, but I haven’t decided how I want to do that yet.

To some fanfare the team over at Technorati (including Tantek Çelik and Kevin Marks) launched a great pair of microformat tools—Technorati Microformat Search & Pingerati.

Its turning into a viral series, and that’s nothing but a good thing™.

Dean Edwards has posted his thoughts in Levels of JavaScript Knowledge.

And Joe Clark adds his take with Levels of Accessibility Knowledge.