This post is merely a test to help me sample enough of the screen widgets as I style the content

arma virumque cano troiae qui primus ab oris italiam fato profugus….

Maybe some Ruby

#!/bin/env ruby

puts "We love Ruby, yes we Do!"
class Razzle
  def initialize(a)
    @foo = a
    @really_long_text = "sometimes when we write ruby we write really long strings, ones that are too long for the pre block to handle properly"
  end
end

This last week or so has not seen a marked improvement in my condition. Things were getting better after my visit to the Dr. on February 14th, but things stalled out rather around the following Tuesday ( when my steroid shot wore out ). Worried, I chose to book an appointment for this past Thursday figuring that I should see some improvement within a week. Basically the improvement process plateaued.

On Thursday morning I received a call and found out that my Dr. himself was sick and I would be seeing the nurse practitioner. I was lucky in that my practitioner was very good; or, at the very least, she prescribed me some really good drugs. After taking a breathing test to make sure that I didn’t have something in my lungs, I was was given a steroid inhaler and (another!) steroid injection in my keester. The office was short two doctors owing to illness and it was a right frenetic zoo.

I asked the nurse if it was just me, or did this year seem especially bad. She confirmed and said it was the worst winter illness season she’d seen in 25 years in Austin.

All around, it might have been a good bit of time to avoid the ATX.

On the good news front, SXSW is just around the corner and I’ll be doing the interactive festival. Hopefully I’ll find some of readers there too?

The only down side of the steroid is that 4 days after I get the injection i feel really disconsolate: hard to focus and a bit depressive. It’s weird.

For the mean time, the inhaler is very good. It really opens me up and I’ve not had any more croup cough since last Thursday. The only unpleasant side effect is uh, a more “productive” cough. And that’s gross…but necessary to getting better. It’s just ruined me for social company.

Anyway, that’s where things stand.

I remember when I rolled my old Blazer’s trip past 100K. I was on the lower deck of I-35 headed southbound across the river. I looked to my right and saw the Memorial Stadium, the lit up tower, and the lights of downtown in that 0th mile. It was memorable.

But on this site, the 1000th post seems to have been: “One man’s DITMTLOD is anothers, “eh”?”. Well I can’t say that was particularly enlightening reading, but probably par for the course of those that come here. Based on this being the 1000th, that would mean that I’ve averaged about 200 posts a year over these last five years that I’ve been writing this site.

That first post was written on the third floor of a salmon colored apartment on Mariposa Street an San Francisco.

This post is being written from a comfortable armchair in Austin.

Then…I didn’t know (technology): Cocoa, Latex, Ruby, Rails, Textmate, anything about Unicode, how to write custom MC files for sendmail, Latin, OpenLdap server builds.

Now…I know all these things

Then…I didn’t know (activities): how to surf, yoga

Now…I know these things.

Then…I thought the president was a dangerous moron.

Now…Some things don’t change.

Then…MoveableType

Now…WordPress

Then…Never been to Australia or Spain

Now…Been to both ( the former, twice! )

Then…Didn’t know if anyone would care to come along on this ride called my life

Now…Making “our life” with a special, special girl.

Then..closest Mexican food: Burrito in The Mission, San Francisco

Now…Chuy’s

Then…My Friend Mike

Now…My Friend The Social B

Then…Trader Joe’s

Now…Whole Foods ( c’mon TJ’s come to ATX, I know it’s WF’s backyard, but bite the bullet! )

Then…sliding into some sort of depression

Now…more connected to optimism and happiness than ever

Then…League-Less

Now…League nearby!

Then…Netflix queue full

Now…Netflix queue at 489!

Then…wrote entries in the on-line editor

Now…write entries in Textmate with Markdown

There are many other thens and nows: cars, clothes, books, sites I read, changes at work in both patron and peer…far too many to think of them all.

So, these are a few ideas on what’s gone before and what’s yet to come. I suppose I’ll keep writing this stuff because, honestly, I can’t stop and I’ve come to use the blog as a storehouse for things I intend to remember. If so, then the site will always have one reader, just like it did the moment after the first time I changed a post status from Draft to Published.

Yesterday’s outage with respect to my domain’s registration ( turning this site into an adwords farm ) has convinced me that I need to be the owner of my domain ( indeed! ) and that I need to find a different host of that content.

Within the next few days I’m going to be moving over to a new host. If you see strangeness in that interval, that’s what’s going on. It shouldn’t last long. I was at my last provider ~ 5 years, so it’s not that common thing.

I took a look at my wordpress blog engine dashboard and noticed that there was a new version out.

I applied this upgrade to my local blog copy on my PowerBook and it looked fine. I did the same thing to the site you’re reading and it messed up in a large way, a much larger way than I was interested in hacking on this morning.

Issues I had:

• Repeated appearances of “Warning: Illegal offset” in sidebars
• Plugin Listing showed the word “Array” all over the place ( i.e. PHP was printing some variable that was an array, versus its contents ).

I’ve noticed that most of the bug reporters who have their own sites are rolled back to 2.1. I’ll stay with them for the moment.

What’s even more surprising, this being wordpress, is that more people aren’t already on it. I think that the mitigating factor here is that some parts of WordPress have now exceeded the casual hacker threshold. With the inclusion of wp-cache.php ( a tool for caching hits…) the mathematics behind a blog site just got a lot harder.

Consider, that it’s easy to ‘mentally’ code a blog.

1. Access site
2. Open database of posts
3. Request last n-many posts
4. Format posts into theme
5. Format post with stylesheets
6. Done

Not bad.

When you add “handle caching of pages” in there it goes from an intuitive ( but complex ) process to a boggling process with a daunting process. I think that’s why I’m not seeing more “[SOLVED]” notes within the bug tracker: the casual open source developers are not ready for this hill.

Yak shaving got a bit out of control and next thing I was doing a site redesign.

And then the redesign I created after about 2 weeks was not really IE-compatible.

So I went back to the drawing board and came back with the design you see today.

There are still a few tiny things ( uhm, the ‘by month’ archives look terrible ), but I know how to fix them and know that I can get it done quickly, so I’m enjoying the feeling of being in the home stretch.

So much has happened since I went new content silent a few weeks ago. Lack of a site that I felt actually looked like “me” ( that is to say, default WordPress theme, “Kubrick” ) really made me loath to post - it was an uncomfortable reminder of a job not-really-done.

If you’re going to start learning HTML, let me highly recommend the Heads First guide. It is an excellent book that gives you examples in a primitive state, requires that you work through them during the course of the chapter and then, at the end, helps you know that you successfully transitioned the work.

For people experienced with (X)HTML this book can be skipped from Chapter 1-6 as the basics of markup, semantics, design and content split are covered. The introduction te CSS styling is solid and the book rapidly progresses from simple CSS to advanced layouts. It actually explained what the heck float:right means better than anything I’ve ever read before.

Here are just a few post ideas that are backlogged and begging to surface:

• Status update from where I was a few months ago in being absolutely dumbfounded with too much stuff to do
• Developers: Why do we have this crazy need to start from scratch?
• SXSW wrap-up ( with very cool modified images to show where I was and what I was seeing ) - yes I know this is about a month late, but I saw some good things that should be shared
• How to handle a panel discussion at SXSW. A major complaint was that panels were “pointless” - here’s how to fix it
• Grid design and this great old copy of Ricoeur’s Conflict of Interpretation
• Other ruminations, opinions, and conjectures

While I don’t think this site makes much of a difference in the world, I do miss writing in this venue, so, thanks for putting up with me while I tried to put some new lipstick on this ol’ pig.

Later that evening…

I’ve tested this a pretty good bit on my PowerBook as I worked out the kinks.

Let me just say, folks, web design is hard. I did this with nothing else but Textmate and Firefox+Firebug. The people who get sites to look consistent and nice across all the browser platforms are definitely worthy of your respect and admiration.

I know that the different browsers show things a little bit differently, but I think most of these items are within fault standards.

Wow, I just looked at the site in IE. It looks terrible. IE is now dead to me. In light of the awfulness I have no choice but to revert back until I find a new level of CSS gurudom.

The “about” page.

This seems to be a section of a site where the person who writes the site tells you what they already expect that you know about them.

This works like so for famous ( or blog-famous ) people.

If you’re Jeff Atwood this is where Jeff says “I’m Jeff and I know a lot about C#” or if you’re at ‘joelonsoftware.com’, it’s where you go “Hm, yes, Joel, I knew that about you, that’s why I”m reading your site.

For people who are famous on the Internets for being masters at topic X or Y, this page usually is just a reminder of why you visited their site in the first place. Akin to, say, Einstein’s about page saying something like “I did a lot of the early research in generalized relativity.”

For the rest of the masses ( yours truly included ) people who find your site usually do so by knowing you as “link #4 on google for my search for ‘bcr collection agency’”. For these people, should they wish to buy you a drink or send you sexy IMs, you like to provide some autobiographical background ( so that they know not to try to slip you a mickey in a vodka, versus a whiskey ).

Normally, most people have a hard time writing content for this section. “Do I talk about how girls didn’t talk to me”, or “Do I talk about the time I got pantsed in gym” ( neither of these things actually happened to me, thankfully )? That’s challenging, I agree.

What’s really driving me nuts is that since my code redesign is largely layout-oriented, how do you make a bio page visually interesting. They’ll all follow the Dickensian I was born… arc up to the present, but what format to put what you put in, in? A bunch of unordered lists? Little squares? Drop-downs?

None of it sounds good to me, so instead I’ve been reading and re-reading the content. I simply have no idea how to present the material.