Howdy

This morning while I went out, the dishes didn’t get washed.\
Then later, when I came home and collapsed on the couch exhausted, the dishes still didn’t get washed.\
And now, while I am goofing off by typing this, THE DISHES STILL AREN’T WASHED.

Why My Site Has Been Down

I love Dreamhost a lot and usually highly recommend them to everyone, but recently, they’ve had some real problems keeping everything up and running around here. I was glad to see them blog about the trouble and what they’re doing to fix it. I love transparency.

Deep Thought

True love is giving away the last piece of your favorite chocolate candy even though you’re going through PMS.

Presentation Remote Solved

Instead of forking over over \$30 for a new remote to use for presentations, I found mira a little System Preference pane that lets me map the buttons on my brand new MacBook Pro’s remote to other applications. It took about 45 seconds of fiddling to get forward/back mapped to the up and down arrows and voila, I have a presentation remote.\
I love Mac developers. If I’ve got a problem, there’s usually a beautifully designed easy to use solution already out there.

Where’s the beef?

I spent nearly \$250 at Costco today (some of that was gas) and only \$15 of that was for food. Isn’t that depressing?

SxSW Panel Online Finally!

You can go get the audio from our panel at SXSW (Convincing Your Company to Embrace Web Standards to get the slides) over on their podcasts page, or get the mp3 directly.\
I just listened to it (Steve listened to it to too, and we traded jokes) and here are my totally shallow observations after listening to myself:

  1. I did a really good job of not talking fast. I talk much faster than that normally.
  2. I sound a little bit like Kevin Smith and that kind of scares me.
  3. Note to self: don’t laugh into the mic
  4. Don’t encourage Marc Canter. No good can come of it
  5. My panelists kicked ass.
  6. Jeremy Keith loves Mr. Chipman\
    It makes me want to do a panel next year… even though it was really stressful getting this one together.\
    Update: Steve and got a transcript from Casting Words, you can go look at it if you want.

Thought of the day

I should have gotten some bing cherries at the store earlier.\
And a big HAPPY belated BIRTHDAY to my mommy. I knew you’d be offline over the weekend, so I didn’t post this earlier. Love you! Miss you! Ate an oatmeal cookie in fond remembrance of you!

Rails, Wow

I’ve been flirting with it for a while (have had the book since it came out and installed Rails all over the place, just never had time to get into it), but last night I broke down and built my first web application with Ruby on Rails and all I have to say is wow. That was way easier than it should have been. Granted, it was painfully simple, but still, it was about an hour total between setting up the domain and database on Dreamhost to getting it tweaked and looking like I wanted (oh, and working). It was another 5 minutes with the book this morning to get the export feature working like I wanted (well, they wanted).\
Next time I need to build something outside of work (or hell, maybe inside of work), it’ll most likely be in Rails.

S5 and Presentation Remotes

I use s5 for all my presentations, and I’ve been giving a lot of them the past couple years. Although I’ve been tempted, I haven’t yet broken down and purchased a presentation remote, because I’m not sure any of them will work with:

  • A mac
  • arrow keys in a web browser\
    So, all you s5-presentation-givin’-standards-nerds out there, if you use a presentation remote, which one do you use, and do you like it?

6 Years and Still Blogging

This blog is six years old today. Now, I was planning a big retrospective, but the archives are all there and you can go browse through all 1845 entries. Six years of blogging and I’ve managed to spew out over 1800 entries (Jen’s posted too, which I’ll talk about in a little bit), and people have posted over 1600 comments, and I didn’t have comments for the first year of the blog when it was over on Blogger.\
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The blog started out orange, and with spacemen, and went through quite a few different designs (some of which I don’t even remember). Thankfully, Jen decided to join the party and I came up with the design we’ve got now, based on a photo Jen took on our trip to Bethany Beach last summer.\
So here we are, six years of blogging about my life, my family, some about work and about other assorted nonsense. You know, I don’t think I’ll be stopping any time soon. I go through phases where I don’t post for a week or so, but I always come back. I always find some other reason to come back and write. It’s become a part of my life, and things may change around again (you never know), but lawver.net will probably always be some sort of blog.\
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Thanks, blog, for holding all the nonsense, and for keeping an archive of me over the past six years. Thank you Blogger and thank you Movable Type.