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Chuggnutt!

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  • Ignite Bend

    So I went and did something today I’ve never really done before, and is already making me nervous: I submitted a proposal to do a presentation at the next Ignite Bend event.

    First, though, some backstory. Ignite Bend is the local version of the “Ignite” series of events started by O’Reilly; it’s a fun, high-energy event where speakers get five minutes on stage with a PowerPoint (or compatible) slideshow to do a presentation on anything they want. Here’s the Ignite tagline:

    If you had five minutes on stage what would you say? What if you only got 20 slides and they rotated automatically after 15 seconds? Launch a web site? Teach a hack? Talk about recent learnings, successes, failures? Around the world communities have been putting together Ignite events to show their answers.

    So you get five minutes on stage, and a total of 20 slides in your slideshow—which will automatically rotate after 15 seconds, no matter what.

    I’ve watched most of the previous Ignite Bend events online and attended the last one and it was incredibly fun and good-spirited; and in the back of my mind I thought it might be cool to do a presentation, too. After all, it’s only five minutes, right? And even though I’ve enjoyed all the other speakers I’ve seen, many were clearly as nervous as I imagine I would be and they still did great.

    So today I did it: I submitted a proposal to do a presentation called “How to Brew Beer in 10 Easy Steps.” I don’t know yet for sure if I will be picked; mine is one of 20 submissions and only nine speakers will be selected (by vote). But I figure pick something I know, right?

    But even so, this is way out of my usual comfort zone; in Real Life I am not a public speaker and am much more of an introvert than you might think. So I’m (at the moment, until the real nerves kick in) looking at this as an opportunity to try something new and hopefully grow from it. (Cue after-school special music.)

    Ignite Bend is taking place next month, February 9th. I’ll post more about it as it unfolds.

  • Pandora

    The last several weeks I’ve been checking out Pandora, the “Internet Radio” site that lets you build custom stations of music based on your personal preferences (and provides a live stream of said music). You can give it artists or genres to choose from, and from there—and based on what you tell it you like and dislike in real time, as the music plays—it figures out other music to play for you.

    So far it’s remarkably good. It’s like magic.

    (Yes, I am well aware that by writing about Pandora now, in 2011, I’ve missed out on something like four or five years of its existence. One might say I missed the boat, and am now late to the show. I’m all right with that.)

    Now, I’m not a big music guy—most of the time I listen to whatever’s on the radio in the car while driving to or from work, and I’ll play the occasional CD (I do own a few). I like music, it’s just more of a background to my life, and I don’t invest a lot of time into it. But with Pandora, it tweaks just the right buttons—I’m as interested in the algorithm behind what it will pick for me next as in the music itself. So I’ve been letting it play in the background at work and generally marveling at it.

    I’ve only created one station thus far, but since it lets you create different stations I’m fascinated by the potential for creating other, vastly different ones based on mood (for instance).

    It’s kind of cliché to say, but this is one of those internet technologies that just works, works well, and makes me feel like I’m living in the future.

  • New books

    Got some new books from Barnes & Noble that came last week (online order via gift card):

    Also a set of three “cahier” Moleskine notebooks—the pocket-sized ones (in black). And I’m waiting on two more books to arrive: Brewing with Wheat (Stan Hieronymus) and Yeast (Chris White and Jamil Zainasheff).

    Yes, there is a certain irony in the fact that I’m linking to the Amazon pages for all of these items, despite purchasing them all from B&N. What can I say, I have an Amazon affiliate code—if you click through I might earn a few cents.

  • V

    So the new season of “V” premiered tonight; you might recall it’s the TV remake (reimagining?) of the the original nearly-30-year-old alien invasion TV series. I watched it from the beginning last season, with the presumption that I’d bail if it looked like it was going to go off the rails.

    It must have been good enough, because here we are at the start of the second season and I’m still watching it; I’m still operating under the same ready-to-bail presumption though. Overall the show is better than I’d thought it would be, though it could very easily swerve into extremely cheesy territory. It’s this tenuousness, I think, along with occasional plot/character moments that seem a little too “What the–?” or convenient that have me wavering still.

    Plus, for an advanced alien race with seemingly godlike omniscient technology—and rampant lizard paranoia—it sure seems awfully easy to manage and get away with all sorts of conspiracy literally right under their leader’s nose.

  • Two brilliant (goofy?) ideas

    One of the goals I have in mind for 2011 is to get back to writing more on this, my first blog (without slacking off on my other two blogs). Sometimes that will be in the form of braindumps, just random ideas I have bouncing around my head that need to be recorded somewhere. Brilliant? Maybe. Goofy? Possibly. Here are two.

    #1: Santa Claus, Zombie Killer. This just seems so obvious that I’m not sure why I haven’t seen it somewhere before. Although I admit I may have been subliminally influenced by Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter; it’s hard not to see a title like that and not internalize it somehow.

    #2: Godzilla vs. Voltron. This popped into my head on New Year’s Eve while we were over at our friends’, watching a Godzilla movie (one of the ’90s ones). Since Godzilla is usually the villain this would totally work; it would of course have to be the lion Voltron fighting Godzilla. This would be completely awesome, though I bet the licensing on this type of deal would be a real bitch.

  • New Year

    It’s kind of nice having New Year’s Day on a Saturday (and Christmas last week as well); knowing there’s another day to this weekend (and actually another after that for me—I have Monday off as well) makes it easy to be lazy and recover from New Year’s Eve.

    …Not that there was much for me to recover from; we spent the afternoon and evening with friends and overate and yes, drank plenty of beer along with champagne at midnight and—get this—a glass of absinthe, but I was careful enough not to wake up with a hangover this morning (lots of water plus aspirin before bed). Tired yes—for some reason I was up before eight, which is bogus considering last night I didn’t get to bed until after 1:30am.

    So today was lazy but a few things were done. I sorted and cleaned out my old emails for the past year, reducing my inbox from just under 1000 (I think?) to 18 emails; straightened up the desk in the office (one of my goals is to re-work the office overall, but the first step is being able to see the desk surface); read the novella “Big Driver” in Stephen King’s latest book, Full Dark, No Stars (the second story in the collection; the first, “1922” is longer and took me several sporadic days to complete).

    And of course, the day was also spent being reflective about 2010 and thinking about what 2011 should be like, as these things go. I’ve not gone so far as to have worked up any resolutions, but working up some possible goals—you know how it is this time of year.

  • The gift tally

    Really good holiday this year (by which I count my birthday and the Christmas days together), with good gifts but especially with family and good friends. My birthday was fairly low-key, with just the family and a boozy theme: a gift card to the Brew Shop, a giant bottle of Jack Daniels, a magnum bottle of Anchor’s 2010 Christmas Ale, a bottle of German mulled wine.

    (Update—forgot to mention a new computer chair for the office as well.)

    Christmas Eve was the first of the big parties: we hosted at our house (which we do every year), with homemade pulled pork sandwiches, lots of potluck food, lots of candies and cookies, and of course lots of good drinks. I warmed the mulled wine in a saucepan, and we had plenty of beer (both homebrewed and specialty bottles our friends Paul and Sandi brought over), wine, and some mixed drinks going on (our friend Karen brought over some homemade vanilla schnapps she had received).

    Food was great, the company was greater. Besides Paul and Sandi and Karen, Shannon and Brian and their son joined us (and of course my family was here as well). Everything went off without a hitch and everyone had a great time (I hope!).

    Then of course, Christmas day. Which began really, really early (does it start any other way when you have kids though?)—the kids were up at 6:45 checking their stockings (that’s an arbitrary time we’d set up long ago), but I had mostly been awake since around 6. (Plus, the dog had woken us up at 2am, barking briefly at something we couldn’t figure out. Maybe Santa?)

    After opening presents, we had homemade crème brûlée French toast and bacon for breakfast. Yes, it was pretty much as good as it sounds.

    For Christmas, I got:

    • Candies and chocolates, a flask funnel, mini bottles of coconut rum and cinnamon whiskey, Guinness-flavored BBQ sauce, and lottery Scratch-Its in my stocking. (“What’s in Santa’s Beard” is the weirdest Scratch-It game ever.)
    • Full Dark, No Stars by Stephen King
    • A Charlie Brown Christmas Tree
    • A gift set of Evan Williams Single Barrel Vintage bourbon, with a combination cigar holder/flask
    • Four specialty beers
    • A belt
    • A bottle drying rack (for cleaning beer bottles for homebrewing)
    • A homemade calendar day planner (my daughter made it)
    • Money

    The gifts are awesome, but it was spending Christmas out at Mom and Dad’s with everyone (Paul and Sandi and Karen joined us again, as well as some other old friends we seen once a year) that really made the holiday for me. My parents put together a fantastic dinner and party and it was perfect. There was so much good food and drink that food coma had set in by the time we got home. But we couldn’t have asked for a better Christmas.

    I hope everyone else had a great holiday this year too!

  • “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown”

    I’m not religious, but I think that clip from “A Charlie Brown Christmas” does describe what Christmas is all about. (That’s also the best Christmas TV special ever, in my opinion.)

    Merry Christmas, everybody. Stay safe and enjoy these days.

  • 38 revolutions

    The title of this post is a reference to the number of times I’ve ridden this planet around the Sun, as of today.

    (I wonder how many pseudo-clever ways you can say it’s your birthday without outright saying it.)

    (And then I’m thinking “38revolutions.com” sounds like a good domain name for… something.)

    Anyway. I’m being a bit self-indulgent today: I took the day off from work and am enjoying the start of a four-day holiday weekend, which sounds just about perfect. Three of those days we get to spend with family and good friends, eating lots of good food and drinking lots of good drink—as it should be.

    And if you see me around town today, you should buy me a beer. 🙂

  • Tools of the trade

    It’s been awhile since I’ve posted anything overly technical here, but it strikes me that a “snapshot” of what I do (for work) and how I do it (the tech) might be useful to some.

    What I do is web development for Smart Solutions here in Bend. Smart Solutions is a web and software development company and the company essentially has three main divisions: custom software development, SEO (search engine optimization—I know, that’s another post), and web development. All these “divisions” work pretty closely with each other—there’s a lot of line-blurring, actually—but for the most part developing websites for clients is what I do.

    The platform we develop for is Pixelsilk—the custom Content Management System (CMS) that Smart Solutions developed from the ground up (and is still developing). The marketing pitch is, it’s SEO-optimized, gives you full control of your HTML, gives you all the tools you need to interact with social media, etc. etc. etc. Move past all that and get to the meat of it, and the primary things I really like about Pixelsilk is that you interact with all of your content and data inside of the system (rather that working with offline files that need to be FTP’d to various places), there’s a powerful and comprehensive Javascript API (giving me the capability to extend the system in new ways), it gives you the ability to re-use code and libraries, and that it’s entirely web-based—-meaning I can work on a site from any browser.

    I’m also the company’s defacto WordPress developer—yes, we host WordPress blogs in addition to Pixelsilk sites—and a few other PHP applications so I still get a chance to flex my PHP muscles every now and again. (Smart Solutions is otherwise a Microsoft and .NET shop.)

    Of course, I use a number of additional tools to develop for the web, and that’s what this post is really about.

    What I use is a mishmash of online and offline tools. In the “offline” category I make use of:

    • The GIMP, open-source graphics software. Free to download, and fairly powerful, there’s still a lot I’m learning about it, but I do most of the graphics work I need to accomplish with it. (Photoshop is the standard for the company, but I’m not versed in it.)
    • Microsoft Visual Studio, various flavors. Sometimes moving the HTML/Javascript/CSS into an editing tool is easier to deal with, and I frankly like the Visual Studio editing environment best of the various programs I’ve tried for these types of files.
    • PHP Designer. I actually use the (older) free version because, well, it’s free and does what I need, it’s fairly lightweight, and it has the same kind of keyboard mappings and editing environment as Visual Studio.
    • Notepad. Yes, a stripped-down plain text editor. You’d be amazed at how much I have this open.
    • FileZilla. Yes, sometimes you still need an FTP client, and FileZilla is a good free Windows client.
    • PuTTY. A great free SSH client, because I spend a non-insignificant amount of time on a *nix command line.
    • Apache/PHP/MySQL: Installed on my Windows boxen as test environments. Pretty critical especially when developing WordPress themes.

    Online:

    • Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox as my primary browsers. I actually use Chrome as my primary while at work and Firefox while at home; these are both highly standards-compliant web browsers and I know if I can get something to work properly in them, then that is in fact how it should work. Chrome has some great built-in development and inspection tools; in Firefox I employ a number of extensions.
    • Web Developer (Firefox plugin): A variety of pretty essential additions in toolbar format for all aspects of web development.
    • Firebug (Firefox plugin): Probably the #1 plugin I would recommend; it adds code inspection, network information, Javascript debugging and inspection, and all manner of incredibly useful tools—you can’t be a proper web developer without this installed. (Chrome’s built-in tools come pretty close to this.)
    • Page Speed (Firebug add-on): A fantastic add-on to Firebug that analyzes the overall page performance (using Google’s recommended benchmarks/tests) and gives you hints on what you can improve.
    • Header Spy (Firefox plugin): Shows HTTP headers on the status bar, useful for troubleshooting server information.
    • AFOM (Firefox plugin): Incredibly useful plugin for the Windows version of Firefox which fixes the memory leak prone to Windows Firefox.
    • Internet Explorer: Of course, you can’t develop for the web without checking your work in IE, and IE8 has a decent set of developer tools built-in—including the ability to switch between IE7, IE8, and Quirks modes.
    • W3C Validator: Because you want to make sure your site code validates and works properly, right?
    • jQuery: The best Javascript library out there. If I’m doing anything in Javascript these days, 99% of the time it’s using jQuery.

    There is of course other tools I use that fall primarily under the heading of “my own sites” and are not necessarily web development per se: Google Analytics and Google AdSense are two examples. That’s probably another post.

    This list is likely incomplete—I may have missed an item or two or three, and if I think of any I’ll update it. But this gives an idea of the various tools I’m employing currently and to a large extent what I’d consider the minimum number any good web developer should be using these days.