Safe from the Losing Fight

In order to prove that I exist, I have posted photos — in case you thought the photo to the left was doctored. I can assure you someone that homely does, in fact, exist.

OK, that’s not true, I just posted them so I could play with some new software. Its the thought that counts, but apparently not as much as getting to play with new toys.

In the photo albums you’ll find pictures of myself and the very lovely Elaine, pictures of what my family might have looked like several years ago, and pictures of cats that I do not own. If you find the pictures to harsh to look at, simply put your thumb over my photo. That’s what I do.

I keep playing around with the visual theme on this blog, trying to find one I’m happy with. The previous theme was certainly lick-able, but a little heavy in the graphics and images department. I also think I just like playing around in php, which I am required to do anytime I change themes. After dealing with C/Objective-C/C++ all day, its nice to program in a high level scripting language, even as cryptic as php can be. Anyway, I settled on this theme, Rusty, because I like gradients, which apparently are the “in” thing nowadays, and if I’m anything, its not “in”. Unless you’re talking about the OpenDoc Anonymous Support Group.

Hi, my name is Andy, and I like Cyberdog.

Anyway, I’m going to stay with this theme for the foreseeable future. Which will probably turn out to be about more five minutes. I have important work I need to ignore, I’ll have you know.

In other exciting meta news, I got all of the posts and comments from my other blogs moved over to this one. Now you can ignore them all from one convenient location. The previous blogs over at Blogger are now officially deprecated. If you visit them now, you will get a compiler warning stating that they are deprecated, as soon as I work out the technical details of why anyone would care. You will notice, however, that unlike Apple, I have not only given you a replacement for those blogs, but the replacement has the same functionality and more. Take that, the hand that feeds me.

The feature that really got me over to WordPress were categories/tags. Since this blog is really a merging of two previous blogs, it was really important that I could sort out the trash from the garbage. And it gave me a new toy to play with, which is super important when you’re an engineer. These pointless ramblings don’t categorize themselves, I’ll have you know. It takes excess free time and a strong stomach for bad writing. Braver men have been bored to tears trying.

I originally tried WordPress with the free hosting at WordPress.com. It was nice and all, but it wouldn’t let me edit the theme templates. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. So we have this blog software, that’s open source and downloadable from many locations, and we’ll host it for you, but dear God, whatever you do, don’t look at the source!! Apparently, the sight of php code makes non-programmers go blind and/or turn into nerds. And you can’t just go around unleashing that sort of destruction on just anyone. They have to be paying customers.

I’m hosting this site with DreamHost, which, despite the name, did not net me any extra nocturnal unconscious escapades. I would write and complain, but, once again, the posts do not categorize themselves. The nice thing about DreamHost is they have Ruby on Rails hosting, which is something I’ve been playing around with. If you know anything about web frameworks you know that Ruby on Rails is vital for rattling off all the buzzwords you know, and ignoring any real work you might have. That’s my excuse anyway.

I’m trying out WordPress on a hosted server for the first time, after creating a couple of blogs over at Blogger. While Blogger is a great place to start, I’m starting to want some more features than what they provide.

Or maybe its my engineering side wanting more toys.

I’ve also found that my “professional blog” isn’t being updated regularly. That’s why I started the second blog. The idea was I would keep “professional” ideas separate from my personal ones. But the more I’ve thought about it, the less sense that really makes. “Professional” posts will probably continue to be scarce, but that’s no reason to continue to isolate them in their own blog.

Whatever the reason, I’m going to playing around with this blog to see if it lives up to my expectations. I’ll probably start migrating the old entries over to this blog to see how they look.

[Note: This post is about my old Type 11 Error blog when I switched templates. Don't know why I kept it.]

The new template is “Nautica” from Blogger Templates.

Its pretty much stock, except for the About Me section. It was off by default, it was a bulleted list for some reason, and the picture was off center. So I rearranged everything until I was reasonably happy with it.

Same lame blog, but with a new shiny plastic exterior.

Tell me you don’t want to lick your screen right now.

That’s what I thought.