My First Mohican 100 Mile
June 27th, 2010 (Running)
Doubled over in the middle of the woods somewhere between Mohican Adventures and Covered bridge, I stared at the no longer edible Raman noodles and other bits of food now all over the trail and yelled back to Ashley, “This isn’t what you expected when you signed up to pace me, was it?” “No”, she replied, “but I had no idea what to expect.” This exact phrase had been running around in my thoughts for the last 6 weeks since I decided to switch from the 50 to the 100-mile Mohican trail run.
I didn’t think I would ever have…
Designs Over the Years
June 5th, 2010 (Web)
As a new website design launches, I thought I would put together a little gallery of my website designs over the years. Unfortunately, I didn’t take a screenshot of every version and the wayback machine didn’t load all of the images from each, but this is what I could retrieve. I’ve just included the logo from some of the designs. Notice that the new design of the website is a departure from the typical green/grey/black color scheme that I have used in every other version of the site.
Privacy, Handles and Social
March 23rd, 2010 (Culture, Tech)
Remember back about 15 years ago when everybody’s online identity was private? Having a handle was the cool thing to do. The first handle I remember having was spam444. This was before spam was widely used as a term for junk email. I just thought it was a cool word because of its use in Monty Python and its utility as the perfect camping food. I used this handle mostly for AIM and IRC chat. A couple of years later, I moved to using the handle cron57, which is still in use today as one of my email addresses.
One…
Languages
February 1st, 2010 (Web)Lately, I’ve been on a kick of wanting to experience a broader set of languages, frameworks and programming techniques. I listened to an (epic?) episode of FLOSS Weekly with Kent Beck on Extreme Programming and have been thinking about going back to some of my textbook learning in college and applying it to real projects.
First off, I’m going through a Python book as I figure it is not too huge of a leap syntax-wise from PHP. Aside from a little bit of syntax difference, there are a few nuances conceptually (everything is an…
HTML and CSS Starter Templates
January 5th, 2010 (Web)Out of laziness, when building a website, I’ve often just started with one of the Dreamweaver basic template layouts – I’ll go in and delete a bunch of stuff and rework it to the way I wanted. This included copying and pasting code from websites I have built previously and rewriting the same sections of code with each new site. I was also using Dreamweaver as a code editor just because I started there. Dreamweaver is quite bloated however and if you are not using the WYSIWYG features, it is completely unnecessary. There are much better text editors out there…
Veridian Dynamics…Predicting the Future
December 18th, 2009 (Life, Tech)
So, you know that ABC show, Better off Ted? It’s based around a company, Veridian Dynamics, that makes cool products based on research in their labs. I’ve found this strange phenomenon happening where I watch an episode of Better off Ted and then a few days later find that the product they created has actually just been created in RL (real life).
OK, so maybe this doesn’t happen with every episode, but I’ll give you two examples:
- Season 1 Episode 2 – Phil and Lem (Veridian’s top two scientists) grow beef in the lab. The day
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The Tenants of Google
November 26th, 2009 (Web)On This Week in Google: Episode 17, Leo suggested that Google may have a set of rules that they follow when building each of their products. Matt Cutts responded with a few of the fundamental tenants of Google. I have listed these below.
- Don’t be evil
- Organize the world’s data to make it useful
- Don’t trap user data – Eric Schmidt, Web 2.0, 2006
- Be an advocate for users
- Compete on merit (don’t give yourself an advantage – no proprietary APIs, etc…)
- Regarding products…
- Go for
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