Jason Cosper

Author: Jason Cosper

  • Lighten Up

    I understand putting a little milk in one’s coffee — but “lightener” just sounds nasty.

  • The 30 Steps To Mastery

    Dear Ben Casnocha,

    You totally fucking nailed it, dude.

    1. Start
    2. Keep going.
    3. You think you’re starting to get the hang of it.
    4. You see someone else’s work and feel undeniable misery.
    5. Keep going.
    6. Keep going.
    7. You feel like maybe, possibly, you kinda got it now.
    8. You don’t.
    9. Keep going.

    Read the remainder here.

  • Blog Days Are Over

    Earlier this morning I confirmed the domain transfers for something that I spent almost six years of my life on. A site that I both obsessed over and neglected terribly.

    As of 8 AM, Preshrunk is somebody else’s baby. Saying that is a real punch in the (emotional) dick, but at least I know it’s in good hands now.

    I’m not going to use this post to talk about why I sold the site. That’s already been covered in enough detail. All I really want to say is that I’m happy it went to a good home.

    Oh, I’m also happy that I can pay off a respectable chunk of our wedding loan — but that’s only because the interest rate is embarrassingly high.

    Hopefully I’ll have a little more time to post here now. Considering my track record tho, I wouldn’t hold my breath for that…

  • I ♥ SendTab

    Because I use multiple computers over the course of my day, I am seriously losing my shit over how awesome SendTab is…

    Now, instead of sending myself reminder emails to check out a site — which I do sort of a lot — I can hit a button and the page will be waiting for me in whatever browser I decide to fire it off to. It’s like living in the future!

    All I need at this point is an iOS Twitter client with SendTab support and I’ll be a totally happy nerd. They’ve got an API, so I guess it’s only a matter of time, right?

  • Something Bold, Something New

    In the little bit of spare time I’ve had over the past week, I’ve been helping Sarah set up a new site. It’s called Something Bold — and it’s totally awesome!

    Now I’m not just saying that because Sarah’s my wife and I’m trying to be a supportive husband. I actually love the shit out of the blog because she’s being unflinching about the realities of doing a wedding on a limited budget without making it look cheap. And since she’s basing the first week or two of posts on how we pulled our wedding off for under $12,000, I’m interested to watch her postmortem unfold.

    So check it out, add it to your feed reader, follow it on Twitter and like it on Facebook — especially if you’re planning on getting hitched any time soon.  You’ll be glad you did!

  • What Would Kubrick Do?

    I posted this above my desk today to serve as a sort of simple reminder.

    I’m not quite sure what it’ll encourage me to do (outside of perhaps using more Futura) but I’m sure it’ll get the creative juices flowing a bit more.

  • Oh My God — It’s Full Of Rainbows!

    Double Rainbow + 2001 = Instant win. [via]

  • Switching Things Up

    Yesterday, I quietly switched this site over from its old Apache server to the much more lightweight combination of nginx + XCache.  As someone who has worked with Apache servers for roughly 14 years now, the thought of moving my personal site to a server environment that I didn’t know how to troubleshoot in great detail was terrifying.  But you start becoming irrelevant the second you allow yourself to stop learning new things.  So I took a play from the Ol’ Jack Burton playbook and said “what the hell?“.

    Surprisingly, it’s still chugging along without any complaints.  Most of the thanks for that goes to DreamHost‘s default nginx config and easy to follow tutorial tho.

    All I really needed to do to get it going was:

    • Select the server from the Private Server configuration menu in the DreamHost web panel.
    • Wait for a configuration update to run on the server.
    • Flush my local DNS cache.
    • Check the HTTP headers to verify I was seeing the right server.
    • Comment out a few conflicting mod_rewrite rules from .htaccess.
    • Copy and paste new rules into my personal site config file.

    And while that might seem like that list had a bunch of stuff in it, I can honestly say that it took no more than 30 minutes to make those changes.

    The only weird thing that has happened so far is that it had a weird memory spike last night — but that dropped off this morning for no discernible reason.  Since everything has been level after that, I guess I’ll have to keep an eye on my graphs and make sure it’s not a nightly thing…

    P.S. Since I’ve never been one to leave “good enough” alone, I’m going to keep making tweaks (and maybe start piling on a few more active sites) to see what nginx can do. Expect more nerdy updates on this eventually.

  • Bands I Want To See In 2010

    While my list is a little shorter than in years past, I’d be perfectly happy if I got to see all (or at least most) of these bands sometime in the next 365 days.

    • The Hold Steady
    • LCD Soundsystem
    • The xx
    • Tokyo Police Club
    • The Pixies
    • Eels

    Who’s on your “must see” list this year?

  • Left 4 Dead: NES Edition

    The only thing that makes me happier than knowing that this exists is knowing that it should be available for download in January of 2010. Anyone have any suggestions for good NES emulators for Linux?