Jason Cosper

Category: General

  • On fresh starts

    This content was imported from blog.boogah.org, a failed attempt at a more introspective and personal blog. Instead of maintaining yet another WordPress install, I’ve decided to cram this content into the everything bucket that is my long running personal site. 🥴

    There is no need to sharpen my pencils anymore. My pencils are sharp enough. Even the dull ones will make a mark.

    — Ze Frank, “An Invocation for Beginnings“

    Now’s as good a time as any for starting over, right? So let’s do something new. Something without all of the cruft. Something that doesn’t feel like an obligation or chore.

    Honestly, I don’t even know what this is going to grow into. And I don’t know if we’re going to make it any further than a few days/weeks/months. But I’ve got an itch that I’ve been ignoring for far too long. So it’s either time to break out the Benadryl or get to scratching.

    Itching away

  • The Decision

    I know things are normally pretty quiet around here. But I have some actual, legitimate news. In just a couple weeks, I’ll be joining the Managed WordPress team at Liquid Web as their Senior Performance Engineer. It’s an opportunity for me to get out of Marketing—where I’ve been broadening my skillset since last fall—and back into implementing things that impact users. The decision to leave WP Engine was hard. In the five and a half years that I’ve been there, we’ve managed to grow the company from five employees in Austin (with me working remotely) to over four hundred and fifty across five offices in the US and Europe. I’m incredibly proud of what they’ve been able to build, as well as the hand that I’ve had in helping to do that. However, when the opportunity came to work with the team that Chris Lema has put together, I couldn’t pass it up. It was simply too exciting. So exciting that I don’t even know what else to say without turning this into a big, rambling, 4500-word post. Seriously. The previous revisions of this draft post go to some really weird places. And because I’m not really interested in tying my disjointed ideas together right now, I’ll spare everyone the word salad and post a GIF of how I’m feeling instead. Maybe I’ll digest things a bit more and write about all of this later. Considering the last post I did here was in March, probably not. But hey, here’s to future aspirations…

  • Mindfulness is Hard

    Ever since I listened to this episode of The Tim Ferriss Show in December, I’ve been thinking about trying to see if I can manage to go 21 days without complaining to help improve my mindfulness.

    The plan is a fairly simple one:

    1. Put on one of those silicone (or rubber) bracelets.
    2. Come up with a list of things you consider to be a “complaint”.
      • Besides outright complaints, I’ve included using curse words as intensifiers (ex: the fucking WiFi) and sighing as a response.
        • Yeah. I still sigh about stuff. Like a teenager. 😞
    3. Whenever you catch yourself complaining, move your wristband to your other wrist and reset your “days without a complaint” counter.

    To prepare, I bought some unbranded, black rubber bracelets off of Amazon and set up a “No Complaints” goal in Streaks. As soon as the bracelets arrived, I started.

    So. How has it gone?

    Well, since Monday, I haven’t gone a single day without complaining. Which is kind of a disheartening way to start things out. But I’m not treating this as defeat just yet. Why?

    This morning, while I was kicking myself for not making it past a single day, Sarah pointed out that at least I was noticing the times that I had complained. That means that something I’d been doing as an almost reflexive reaction to everything — and paying no mind to — has become something that I can’t stop seeing.

    Becoming aware of just how often I complain was the first step. That’s a “no duh” moment now — what with the sharpness of hindsight and all that — but the realization was still a pretty powerful one.

    I’ll be 38 next week. Sadly, I’ve been complaining about things for about as long as I’ve been able to speak. Breaking that habit is going to take a while to undo, but I feel like I’m up to the challenge.

  • Sexy Beasts

    New Business Card

    While I was in Austin last week, work graced me with a new set of business cards. And they’ve got my new(ish) title! Don’t they look fucking handsome?

    I’m sure that everyone I hand them to will silently curse me for their non-standard size, but maybe that’ll become less of an issue once they notice the lightly embossed WP Engine logo.

    Or maybe not. But hey, whatever. New cards!

  • I Was There

    Interview with James Murphy of LCD Soundsystem about how to deal with Failure

    99U dug up this fantastic interview with James Murphy (of LCD Soundsystem) that covers feeling like a failure in your late 20’s and how to deal with it. It’s something I really wish I’d heard when I was floundering hard a few years ago.

  • Fork This DMCA Takedown

    Over the past few months, I’ve had to help several clients file DMCA takedown notices. Yeah, I think the DMCA stinks. But it’s also the most expedient option for squashing content scrapers and self-titled “curators” who don’t spend a lot of time worrying about things like attribution.

    Anyhow, because of this, I keep finding myself in need of a well-crafted — but still fairly generic — DMCA takedown notice template. Which normally means I have to do a quick Google search for one. And then I have to spend a bunch of time doing boring, time-consuming find & replace work.

    So the last time this came up, I swiped a publicly available example notice and made some edits. And, naturally, I turned it into a Gist so folks could fork it and use it for themselves.

    Hope someone out there finds it useful!

  • So Busy

    Note to Self: Stop saying that you’re “busy” when people ask about the things that are happening in your life. Everybody is busy.

    Besides, it’s a boring fucking answer. And it makes you sound like a real asshole too.

  • Fake Louie Episodes

    Sad about “Louie” going on hiatus until 2014? Me too.

    At least we’ve got @FakeLouieEps to hold us over until then…

  • Kanye Wes Anderson

    The second I saw the picture above, Kanye Wes Anderson became my new favorite site on Tumblr. [via]

  • Girl With a Silver Camera

    Girl With A Silver Camera

    This take on Vermeer’s Girl With a Pearl Earring (allegedly by the artist Mitchell Grafton) made me laugh. Out loud. So I thought I’d share it.