Category: General

After a year of running this domain under nginx with XCache, I’ve decided to roll things back over to Apache for the time being.

While nginx has been great when it came to system resources, I’ve never been able to get it to play nicely with Super Cache. I mean, things were caching just fine — but expired stuff hung around forever. And while I like my tweets, photos and Pinboard links from a few days ago, I’d rather show my visitors fresh content.

Besides, I’ve seriously been itching to use mod_pagespeed and PHP 5.3 on my personal site. And since neither of those things are available under the DreamHost install of nginx, my hand was forced.

But not all hope is lost! Being the huge nerd that I am, I’ll probably switch back to nginx once PHP-FPM support gets added into the DreamHost PHP 5.3 install.

Fucking. Epic.

Oh, it’s also happens to be available as an iPhone case or skin.

You know, if you’re into that sort of thing.

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!

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.

An (apparently) unnecessary reinstall of Ubuntu 9.10 allowed me to clean up my netbook a bit. Fortunately, the fresh install was a snap. All I had to do was copy the few files I wanted to keep into my Dropbox, wait for it to update and reinstall from my USB keychain drive with impunity.

While it’s still no OS X — sorry Linux nerds — I’m really enjoying the interface refinements and bits of polish. I can’t wait to see what improvements 10.04 will bring.

P.S. The totally awesome wallpaper is from kozyndan. If you like it, go downolad it.

Thanks to the release of (Nerd)Press, I’ve switched up the site’s theme a little bit.  And while the jumbo header and splash of Colourise will be sorely missed, I’ve gotta say that I’m really enjoying its super minimal replacement.  Not only does it elegantly tuck comments out of sight — without disabling them completely, I might add — but it also manages to use a liberal amount of Helvetica.

Well, so long as you’re running an OS that installs Helvetica by default, that is.  Otherwise it defaults to (gag) Arial.  Still, sans-serifs FTW!

So feel free to kick the tires a bit.  And let me know if you notice anything weird.

I consulted VW’s RoutanBabymaker3000, and it seems to think that we’d have great looking kids.  Don’t believe me?  Take a look for yourself:

Now I know you’ve got a thing for quirky bearded dudes. Well, you might. For all I know, that was just a phase. Hopefully it wasn’t tho — because I’m way into college educated actresses with published research papers who aren’t afraid to shave their heads for a role.

Anyhow, now that you know what our offspring would look like, you should drop me an email.  We don’t have to make babies right away, but maybe we can go record shopping or talk about Israel.  You know, just getting to know one another.  That would be nice, wouldn’t it?

Okay, it’d probably be nicer for me than it would be for you.  But I swear that I’m a nice guy and not really that weird.  I mean, I might be weird enough to run your photo thru a website, but I’ll never send you a sweater made of my hair or anything.  That’s just bizarre…

As I posted to Twitter earlier, I’ve decided to join the fray and shrug off new year’s resolutions by instead adopting a theme word for 2009.  My choice was:

follow-through

Why?  Well, to be honest, when it comes to follow-through, I’ve historically been sort of selective.  Get me working on something that I’m passionate about and I’ll concentrate on it almost purely.  But other things fall by the wayside while my OCD kicks in — and that’s a problem.

I’ve become lethargic, unhealthy and chained to my desk.

I’m letting relationships and friendships fall by the wayside while I concentrate on building a legacy.

There are places that I wanted to see and things that I have wanted to do long before I managed to get this old.

I’ve got laundry that is in dire need of attention.

So with another step into my thirties a mere month away, I find myself at an interesting crossroads.  I can either stay on my present course or temper myself and make sweeping changes in the way that I do things.  But resolving to change one’s ways is always a slippery slope.  Old habits do die hard, after all.  This is where the idea of a theme word comes in tho.

By choosing something as simple as “follow-through”, I can allow myself to see the things that need doing thru the year and work at them.  Hopefully, using that hyphenated mission statement as a mantra, it’ll keep me on task enough to make this year better than any previous one.

So, what’s your theme word?