I flipped the switch early, but I have been working on moving this site so I can use it properly again for a while. Lots of broken links and unfinished business, but it’s better than the site that hadn’t been updated in two years. Bear with me, I will get there a little at a time.
Things One Finds in my Quadrant of the coffee Table., a photo by bump on Flickr.
The moon is alive tonight., a photo by bump on Flickr.
I'm really enjoying being a Dad.
I’ve been working on a new “of the week” project since the beginning of the year. At the end of last year, I was tired of taking a picture every day, as much as I enjoyed the 365 Project. I didn’t want to commit to the same daily level of things this year, partially because of the impending birth of the baby (codenamed Smallz) and partially because I was just tired of being a servant to the project.
At first, I was thinking that I would try and do a single picture each week, but really work on the technique and quality of each picture. Then I was thinking that I would do that and start a 365 for the first year of Smallz' life. (I still plan on doing that.) When our January issue of Bon Appetit arrived, it had a recipe for a Bahn Mi sandwich that I really was interested in making. I ended up making it, and taking pictures while doing it. Making these sandwiches gave me the idea to make something new each week, and learn how to cook and take pictures of food better while doing it. Here’s a collection of the recipes I have made so far.
In the first nine weeks, I have learned that it’s not always easy to find something I want to make. I have also learned that I know far less about cooking than I realized. A lot of my inspiration so far has come from Serious Eats and Tasty Kitchen. Both are awesome resources for the home cook.
This is more than a test post. Well, actually, it’s a test post because I haven’t been able to update this site due to some server problems. I am working on changing hosting companies. I need to do this for two reasons, first I am paying way too much for what I am getting with the current hosting company. Second, I have been updating this site using Blogger since 2001, and Blogger are phasing out support for ftp updating. So if you aren’t hosted on their infrastructure, you really can’t use their tools. This is lame for all manner of reasons, but I think it’s the kick in the ass I needed to get this site going again in some meaningful manner. Current working theory is moving this site and all the other domains associated with it over to Media Temple. This is time consuming, not because of the moving of files, but because of the moving of all the domains. It means a lot of phone calls, and I want to make sure that I don’t lose them. So just a test for the moment.
It’s been an amazing year in my life, and this blog has suffered as a result. I don’t feel guilty about it at all, but I am sure I will wish I had more writing from in between some of these large gaps in time.
Since the last post here, let's see, some things have happened in my life. I got married, that was in September. I turned forty, that was in October. We launched League Pass Broadband, the product I had been working on since June, that was in late October/early November. We also adopted a lovely little pug, named Puka, in November. Each of these things deserve multiple posts here. I learned so much this fall. I have so much to be thankful for, and every day I hope I don't find some way to screw it up.
I don't think I will mothball this site, but I am much more active on Facebook, and Twitter, both of which are linked from this page. It is likely that I will update more here now that I have broken the seal, but you will get a lot more volume over at each of those places.
I’m updating Twitter, when it decides to be up, more than this blog right now. Between my guild’s pursuit of finishing Sunwell, my work on this NBA project I am on, and getting married in September, I have very little time to write, even though I want to. Today’s winner links worth sharing:
So, as I think a lot of people know, Super Deluxe is being “folded into Adult Swim.” I feel like Super Deluxe was based on a fundamentally good set of ideas. I also think that we were learning as we went, and had demonstrated a great ability to learn from our audience, and make good decisions from that learning. However, companies as large as Turner make decisions that they have to make, and they make them based on a variety of reasons, not all of which are apparent or logical to someone outside the decision making process. I am sure that, for the senior management team, this was the right decision to make, and that’s their job.
I do, however, lament the fact that my amazing team of developers was dissassembled. For those of you who were on that team who might be reading this, you guys/girl were some of the finest people I have worked with in my career. I honestly felt like we could have built anything we were asked to. I wish that the senior management understood the value of keeping a development team intact, regardless of the product that they were working on. This is water under the bridge now, and I can only hope that I might teach my superiors to value development teams more in the future. Building a team, building process, and learning how to work with a large team of bright people is a challenge, and starting from scratch is a little discouraging, but I have so much learning to apply that it is also exciting.
I am working now for Turner Sports. I will be working on technology related to the NBA.com licensing deal. It's a pretty exciting project, with agressive deadlines already, and some new technology that hasn't even been created yet. There are going to be a lot of new faces here in the coming weeks, and I am looking forward to making the most of this opportunity to learn and do more.
Finally, to my Super Deluxe peoples, you folks are really unique interesting people as a group, and I just hope that I get to work with all of you again at some point in the future.
Tidbits: Should Mac Users Run Antivirus Software? “I do not recommend desktop antivirus software for the average Mac user, but you need to take other precautions.”
I don't run antivirus software on any of my Mac OS X machines. In reading through the other things he says, I think that this article is something that Mac OS X users of all levels need to read. Most of this stuff is common sense to me, but it may not be common sense to you. The single most important thing to keep in mind, which he does not come out and explicitly say, is that you should not immediately trust anything online. That email that seems to be from your bank, or ebay or paypal probably is not. Look carefully at links before following them, and don't trust any source of information or software without first verifying that they are legitimate.
This can sometimes be very hard for a non-technical user to figure out, but I recommend that you err on the side of caution.
