The Author
I was born on December 28th in the year 1964, and live in Portland, Oregon. I've lived in Portland most of my life, except for a brief period in 1998-1999 where I endured Austin, TX, and some of my childhood years in various parts of Washington.
I favor Mac OS X. I work on Windows (they don't get a link) when I'm paid to do it. And, yes, I'm accepting new clients.
For hobbies I like to run, read, and travel (when I can afford it).
Look here soon for more fascinating stories about the blogger. I'm tired and it's late and I see HTML and CSS when I close my eyes. So I'll write something for this later. OK?
Other places I own on the internets:
The Lie Factory, a blog dedicated to politics, both local, national, and international. Mostly local. (Currently re-directs to my home server... sorry. 17 August 2007)
- Run, Moon!, my running and diet log. Re-launched as of 30 March 2008!
- Lethem, my trusty Intel Mac mini, connecting via cable modem from my living room.
- My Flickr pictures - I post the best of my pictures here.
- 43 Things, where I work on my goals.
- My MySpace... um... space, which I pretty much only have due to the urging of my friends.
- My last.fm page
- My Twitter page
- For a look at my favorite other internets, check out my blogroll.
The Site
- The HTML and CSS was hand-written by the author (see above), based on looking at the code for many sites that I admire. All the code will validate - eventually. Not right now. That's on my to-do list.
The site is hosted on dante, which is maintained by Caleb Phillips, d.b.a. "Small White Cube". (No longer true; see above. 17 August 2007) Caleb has contributed
a lot of code and tools and suggestions to my site, both directly and indirectly. An example is reliam, the basis for my Contact page.
- I use Blogger to post. It does all the hard work of keeping track of my posts and all the comments, and setting up the Atom feed, and generating all the archive pages. Plus it's owned by Google and Google is pretty cool.
- I do my writing on my new sexy thing, a MacBook Pro 2.0 GHz 15.4" beautiful, beautiful laptop. It's the fastest computer I've ever owned, bar none, and it's a work of art. My software tools of choice are TextWrangler, and images are created in Graphic Converter and Apple's Pages. For uploading the files I use David V. Kocher's Cyberduck.
- My webserver is Eggers, a 1.83 GHz PowerPC G4 Mac mini, running Mac OS X v10.4.10, and using tools installed via the Fink Project and MacPorts, with 1 GB of RAM and an 80 GB hard drive. It's sitting behind a Linksys router, in the office of Willamett Mortgage Services, in the Pearl District of Portland Oregon, on a DSL line provided by Integra Telecom.
- The images in my header are taken from NASA. Duh. And don't get on me about how they're positioned in an unrealistic way - I know. I got all copy&paste-y to make them fit right.
- The font in my logo is Futura, a favorite of Stanley Kubrick. I associate Futura with 2001:A Space Odyssey, particularly with the iconic image of the Earth rising over the Lunar horizon, and the monolith "screaming" out... So that font just looks right up there with the moon and Earth.
- Note: It is the official policy of this website to either delete or publicly mock anonymous comments, whichever I deem funnier.
Internet Explorer
My site may not look right to folks using Internet Explorer, especially versions 6 or less. As it turns out, there's practically a cottage industry devoted to hacking around or correcting for bugs in Internet Explorer 6 or less for how it displays modern, standards-compliant web pages.
I'm not going to get into a religious argument here, but since I favor Macintosh and open standards, I didn't even notice that IE (at least versions 6 or less) had a problem with my site design until it was too late.
Just because IE has most of the market, I am working to correct some of the more obvious errors (see my change log and to-do list for the most recent list). However, I'm probably not working on it full-time, because it's hard for me to care much. My site works for me, and my friends, and that's almost good enough.
But I do want others to read and enjoy my site, and I want it to look as beautiful for them as it does for me and my friends. So until I correct those errors, here are some workarounds for you:
- First, if you're running Mac OS and still using IE, stop. Just stop. You're hurting yourself. There's so many other options for you.
- If you're running on Linux - get out of here. IE doesn't work on Linux unless you're really masochistic.
- That leaves you Windows users. You realize that IE6 is several years old now, right? Why don't you try a newer, better browser?
- Try Firefox, which is a modern, clean, safe browser.
- ...or even Opera. Lotta fans of Opera out there. And by that I mean some.
- Or if you're brave, you could try the IE 7 Beta 2 preview. I've heard it fixes most of the display bugs of older versions, and probably doesn't introduce too many new major ones.
- Get a Macintosh. You can pick up a shiny new Mac mini for $599.00 and get a decent computer that just works and won't likely get bogged down with viruses or spyware. And you'll be using the same browser I'm using. Or you could go up from there. Or if you're really cheap you could buy used. Just sayin'. You just knew I had to bring this up, right?
Change log
- 23 April 2006: Site first published.
- 24 April 2006:
- 25 April 2006: Implemented "ass.css" just for IE6 and less, correcting most of the positioning errors.
- 1 May 2006: Changed logo.png to logo.gif just for IE.
- 7 May 2006: Added other feed links to sidebar
- 5 September 2006: Added my blog to Technorati - includes a search box for this blog
- 17 August 2007: Moved servers; now being served by Eggers, my G4-based Mac mini. 512 MB RAM, 1.83 GHz PPC processor, 80 GB hard drive, running Mac OS X v10.4.10, via a DSL connection provided by Integra Telecom, from somewhere in Portland's Pearl District. Thanks to Willamette Mortgage for the physical space!
- 18 November 2007:
- Got
launchd to run webalizer nightly. - Turned on per-post comment feeds.
To-do list
The following items are things I still need to do, or things I would like to add to the site, or suggestions from my readers.
- Fix broken links in old posts; add titles to all old posts
- Move Archives to a separate page
- Give option to see Archives by post title (rather than date only)
- Make navigation items 'smart'
- Update picture gallery CSS
- Make page templates 'smart' for sidebar items
- Adjusting font size screws up columns
- Add last.fm "Recently Played Tracks" list to sidebar (as RSS feed).
New To-do list
Added 17 August 2007: All of the previous to-do list, plus:
Move picture gallery to Flickr done long before 30 March 2008
- Widen columns
- Tag all past posts
- Add a tag cloud page
- Add physical, local backup
- Add remote backup to home network
- Implement remote monitoring
Research traffic stats software
Implement traffic stats software
- Implement virtual hosts traffic stats
- Install a wiki
- Options for font sizes - bigger, black-on-white
- Research comment feeds
Figure out launchd - nightly updates of webalizer
- Move Run, Moon Run and The Lie Factory archives to Eggers.