Erudition and Inanity

Many people can drink and write; there is, in fact, a grand tradition of engaging in both simultaneously. I am not one of those people¹, and have spent much of the last year in this new city, job, and social circle engaged in much of the former and not enough of the latter. Even that cannot suffice to explain my extended absence from blogging; indeed, I must ultimately confess to having surrendered to the shallow charms of sloth. No more! Everything is now deployed, configured, and arranged in more or less the fashion that I desire. I have met the enemy, and he is me, and he is vanquished. Allow me to take a moment and put in an associate cheer for mod_rails.

I’ve also taken the opportunity to finally design my own custom theme. Many good and widely admired technical bloggers use stock or mostly-stock layouts. But it’s my little corner of the internet, and I can stumble blindly around Photoshop as well or better than the next poor sap when the need arises. Folly follows futility, however, with the knowledge that a large proportion of readers will simply consume this content through syndication and never stop to admire the elegant curve of my header, or its tacky nod to Web circa-2.0 fashion. In fact I haven’t even bothered testing it in IE6, and almost certainly never will; I am profoundly, almost fanatically indifferent to legacy browsers, even though their users are, being somewhat behind the technical curve, proportionately far less likely to consume this content through a feed reader and must thus endure my less-than-finely-tuned CSS.

I nonetheless submit that I am part of the solution, not the problem.

Frankly I haven’t tested it in IE7 either. I tried Firefox 3 and Safari 3 and then I got bored and went out for coffee. Either way, expect future blog entries to be more technical and perhaps less baldly narcissistic.

¹ I’m young yet, though, and everybody needs a dream.

The job search: It’s hard to tell, but I think it went well. When a blog post rhymes, I eat limes. Friday is here, and I’m drinking a beer! Let’s end this.

California was quite nice in the daytime. I flew the redeye back this morning and I’ve been napping all day as a result. JetBlue may have a lot of forward leg room, but from side-to-side it’s torture. I did meet a couple of cool people, though. To my right, this guy. To my left, director of development here. I enjoy a little schmoozing now and then.

Blog news: Upgraded to Typo 4.1. Pain in the butt. Broke some CSS. Backend seems nicer. We’ll see.

Other: I did manage to get a little bit of work done. Expect a new release of Handshake soon with some small updates (documentation, checked_self, no blame system yet).

In the process of cleaning out spam I accidentally removed a bunch of valid comments. (Bad UI, Typo! Stupid human, Brian!) Sigh. I dug through the default sqlite database for this thing and it looks like the comments were legitimately removed, not just marked for deletion. The database isn’t backed up anywhere. Clearly I am a super genius. If anyone has any bright ideas, let me know in the comments, which I will try not to subsequently delete.

Maybe Wordpress is everything it’s cracked up to be. Typo has been a bit of a disappointment. It crashes occasionally too, and I’ve glanced at the logs but I haven’t nailed down the reason yet.