Geekery

if $brain >= $fried ? ramble : $code;

I am too busy. I suck at being busy. It is my worst thing and it always ends badly. I am not sure how to not be busy. It is a vicious cycle. As soon as I start feeling better, I want to do things. All the things that I can’t do when I am …

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WordCamp 2007

I have been so busy this week that I haven’t had time to write about WordCamp. Lots of work these days and then on Wednesday, I got my 2 top wisdom teeth pulled. K came with me (thank you K!) and we had to wait for an hour in the waiting room, and then what seemed like forever in the dentist room. I cried. I have a hard time going to the dentist. After almost two hours of waiting, the dentist pulled my teeth in about 5 minutes. I didn’t feel a thing, but the noise was pretty sick. It doesn’t hurt too bad as long as I take tylenol and don’t eat food that requires chewing.

This weekend, I went to WordCamp 2007 in San Francisco. It was even better than last year. Surrounded by WordPress geeks. In some ways, I like it better than macworld. There are not too many things that I like better than macworld. WordCamp is smaller and more focused. Lucky for me, it is focused on some of my favorite things.

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very random thoughts from the lake

I am at Lake Merrit, about half way around. Online. This is cool. I am trying to type with 2 thumbs. Better than last time I tried. Still appreciating David Pogue’s punctuation shortcut every time I use it. It is so nice to be able to leave the house again. The water helps my brain. …

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Random Geekery

First, an iphone update. It still rocks! Most of the annoyances do not bug me anymore except for safari not remembering my zoom (Edit: I forgot that a double tap zooms in the safari window, so I rescind that last annoyance), lack of basic text select, copy, and paste features, and poor navigation. Some breadcrumb …

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Review: iPhone 1.0

I cracked. Didn’t even last a week. I tried to resist, but every day I went to the apple store to play with an iPhone. The 8GB models were continuously out of stock. Usually the 4G models were too. It compelled me. Like the iMac did nearly 2 years ago, and like another mac most …

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Pod People

iPod nanoI am now one of them. I have resisted getting an ipod for years, mostly because I find it kind of crazy that there is no way to input data without transferring files from a computer.

I have been tempted repeatedly, mostly by the shiny black video ipods and nanos. The screen size of the video ipods seem a little small for watching videos. Better to wait for the iPhone. 🙂 The nanos are harder to resist. I don’t need one. I have a palm pilot that does everything a nano can do and more. Still, I see them in the store and want one every time. Marketing genius.

It is likely that I will eventually get an iPhone. I will try to wait for version 2.0 when the initial bugs and annoyances have been worked out. The iPhone screen is a better size for video, not to mention the million other things it does. But it is crazy expensive, not even including whatever monthly fee there will be to use all of its features.

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Autiblogger 1.2.1

Autiblogger is a free blogging community for people on the autistic spectrum. Since its initial beta release last August, many new features, themes, and plugins have been added. We have moved from a very unreliable shared server to an excellent dedicated server thanks to donations from the community and lots of help from my family. …

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WordPress 2.2 Upgrade

I am starting to believe that the days of the fast and easy WordPress upgrade have come to an end. Version 2.0 brought some problems for upgraders. Version 2.1 seemed to bring even more due to some database changes breaking certain themes and plugins. The 2.0 upgrade went very smoothly for me. 2.1 did not. …

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Web 2.0 Expo Boring

I was very disappointed in the Web 2.0 Expo yesterday at Moscone Center in SF. I wasn’t expecting much since everything I was interested in was part of the conference and not the expo, but I thought it would at least be fun and interesting. It was not.

I was glad I left late for the city. I stayed home in the morning to work on the big site upgrade that I am doing. I reached about hour 25 of what will most likely be a 30 hour project that I will get paid $300 for. I suppose $10/hr. is a big improvement over the $2/hr. I was making last year. I am happy about the job. It is for a long time client who has sent me many referrals, and the updated site will make it much more usable for us both.

I digress. Back to the expo. So many of the things that I consider to be the future (and present) of the web are open source projects with large enthusiastic development communities. The small expo floor was filled with large corporations and smaller startups focused on selling their products to other companies. The people I spoke with were sales reps rather than developers.

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Dedicated $erver

My new meds are still working much better than the last ones. It is still hard to concentrate, work, play, and read, but for the most part, I am feeling about a million times better than I was just a short time ago 🙂

It is easier to be with people. I had a really good weekend that turned out to be very social and I didn’t even hate it at all. On Friday, I met D at the White Horse for a little while. It was very nice to see her. She is one of the very few people that I can ‘talk geek’ with. It is a rare and beautiful thing. We have other things in common too that make it easier for me to hang with her than it sometimes is to hang other people. She came over and had dinner with me and K.

After dinner, we all went to Velvet to meet Lorena and Tess. It was a good night. We played pool even though we were all sucking pretty bad, even D who is actually good at pool. There were a few obstacles like a giant pole and huge speaker in the way of making certain shots. Still it was fun, even though my knuckle is still a little swollen from smacking it into the giant pole while trying to shoot around it. Eventually, I completely lost all focus of what was going on around me and went into my own special world where it is quiet and stimuli is almost non-existent. I think D ended up in some other world too. I am lucky to be able to do that. Otherwise I would have needed very badly to get out of the bar immediately.

Yesterday, me and K went to Spin’s birthday party. That was lots of fun too. Happy birthday Spins! Nice people and a custom ‘Pin the Tail on the Tigger’ game with Spin’s features imposed on Tigger and magnetic tails for pinning that was made with obvious love for her by her guy. He even had a special ‘tail’ for himself which was actually a heart that matched the heart on the card that he gave her (at least I assumed that card was from him. Only saw the outside, but it had an identical heart). Very sweet 🙂 Other than that, me and K did some errands and even had a little bit of quiet time to watch Prehistoric Planet and for K to start a puzzle that she has wanted to do for a while, but hasn’t had the time.

And then, tragedy struck… (not really. just having a sudden flair for the dramatic)

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Server Load, Share-This, and No Trip

Earlier today my site started loading crazily slow. I checked other sites on the server, and they were all like that. I called LiquidWeb and they told me that it was because of having a really high server load and using more memory than I am allocated. Hard to pinpoint the exact cause because it depends on everything that is happening on all of my sites. The guy said that if it keeps happening, I will have to move to a dedicated server (on a VPS now). I really hope that doesn’t happen! It will cost at least twice as much per month as the VPS. Not sure what to do, especially since my next client site will be using tons of bandwidth for playing huge mp3 files and I already agreed on a hosting price of $100/year because I had no idea about the server resource problem. I also didn’t know how gigantic their mp3 files were at the time. Dang.

I finally got the Share-This plugin to work nearly right. Problems in IE. Surprise. Sending email returns people to a blank page. I give up!

Sometimes, I really hate being me. Usually, I like it okay. I am very lucky in a lot of ways. Most ways. But once in a while, I get very down on myself and very jealous of other people. I get tired of having a hard time doing basic things like reading, traveling, talking, leaving the house, working, even playing video games! It makes me feel like an idiot. I know that there are lots of things I am good at, and that sometimes those basic things are not hard at all, but when they are, it is very annoying. How can it be hard to play video games? That is completely ridiculous!

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More WordPress Plugins

The first plugin of today is not actually a wordpress plugin at all, but it works like one (at least like one that has a slightly complicated installation). It is called iBox. Installation is relatively simple if you are comfortable with uploading and modifying files. Kind of a pain if you’re not. There is some code that needs to be added to the header.php file of your theme, an image that needs to go in the root images directory, and two files that need to go into your theme’s main directory.

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Plugin Update

I have given up on the Share This plugin for now. No time to mess with it anymore. I am back to using the social bookmarks plugin, but I like the way Share This works and looks much better. When I have more time, I will try again. Yesterday, I added the WP-chgFontSize plugin, which …

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Good Things

I am finally feeling better! It’s only been a few days, but I am hoping it will last. So far, I haven’t had any trouble breathing at all with the new old meds. It has been easier to think, easier to work, easier to play. Still can’t read, but maybe that will come later.

Last night, I did something that I haven’t done in a really long time. I actually called people to see if they wanted to go out. K and A and R were going to see AC/Dshe in the city (San Francisco). I didn’t want to go because the show didn’t start until 11pm and I thought I probably wouldn’t want to be out in the city that late.

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Web 2.0 : The Video

The term Web 2.0 has been overused to the point of barely having any meaning. Some people use the term to refer to the way in which the web is changing into a more personal and interactive environment where anyone with access can participate without having to be a computer geek. Other people use the term to refer to the individual technologies that are bringing these changes about. I have no idea what it actually means.

While I am not a big fan of the actual term Web 2.0, I am very excited about the trend of providing people with easy access to cool technology and letting them run wild with it. The best explanation of Web 2.0 I’ve seen yet is this video that I stumbled across on youtube today and watched 4 times in a row. I think non-geeky types might enjoy watching it too.

The Machine is Us/ing Us

Interesting Things

I was an insomniac again last night, but I didn’t really mind. Got some good rest anyway. Me and K had some laughs in the middle of the night, mostly due to to Nikkyo falling down behind the bed repeatedly. I watched some online tutorials at lynda.com. K is getting me the very sweet birthday …

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December

Red Wave
I dropped my classes. i am very sad about that, but relieved too. It was too much. So much work and trying to deal with meds (or lack of them). I just couldn’t keep up. It is very similar to what has always happened when I’ve tried to do school, but with one major difference. Since we actually learned by doing things, I still know everything I learned and can use it for my work.

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Work, Weariness, and Warcrack

Work has been very busy lately. I have one very big job, and possibly several other smaller jobs coming up. I am hoping to be able to partner with d. We will try a test run with one of the smaller jobs. We have almost completely opposite skills and completely opposite ways of working. I think that is a good thing. She is very organized about the initial process of signing up a client, including managing expectations, writing contracts, and charging realistic prices based on actual time worked, rather than pulling some random number out of the air like I tend to do. She is also skilled at graphic design and has experience making web sites. If I had my way, I would stick to the (x)html/css and back end coding for the site and do technical support for the client after the site is complete. I would leave the business stuff, front end design, and client management to someone else. Could be a match made in heaven if we can somehow merge our oppositeness into a working business.

It is getting harder to keep up with school. The ‘side-effect’ of feeling better lately is that I have lost the super-focus that I was having when I was undermedicated. I have also been very twitchy and shaky which is quite annoying. It is a strange balance. It is still hard for me to get out, but not as hard as before. The main difference is that I am not completely exhausted like before. I can do a wider range of things, but am back to having a one second attention span. Going to see the doc on wednesday, but not sure if I am ready to continue experimenting with new meds and/or doses and timing of meds.

I am tired of waiting and waiting to find the right combination of drugs and going through long periods of terrible side-effects until the next drug or dose kicks in. I will probably keep experimenting, but am thinking of taking a break for a while and going back to figuring out ways to make myself feel better even when things aren’t so good. It has been very hard to do that while continuously messing with my meds, and I am hoping that taking a break will help, at least in the way of keeping things stable for a while. One of my best skills is adapting to life under less than ideal circumstances. It is impossible to adapt to something that keeps changing.

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WordPress Love

I love WordPress. My first thought about making new websites for clients, friends, or myself is “How can I do this with WordPress?”. In most cases, there is a way. I have used more open source php/mysql content management systems over the years than I can count, and at this point WordPress is my favorite by far.

The code is clean. That is the thing I love best. The file structure makes sense. It is usually pretty easy to completely customize a site design by altering only the theme files. In most other systems that I have used, hacking the core files is part of customizing the design, and updating the core files can be a nightmare. I do end up hacking WordPress plugin and widget files from time to time, but that usually has more to do with function than design.

A basic install of WordPress is small and fast. I like that. The plugin system is excellent and the developer community is incredible! It is nice to be able to customize site features as needed, rather than having to install a gigantic supersystem every time that overwhelms clients and has a negative impact on site performance.

My favorite WordPress plugins and widgets:

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White and Nerdy

This video is from Weird Al Yankovic’s new album Straight Outta Lynwood. It is a parody of Chamillionaire’s “Ridin Dirty“, and it is very hilarious. Thanks to Lord Matt for the tip 🙂