Web Developer’s Field Guide

A couple of nights ago I dreamed I was at a Guns ‘N Roses concert; they were playing Bon Jovi covers. In the dream, I kept trying to fall asleep, but kept myself awake because I didn’t want to miss the music. I ended up waking up fully because I tried so hard not to fall asleep, while I was already asleep. I’m assuming that I was trying to switch between sleep stages but not letting myself do so.

Last night I dreamed that some important guy had created a new, puzzling, adventurous world to explore; one of the puzzles was figuring out how to get into the world in the first place. I figured this out before anyone else; it was as simple as asking the man for the key. Once inside the world was Escher-like, labyrinthine and full of junk. You had to sort through all of the junk to find the useful items for the journey. I figured out fairly soon that although the world was so large, none of the paths you followed got you anywhere. I realized that this was also an inherent puzzle to the world. Upon figuring it out, I could leave and get a true adventure from the man. Having proved myself, I did so.

I’ve been playing both Portal and Half-Life 2 lately, so I think that gaming fired off that particular dream.

Onesy Ideas:

• An arrow on the front pointing to the mouth with Food written under it; on the backside, an arrow pointing to the butt with Poop written over it.
• A snake mouth on the bottom half of the onesy; so it looks as if the baby is being eaten.
• Basic animal onesies, all ferocious and ravenous looking; not cute and cuddly.
• Gender-benders: Girl-onesies with sparkly, vicious, toothy T-Rexes; pink and purple fire trucks; etc. Boy-onesies with camo-print prancing ponies.
• His and Her: Mommy Loves Me; Daddy Doesn’t and Daddy Loves Me; Mommy Doesn’t.

Pregnant Woman T-shirt Ideas [all of these prints go on the lower part of the shirt, so the belly fills them out]:

• Disco Ball [thanks to Noah Pfarr]
• Death Star
• Globe
• A monster mouth with sharp teeth [to discourage people from touching the pregnant belly].

Final Salute

I received bear paw mittens for Christmas, and they’ve become my favorite gift. They give me near endless amusement, I get to act like a bear and make infinite puns about doing things with my bear hands. In addition to this, I also get to act like a bear and make infinite puns about my bare hands. These mittens are so awesome that people do triple takes. I pretend they are my actual hands and wonder aloud if I’ll ever find gloves that will fit. I probably exasperate everything within ear-sight of me when I have them on. They even have the bonus of being fairly warm, despite their acrylic nature. The next time I’m in Canada, I might try fishing with them.

It has also been suggested to me that I get a shirt that says “Everyone has the right to bear arms.”

I pissed off a cop today. He was sitting at the intersection of West 20th and Lorain at the light and chatting with a car in the other lane on West 20th. I was two cars back. The light turned green and they just kept talking, so I honked my horn. The car in the other lane got the hint and moved on, but the cop glared in his rearview mirror at me and waited until the light turned yellow before turning out onto Lorain. The car between us also made it through the light, but I got stuck at the red. The cop pulled over on Lorain to wait for me until he realized that I was stuck at the red, and then drove off. I wonder what he would have ticketed me for, or whether he was just going to waste my time and bitch at me for honking at him.

Hey man, I was hungry and he was between me and the grocery.

San Fran Bag Ban

MileMeter - Car insurance by the mile. Thanks, Jeff.

The new year always kicks off some great new projects at the County, mostly because everyone has money to spend after budget approval. The focus last year was getting the new county home page off and running, and in the year since we’ve made sufficient technological progress that the home page now requires another rewrite. This time, if all goes according to plan and my knowledge of RSS and our Synapse Content Management System pays off, the home page will be able to update itself. This is probably some time off though, as we have to put most of the current county sites into the CMS in the first place.

There are a few sites already out there running the CMS, the most notable of these is the Department of Development’s site. While I’m still having fits over getting .NET to serve valid, standards-based code, the site itself has much better flow, and a significantly updated look and feel. Hopefully it actually feels like it has been designed, instead of just built.

The big ticket item for the first quarter of 2008 is a complete overhaul of the Board of Elections site, putting it into the CMS, making it more like a portal and creating pages with voter-specific information and interactive election-tracking as well. In addition to the end-user bells and whistles, behind the scenes we should end up with less labor intensive updating processes and significantly less server load.

Other sites currently in the pipeline include the Office of Homeless Services, the Board of County Commisssioners, Coroner, and Justice Affairs. This is a good chance for me to build up some earned time so that I can take time off when the kid arrives.

Here at home, I’ve switched O/M over to Bluehost, an all-around good idea, as I can and am doing a redesign with multiple Wordpress installations and databases.

13 weeks after
tears and trepidation,

it happens quickly. You
wrought to sound;

she the seashell
woman you hide inside.

The day you first spoke to
me; I put my ear

to our blood ontology.

like first steps,
like the sea.

The creation of enclaves of like-minded people had a second effect: It made both liberal groups and conservative groups significantly more homogeneous — and thus squelched diversity. Before people started to talk, many groups displayed a fair amount of internal disagreement on the three issues. The disagreements were greatly reduced as a result of a mere 15-minute discussion. In their anonymous statements, group members showed far more consensus after discussion than before. The discussion greatly widened the rift between liberals and conservatives on all three issues.

The Internet makes it exceedingly easy for people to replicate the Colorado experiment online, whether or not that is what they are trying to do.

Cass R. Sunstein - The Polarization of Extremes

Baltimore is a postindustrial city, wedged between D.C. and Philadelphia and struggling to find its future and reconcile its past. In that sense it’s like St. Louis and Cleveland and Philly and a lot of other rust-belt American places, and so stories from here have a chance of being about more than Baltimore per se. The storytelling here might be quite detailed in referencing local geography and culture, but it translates easily to elsewhere and therefore acquires additional relevance easily.

David Simon - Creator/Writer/Producer of The Wire as interviewed by Nick Hornby.

I’m pregnant. That’s right, you heard me. To be perfectly specific, my girlfriend Debbie is pregnant. I’m going to be a father! We’re going to be parents! This wasn’t expected or planned, but we both want children so we’re making the best of it. This news explains the intermittent noise amid all of the radio silence here lately. We’ve been moving in together, breaking the news to our family, and doing some serious psychological adaptation to our new roles. She’s 15 weeks along at this point, so we’ve had time to get over the initial shock and get excited about the actual birth. The due date is June 20th.

I’m not too good at keeping a secret and I would have felt like I was lying to post continuously with such important news kept in the bag along with the cat. We heard the heartbeat the last time we visited the doctor, and a sonogram will show up in a few more weeks. Debbie had pretty awful dawn-to-dawn morning sickness for the last three months, but now that it is fading away a bit everybody is less stressed.

We spent Thanksgiving with Debbie’s parents and Christmas with my family. Christmas week was a flurry of driving and it was good to get back into town, especially since, while we were gone, I had wood floors installed in part of the house. I still have to put down quarter-round and grates for the ventilation, not to mention work on the walls in the main entry room, but at least two of the room feel like home now.

New Year’s was celebrated with a couple of friends and a tense game of Star Wars Monopoly. You’re pretty much caught up. I’ll now take a few questions.