What a hellish day. I spent many hours today copying files for a slew of domains to my web server. While trying to upgrade to a dual SCSI RAID, the hard drive failed. The tape backup was incomplete. It's back up now, and it's time to write some scripts to automate backups and restoring sites to the server...
But hey, it wasn't all bad. Rebecca and I went out to eat with our friends Brent and Susan. Brent made me laugh so hard I about choked on my Southern vittles.
So, now I am 34. Well, actually, I think it is at like nine in the morning when the event in question took place, so I will pleasantly be 33 a few hours more (while I am asleep).
From day one, I never liked the morning. I guess it's a rough time of day to be born. After all this time, morning is still not my strong suit.
The early thirties are sort of a weird border time. On one hand, you can still kind of get away with pretending that you are in your late twenties: hip, reckless, etc. But on the other hand, you don't really feel that way as much anymore, and the shiny grey hairs will give you away in the sunlight in any case.
If you're a web developer, you need to install this extension for Mozilla or Firefox. It puts several very useful tools on a separate toolbar in the browser. It's great for your own development and also quickly deconstructing the presentation code of others (ever inherited a site from another developer?).
My new favorite editor for coding is ScITE. It supports a ton of languages, code "folding" (collapsing sections of code), nice syntax highlighting, etc. I've even replaced Notepad with ScITE, which means I can view source from IE in ScITE. Firefox's source viewer is already pretty decent, so I guess it doesn't need replacing.
The only drawback I have with ScITE so far is that it doesn't natively support Cold Fusion syntax highlighting (my coding time is spent equally between PHP and Cold Fusion), so I'm still using Dreamweaver for that. It looks relatively easy to add support for a new language, but I'm just going to wait until someone else does it for me.
It would be really cool if someone ported this to Palm, so I could edit a little code in bed or on the couch.
It's true: I'm obsessed with gadgets and automation.
Enter our latest toy, the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner. This little guy does a great job, going under the couch, etc. My wife is very happy, because my approach to vacuuming tended toward bumping up against things rather than actually moving anything to find the hidden dirt. Now, all that dirt that no one knew was there is also gone.
The Roomba is fascinating to watch the first few times you use it. After that, you can let it go and have clean floors all the time. With two dogs, three cats, and hardwood floors, that can be quite a sneeze-reducer.
It's all I can do to conceal my feelings of jealousy
Yes, after railing against the inanity of blogs for about an hour, I had no choice but to get e-becca (my darlin' wife) to design a template for me. How else could I prove my undying hypocrisy?
Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before
Blogging is a descent into insanity. This is my second attempt, and hopefully my common sense will kick in before I show up on Google.
I sometimes have nightmares about Google, as if every tiny mistake (I spilled some coffee, I flushed the cat) is going to be indexed, surveilled and digitized for the entire world (well, those with internet access) to pore over.
But maybe it won't be that bad. If I can remember that the whole point of public diary-keeping is to assert my geekiness at every turn and link to other sites that geekily link to other geekiness, I should be safe from harm.
Say, did you hear about that one site where they talk about RSS a lot?
Please enter your credit card number. Thanks, I will use that to fund future blogging madness, where I will ramble on incessantly about the joyful utopia brought about by RSS.
