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Life in POD-land
Yes, I’m still alive. No, I haven’t succumbed to a recurrence of tonsillitis. No, I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth. And no, I haven’t joined the TSA. (I don’t meet their standards, since I have a basic amount of common sense. I don’t drag my knuckles or wear jackboots either, but I digress…)
I’ve been working on the Picture of the Day pretty much non-stop since February. I installed WordPress as a content management system and then taught myself PHP and WordPress theme development. It was more tedious than difficult, since I’ve been programming off and on for 25+ years.
My goal was to design a custom theme that looked like the old POD, but with lots of new stuff (comments, ratings, tags, etc.). Then I started importing the old archives. That turned out a to be a huge job, so I recruited a team of volunteers to help. Once we imported a sufficient number of pictures from 2007, 2008, and 2009, I decided to go live with the new interface on March 23. That was the Trillion-dollar post.
I’m not dead yet!
Actually, I’m feeling a lot better. Finally!
My tonsils hurt for nearly a week after the shot of antibiotics. I pretty much lived on milkshakes and grilled cheese, and not much of either. The silver lining is that I lost almost 10 lbs. I wouldn’t recommend it as a diet plan, though. I still didn’t talk much over the next week (it hurt), and eating was painful if I didn’t chew my food thoroughly.
Gulp… wince
A really quick update…
I thought I had the flu, but it turns out I don’t. I have tonsillitis instead. Jesu, joy of man’s desiring!
At least it explains why my throat hurts like hell. Fortunately, the doc gave me a shot in the office (well, that’s not really where he stuck me, but you get the picture), and a prescription for oral antibiotics.
Don’t Tread on Me
I’ve actually had more time to write lately. I’ve also had the motivation, which is even better. Now, I don’t think I’ll ever get back to the 2,000 words a day of Book 1, but I’m pretty happy with my pace lately (~800 words a day).
Anyway, I started a long blog post a couple of days ago, but it was more rant than post. It was about politics, but it wasn’t what you’d think.
Social Distortion
My business partner is an only child. On top of that, he’s an only child of older parents. His parents both worked when he was growing up, so he spent a lot of time alone. And when they did spend time with him, they tried to make up for it by lavishing attention on him.
So it was famine or feast. Not surprisingly, he learned to hate the famine and crave the feast. These days, he doesn’t do anything alone. Not if he can help it, at least.
Now, if you’re like me, you grew up with siblings, so you know the value of alone-time. It’s nice to have some peace and quiet to yourself sometimes. But my business partner never learned the value of alone-time, and he does everything he can to avoid it.
So, why am I telling you this?
Dealing with critics.
Someone recently commented on my last blog post, and I started to write a reply. But then I thought about it. I didn’t want my reply to get buried as comment #63, so I decided to kick it to the top of the blog with a main post.
If you’d like, you can read the original comment. The whole thing is polite and well-written, but I disagree, obviously (or I wouldn’t be taking the time to reply… at length). Anyway, that’s probably enough preamble. Here’s my reply.
And you wonder why I chew the furniture sometimes…
I received this little gem in my inbox this morning—a great way to begin a lovely spring Friday.
I’ll post my reply at the end. In the meantime, “enjoy.”
Up and running… for the future!
Well, after nearly three weeks of work—including one weekend where we spent 20 hours upgrading, installing, copying, moving, testing, and fixing—the new server is up and running.
Let me guess… most of you never noticed. Well, that was kind of the point.
Now, this wasn’t three solid weeks of work. It was work in our free time, after the 8-10 hours a day that each of us spent at our “regular” jobs. And when I say “we,” am I, perhaps, referring to the mouse in my pocket? No, I’m talking about my server admin team.
New interface, obviously
Short update.
I updated the blog interface, obviously. I never really liked the old one—it didn’t match my colors or look and feel—but I didn’t want to take the time to learn how to create my own theme. Well, several months ago I found this theme (for another project). I was in the mood to work on the site tonight, so I decided to update the blog theme.