erratic

My ‘bird flu’ entry captured me 6th place in the typo theme contest. Geoffrey deserves a huge round of applause for all the hard work he managed to fit in around business demands and trans-global flights to run a pretty kick ass contest! And he produces the podcast, does the man ever sleep?!

Also deserving of mad props are the sponsors of the contest and the suite of enticing prizes they offered up as inspiration/motivation:

• Site5 Hosting
• Planet Argon Hosting
• Ma.gnolia Social Bookmarking
• The Pragmatic Programmers
• The Iconfactory
• Macromates
• Tables Turned

I’m making the psd of my design available for download (right/control click & save file) for no other reason besides that I can. Take it and do what you will. It is yours.

The typo theme that started it all: Bird Flu

Every time I challenge the silicon gods by installing yet another demanding software package on my powerbook G3 I always start by consciously dismissing the age and condition of the laptop. The machine is 6 years old, has 386mb of ram, a 9 gig hard drive, a 500mHz processor, and a first generation airport card. After installing tiger and developer tools there is a little under 2gb of disk space left.

There is a ghost impression of the keyboard etched into the surface of the LCD screen from the oil left on the keys by my fingers. I have dropped, sat on, stepped on, rolled over, spit on, slammed shut, forced open, poked, prodded, wedged, and pried loose this poor machine during the 6 years, 2 SXSW’s, many business trips, not as many vacations, and 6 operating system upgrades of it’s life.

Every time I do something beyond surf the web on grandpa pismo and it doesn’t start smoking or tell me to hold the power button down in 5 different languages I experience a trepid euphoria not unlike that experienced by a man who only hears the metallic click of the firing pin during a game of russian roulette.

Around minute 30 of hour 2 of installing mod_ruby using darwin ports (just to see if I could) I started to get nervous. I was using a wireless connection, the elderly (original) battery was at 50% and sinking and I was having a hard time staying awake. it was 2:30 a.m. which is actually 3:30 am to my internal clock seeing as we’re only a few days in to the daylight savings time switch.

Being the dedicated, task focused person I am I… fell asleep.

I have yet to assess the outcome of this latest haphazard command line escapade.

Ceaseless curiosity and always taking 3 lefts to go right. Some things gleamed recently:

• USE ‘apachectl’ NOT ‘httpd’ to stop apache1.3 and release the port. THEN ’ sudo /opt/local/apache2/bin/apachectl -f /opt/local/apache2/conf/httpd.conf -k start ’ to get apache2 running. Specifying the full paths is how you tell apache2 it’s their turn to bat.
• apache2’s http.conf default took two days of my life away. Comment out the unique ID module line and blues skies will you see.
• to use new config use the command above, but replace ‘start’ with ‘graceful’
• alias and directory settings are a bitch.

Just a few of the many things I’ve learned. This knowledge is basic, but I didn’t have it before. I was stuck. With enough ritalin and diet coke I was able to keep banging my head on the terminal until a curiously dull exclamation mark would appear above my head and I would make a simple and obvious change in my approach that is assumed knowledge everyone got two minutes after they were taught where the power button was on their machine but I never learned because I don’t play well with others or authority figures.

One interesting twist is that the big bad scary complex command line has been demystified. I kinda got it now. Now when something doesn’t work I have a 50% chance of knowing what question to ask and where to look to find out what I’m not doing correctly. Prior to this point in time I would’ve had a snowballs chance in hell of fixing something on the command line if I broke it. This is what an optimistic person would call progress.

I started as a graphic designer (layout monkey) and it’s been a long road of learning by necessity how to make stuff with html, css, php, mysql, javascript, and now ruby/rails. Still learning. Always have been. Always will be. It’s a bitch.