ghotifish.net

I’m in training for version 6.1 this week, which is both a blessing and a curse — a blessing because I don’t have to deal with customers at all; a curse because I have to sit through 40 hours of class when only about 5 hours worth is actually new to me. I am quite glad to be learning the new stuff, though; one tires of having to feign knowledge.

One of the perks of being in training (other than freedom from the telephone) is that I get home 1–2 hours earlier than normal. I am amazed at what a difference this makes: I am able to cook and eat dinner before the sun sets. Today I did a couple of laps around Lake Calhoun, which was mildly abuzz with windsurfers (Windboarders? I’m not sure if it can be considered a form of surfing if done sans surf) and sailboats.

Even better, I found out yesterday that starting next week I’ll be working 9:30–6:00 rather than my current 10:30–7:00. This is great not only for the reasons discussed above, but also because it means that David and I will be able to carpool to work and/or bike to work together. As David points out, we might as well just get married while we’re at it… but then we’d have to leave lovely Minnesota, wouldn’t we?

Preparations continue apace for the Loyd–Applegarth wedding. I spoke to Matt this evening about helping out with the inevitable airport shuttling. So many plans to make! I really don’t think I could handle it.

On to geekier news…

I’ve been doing a lot of poking around with WordPress. It’s not nearly as polished as MovableType, but it is available under the GPL, and it’s written in PHP, which I find to be much more friendly than Perl. Don’t be surprised, therefore, if ghotifish.net suddenly changes again in the next few weeks. I think I may even be able to coax WordPress into serving as the backend for Professor Yeti, which would be great — I’d be able to apply expertise gained from working on my own site to PY, and vice versa.

Speaking of Professor Yeti, the broken server/missing files craziness sorted itself out when everything suddenly reappeared on the server as if nothing had happened. We still haven’t heard from 1&1 about the incident. The hosting plan is a free promotional deal, so I guess you get what you pay for, but on the other hand I strongly doubt that 1&1 will see us sign up for a paying plan when the free one runs out.

I’m none too pleased with the folks at 1&1 right now. Professor Yeti was down for almost 24 hours, everything seems to have disappeared from the server, and we haven’t heard a single thing from them. I’m currently working on moving Professor Yeti over to my hosting plan at DreamHost… lets hope 1&1 can handle a simple DNS update.

Another weekend passes without having figured out a suitable bike route to work. This despite having just spend $50 on a biking jersey — not to mention much more than that on the actual bike. (For the curious, it’s a Trek 1000.) I’m a bit disappointed that I haven’t been able to get my biking act together yet, since this week is officially Ride Your Bike to Work Week. Still, I’ve enjoyed the rides I have been on, including an 18-mile trip with David and Kevin last weekend.

I did get to spend some time this weekend scratching my head over what I’m going to do about Professor Yeti. My goal is to get a management system in place whereby the editors can post the content themselves and have the issues automatically generated — right now I’m translating text and Word files into html and building the pages by hand. This can be pretty frustrating: it takes a while, and I invariably introduce new errors during the translation process, which means the editors are forced to proofread everything again after I’ve built the pages.

I’ve test-driven a bunch of freely-available CMS’s, but I have yet to find one where the amount of work I’d have to put into it to make it useful for Professor Yeti is less than the amount of work I’d have to put into developing my own system. It looks like I may be in for some fun with PHP before this is all settled.

In other news, I spent some quality time at the Mall of America this weekend getting measured for a tuxedo in anticipation of my participation in the upcoming Loyd-Applegarth wedding. My jacket size is a 38 regular.

Welcome to the new ghotifish.net. (I’ve decided that the name shouldn’t be capitalized.) As you’ll notice if you glance at the bottom of the page, ghotifish.net is now running on Movable Type 3.0. We’ll assume this is a good thing. The administrative interface sure is more attractive that the system I had slapped together. So its got that going for it.

The look certainly won’t stay the same for long. This is the default css; I don’t want to look like I just went to Ikea and picked up the same logging software (I’ve also decided that I will struggle to avoid using the ‘b’-word) as everyone else, though that’s pretty much what I did.

The entries below are just there to take up space, really; it’s easier to make stylesheet decisions when the page is full. The text was generated by a nifty tool at www.lipsum.com, which also provides some equally nifty trivia. If anyone who can read Latin reads this, I’d be interested to know how closely the sentences fit the grammar. Are they just random words? Random complete sentences? Based on n-grams of some sort? (EDIT: I’ve removed the filler entries, since I’ve now got enough legitimate content for things to look right.)

Some readers will, at this point, be getting a bit impatient—where is the news about living in Minneapolis, working in tech support, and purchasing bicycles? Those readers will have to stretch their patience out a bit longer; I don’t think I have it in me to write the Great American Life Update at the moment. I expect it will trickle out over the next few weeks.