Wow, geeze. I had an amazing day. After a fun, but lackluster meeting with the nice folks at Gershoni via iChat, I figured the day was pretty well blown, so I might as well send out a couple more applications.

What has resulted has me dancing in the snow kissing old ladies and throwing babies in the air.

I don’t want to say much, because a) the horse hasn’t arrived, so we don’t need the cart; and b) they’re probably reading this (Hi, guys!).

That said, let’s just say I may soon be on a path for World Domination.

I’ll be cackling maniacally. (Oh, and don’t try to get ahold of me Tuesday or Wednesday… I’ll be in The Bay!)

:D

So, I had a preliminary interview today with Gershoni (woo! fo’ real!) that I felt went really well…

Okay, so really well except for The Hardest Interview Question Ever!. The person who interviewed me deserves the HR gold star of the year award for this one; maybe it’s common but I’ve never heard it before.

“How would your friends describe you?”

It is at this point that I slowly swallow my tongue and freak out. I probably looked like a puddle of something gooey, because despite thinking of plenty of good friends with nice things to say, I felt very awkward suddenly thinking about what other people would say.

I felt I should say something honest, but then I had no idea what that would be! I’m liked, I know, I’m pretty crazy intense when it comes to human rights or bad governmental behavior or work related perfectionism, but I wasn’t really sure what anyone would say, exactly, so I just kinda froze.

Those of you with a dream of working in HR, remember this one. It will stop’m dead in their tracks! :)

...there’s always Dio.

And check this out from the YouTube comments:

Holy crap people are crazy!

I hope no one can ever accuse me of cussing somone out in a public forum in defense of Dio (over kKllswitch, no less).

Editors Note: Please realize while watching this video that Dio is about 5’1” :D.

Typo: The end is nigh

Not for Typo on a whole, mind you. Just here.

I’m preparing the first sketches on the long-overdue development of my personal site and one of the major components is going to be a completely overhauled blog presentation. And, when that happens, I’ll be switching to Mephisto due to the unnecessary weight of Typo and it’s sluggishness on this shared server.

The new system will employ much AJAX and DHTML goodness. Don’t worry: not a bunch of useless crap. I’m working on the wireframes now for a novel way to look at a blog. Admittedly, there’s not a lot you can do with a blog, but I’m asking questions of myself as to how people really interact with blogs, the differences between posts like this, which are dated and time-specific, and posts for longevity. The result is I think that there should be more user control over what is on the screen at any time, and fortunately JavaScript, CSS and the DOM will let me do that to some extent (at least I hope).

First of all, allow me to make a brief announcement regarding my seemingly permanent absence from the blogosphere: I’ve been really crazy busy and had no internet connection for a bit in Indianapolis, but now I am back.

Without further ado, the news at hand:

gravitymusic.com is getting it’s third facelift! The site that is currently up is some of my oldest work that I still mention (circa 2002) and it’s soon to be gone making way for a new Ruby on Rails powered web presence.

Gone will be:

• Flash-based MP3 player that intermittently decides not to work on XP
• Tables (eek!)
• I-Frames (EEGADS!)

New will be:

• Ruby on Rails (oooh!)
• DHTML and AJAX [via prototype and moo.fx] in news and music display (oooh la la!)
• “Web 2.0”-ie graphic shite, like reflections and starburst badges and a shitload of gradients (... em, TIRED?... yeah ok, but it looks hot.)

Just see for yourself! (Warning: Spoiler alert.)

IconFactory, purveyors of amazing pixel art (really the best in the business in my opinion) have taken their site down, oddly enough, for six days awaiting the launch of a completely new website.

To help market this relaunch, they have been running an extremely cool six-segment daily-updated pixel film in which the Sims-like icon workers are visited by a very angry W3C inspector (seen above complaining about undepricated break tags; very cute :) and then proceed to start renovating the place to comply.

This is the best kind of web promotion. Clever, insider, extremely high quality, viral as hell. This rocks.

See it from the beginning here. (Requires Quicktime)

I seriously cannot even fathom how much this would cost, but I think we need one at Therapy

I found this not too long ago on Digg. It’s pretty damn cool, huh?

More details are available at the website of the creator (natch, they’re German).

I definitely think I need one of these. Check out that Leica Lens. Sexy, baby.

It hits the market soon. Supposed to be under $300. Yum.

It’s official, I’ve joined the blogosphere™

I’m excited to have my own plot of land with an exit from the information super highway (and it was dirt cheap, too), and pleased how easy it was to furnish that tract with my very own blog.

Yet, there’s a certain lump in my throat and queasiness in my stomach.

Does my ownership of a blog now mean I’m doomed to end up just like my friends?

For those who haven’t already guessed (or also blog) I’m referring to the blog-owner habit of airing one’s grievances with another friend (usually also a blogger) in the blog, under disguise, rather than in person.

This has been an interesting day, attempting to get a fresh build of Typo 4.0.1 installed on a shared hosting account with DreamHost.

The reason for this, predominantly, was to practice deploying a Rails application on DreamHost in preparation for the launch of Witnessing Life which I’m currently spending my days (and nights) thinking about.

Without further ado, here’s the rundown of how I achieved my goal.

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Disclaimer: I am not well versed in server configuration, ruby, rails or typo. This is simply a documentation of the steps I took to get typo up and running on my page. I am a newbie with the intention of helping other newbies get their feet wet. If things go wrong, see the list of related links at the bottom and seek assistance at #typo on irc.freenode.net, but more importantly please let me know what went wrong so I can correct this information for the future.

Another Note: This post is under the assumption you’re installing your blog as a subdomain, like this blog, e.g.: blog.yourdomain.com.)

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