Going The Wong Way

Chicago 2012

2013-04-23T17:56:00-07:00

Ah, Chicago. What an interesting city full of interesting architecture and tasty food. On a less pleasant note, over 20 people were shot while we were there. This in a city that has so many restrictions on guns that they’re being challenged in court. Nice!

In any case, you can see more pictures at the full gallery.

Boston November 2010

2013-03-26T17:21:00-07:00

We took a trip to Boston a little while back. We went in the fall so it was nice and colorful. Brisk as well. Check out the full gallery to get more from where these came from!

Dating Defined

2013-02-18T18:45:00-08:00

There are unlimited amounts of material to help you find your soul mate, date online, and analyze yourself so that you can date better. How can you even begin to start all of that if people can’t even agree on the definition. Some people think that a date must involve mutual feelings. Others think that you have to use the word “date” for it to count. Semantics, people!

Date

noun - Prearranged meeting between a male and a female for some period of time greater than 10 minutes
verb - Spending time socially with one other person of the opposite sex

People are going to object to my definitions. In fact people have already objected to my definitions! But stick to them, and your wariness might prove to save you untold heartache from a lack of communication. At the worst, these definitions are going to force you to communicate about what people’s intentions rather than drawing your own assumptions.

And remember everyone, assumptions are a fast track to trouble.

Color Mob 5K Run

2013-02-11T21:38:00-08:00

A run that was more about the fun than about the run. Check out the full gallery.

Going Retail

2013-01-25T18:15:00-08:00

This blog has not been getting the lovin’ that it’s due. It’s calling me to utilize it. It wants it, it needs it!

But that’s another story.

This post is about my new job. It’s been a few months now, but I mention it here to keep things on the up and up. Based on my pattern, I’m good for a few years until I yearn for new things. Then again, I have a relatively small sample size. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed my previous job. The work was fine, and I had some friends amongst my workers (note: Crom wasn’t one of them). But I’m off to new things.

I now work for a retail website (in fashion no less). Suffice to say it’s been a bit of a different experience since now it’s less about the software and more about selling products.

Oh don’t worry, I have some Crom posts backed up that I need to finish. So stay tuned for those, but fear not for I have already encountered numerous other characters in my new workplace! I suspect that this blog won’t ever die simply because I need an outlet to tell the stories that make up my life. You should be so glad.

Pizza Party

2012-12-31T17:56:00-08:00

A pizza party! Check out the Pizza Party Gallery for even more pictures.

Crom, The One Who Can't Concentrate With Too Much Noise

2012-12-07T21:30:00-08:00

Crom is a man who works early.
He definitely does not have hair that’s curly.
He likes to have interesting chats.
I highly doubt he works out the lats.

He is quite a unique one, that Crom is.
Of that I am telling the truth, I promise.
He walks about with a full bowl of food,
And does things that some might think of as rude.

He tells bad jokes
To most any of the folks.
Worst of all when it’s about work and he’s on the phone
He tells me and my friends to lower our tone.

It’s very strange since there are rooms.
I mean, you can’t make noise like you can in the restrooms.
At the least he can watch out to not be so loud,
But that lack of self-examination is what sets him apart from the crowd.

Ron & Christina

2012-10-27T00:40:00-07:00

Here are some pictures from Ron & Christina’s wedding. More at the gallery.

Hawaii May 2012

2012-10-15T21:49:00-07:00

Here are some pictures from a trip that I took to Hawaii earlier this year. It was (as usual) a rather pleasant excursion to the picturesque state. Check out more at the gallery.

Octopress For Static Blogging

2012-10-06T22:29:00-07:00

Thank you, Wordpress. You were fantastic to me for over 5 years, but I’m moving on to something new. In efforts to keep things fresh, learn something new, and improve the performance of this blog, I am starting to blog with Octopress, which is a blogging platform built on Jekyll.

The advantages of this system include (but are not limited to):

It serves static web pages so it’s fast.
GitHub offers built-in support so my blog is now in proper source control and hosted for free!
The completed website is generated on my machine and pushed to a webserver so I could easily move webhosts at any time.

There are plenty of write-ups about transitioning to a Jekyll-powered blog. Namely I used exitwp to extract the posts.

Octopress includes a pretty decent stylesheet, which made it easy to get up and writing. However, I ended up customizing it that my blog would not look like all of the other Octopress-powered websites out there. Some of the things that I added were:

Sitemap
Atom Feed
Retaining sidebar collapsed state

Sitemap

Octopress included a sitemap plugin, but I didn’t like that it used the file modification time. In theory that works great, but for some reason it always showed every post with the exact same modification time. So I just created my own:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<?xml-stylesheet type="text/xsl" href="/sitemap.xsl"?>
<urlset xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9 http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9/sitemap.xsd" xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
  <url>
    <loc>{{ site.url }}/</loc>
    <lastmod>{{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
    <changefreq>daily</changefreq>
    <priority>1.0</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>{{ site.url }}/favorite-posts/</loc>
    <lastmod>2012-02-07T20:59:36+00:00</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.6</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>{{ site.url }}/about/</loc>
    <lastmod>2012-02-07T20:59:36+00:00</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.6</priority>
  </url>
  <url>
    <loc>{{ site.url }}/my-photo-gear/</loc>
    <lastmod>2012-09-07T20:59:36+00:00</lastmod>
    <changefreq>weekly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.6</priority>
  </url>
  {% for post in site.posts  %}
  <url>
    <loc>{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}</loc>
    <lastmod>{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</lastmod>
    <changefreq>monthly</changefreq>
    <priority>0.2</priority>
  </url>
  {% endfor %}
</urlset> {% raw %}

Atom Feed

I started with this simple Jekyll feed in order to create a custom Atom Feed that looks like this:

{% raw %}

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<feed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom">

  <title><![CDATA[{{ site.title }}]]></title>
  <subtitle><![CDATA[{{ site.subtitle }}]]></subtitle>
  <link href="{{ site.url }}/atom.xml" rel="self"/>
  <link href="{{ site.url }}/"/>
  <updated>{{ site.time | date_to_xmlschema }}</updated>
  <id>{{ site.url }}/</id>
  <author>
    <name><![CDATA[{{ site.author | strip_html }}]]></name>
  </author>
  <rights>Copyright (c) 2007-2012 {{ site.author | strip_html}}</rights>
  {% for post in site.posts limit: 10 %}
  <entry>
    <title type="html"><![CDATA[{{ post.title | cdata_escape }}]]></title>
    <link href="{{ site.url }}{{ post.url }}"/>
    <updated>{{ post.date | date_to_xmlschema }}</updated>
    <id>{{ site.url }}{{ post.id }}</id>
    <content type="html"><![CDATA[{{ post.content | expand_urls: site.url | cdata_escape }}]]></content>
  </entry>
  {% endfor %}
</feed>

Retaining Sidebar Collapsed State

The default template for Octopress includes a nifty sidebar that can be collapsed. To improve that functionality, I included the jQuery Cookie plugin and edited the addSidebarToggler function in octopress.js like so:

function addSidebarToggler() {
  if(!$('body').hasClass('sidebar-footer')) {
    $('#content').append('<span class="toggle-sidebar"></span>');
    $('.toggle-sidebar').bind('click', function(e) {
      e.preventDefault();
      if ($('body').hasClass('collapse-sidebar')) {
        $('body').removeClass('collapse-sidebar');
        jQuery(window).trigger("resize");
        jQuery.cookie('sidebar_collapsed', "0", { expires: 7, path: '/', raw: true });
      } else {
        $('body').addClass('collapse-sidebar');
        jQuery(window).trigger("resize");
        jQuery.cookie('sidebar_collapsed', "1", { expires: 7, path: '/', raw: true });
      }
    });
  }
...
}

Additionally I added the following code:

jQuery(document).ready(function () {
    var a = jQuery.cookie("sidebar_collapsed", {
        raw: true
    });
    if (a === "1") {
        $("body").addClass("collapse-sidebar");
    } else {
        $("body").removeClass("collapse-sidebar");
    }
});