Taking advantage of free inflight wifi provided by gogo (for smartphones only) posting using the WordPress 2.9 mobile app.

Flew down to San Jose and rode with my parents (who flew into San Francisco) to San Luis Obispo for my Aunt’s wedding. I was the official photographer for the ceremony. Weather cleared up nicely for the big day, and didn’t get too hot. Sunday the next day was really nice and quite warm. I got to bury some cousins in the sand, but sadly didn’t get a chance to try surfing.

Sunday night we headed to the bay area and did the touristy stuff on Monday. Went and visited the Full House house in San Francisco, My old college roommate who works at google gave me and my dad an abridged tour of his workplace, small software company, you may have heard of, went shopping at the Apple Company store at 1 infinite loop, and drove by Steve Jobs’s old house in Los Altos. Then it was back to the San Jose airport, and here I am, blogging at 30,000 feet (not sure how high we actually are, just a guess).

And yes, OMG I want to do that. Makes me wish we got more than .5″ of snow in town here!

ARD Lock screen

Not sure how the chicken vs egg thing works out, but the previous Tech at Sheldon didn’t do much for managing Macs, so since I have a stronger Apple/Mac background, the Macs here are getting some newfound TLC from me. First step getting an disk imaging/ghosting system in place.

The couple of weeks it’s kind of been a side project to get a “Master Image” set up on a computer to use as a basis for creating more specific images. Yesterday I deployed the image for the first time onto 2 more computers (one for testing on another similar PPC system, and one on an MacIntel to install Intel/10.6 specific software)

I’m also testing to see how Apple Remote Desktop (ARD) is going to work for myself and specific teachers who might need it. I noticed when you run Curtain (lock screen while managing computers) it displays the name of the person who locked it. Which led me to ask, where is it getting that name from?

It’s pulling the name from the ARD Admin’s long username in OS X. In my case that was my actual name. I was thinking I might want to change this to read “Screen locked by SHS Admin.” To make this change: Go into System preferences -> Accounts, and change your Full Name. You will then need to quit and relaunch Apple Remote Desktop.

Happy Mac Administrating.

Also, as has been in the news this week, the 4J district and Unions are fighting over whether to add back furlough days as work days, which due to budget shortfalls, would mean they would have to lay off over 100 workers (mix of classified and certified). They of course let the newest hires go first, so we’ll see if this lasts past December 17.

Scott Slalom Shin Guards

It’s been a long time since my high school alpine ski racing days, but it seems like I get a chance to bash some gates every now and then. I always regret it though when my shins/knees get bruised up, and my snow pants get torn sometimes. This past Friday, I found a pair of “like new” Scott shin guards at Value Village on Centennial Blvd.. Only cost me $5! They aren’t brand new, show some signs of being packed around or possibly worn, but they don’t look like they’ve hit a gate yet.

Can’t wait to get the chance to break them in… I love bashing slalom gates!

• Matt Mullenweg and Jane Wells of Automattic
• Scott Porad from the icancheezburger network
• Tyler Sticka, designer at Waggener Edstrom
• Will Norris, one of the core developers of Shibboleth and author of the OpenID plugin for WordPress
• viper007bond, one of the most prolific WordPress plugin developers
• Aaron Hockley, founder of the Portland WordPress Users Group
• Justin Kistner, senior manager of social media at WebTrends (and designer of some of the sites I currently manage)
• Rick Turoczy, from Silicon Florist, a blog about web startups in the Portland area
• and countless others

These folks and others, along with awesome food from Whiffies Pies, Windmer Beer, Zupans, Resers, Coconut Bliss ice cream, Cup Cake Jones— and the awesome folks at WebTrends for providing the venue for the event— made for an AMAZING WordCamp.

Also a big thanks to my buddy Tristan for letting me crash at his apartment Saturday night and helping me find my way around town. Tristan’s former roommate from Eugene, Aaron was also there. They both live and do freelance web development in Portland, so it was also a great networking opportunity for them.

This is a fairly long post, so continue after the break if you will

The first presentation Saturday was Jason Grigsby about speeding up WordPress, and a few browser plugins (Firebug, YSlow, and Google Page Speed) as well as server-side solutions: SQL Monitor and WP Super Cache. General tweaks for speed whether on WordPress or not include going though Yahoo’s 14 Performance Rules, and if you have lots of small graphics on your site, use spriteme.com to turn graphics into sprites *and* tweak your CSS accordingly to utilize such sprites.

Speed Up WordPress Wordcamp Pdx 2009

Next up was a Web Analytics talk by Lorelle, probably the worst presenter at the event. Her entire MO was selling her book and promoting a new web analytics tool she’s involved with, Woopra. I did sign up for a beta account, but the beta is closed or soon closing, and is going to be a pay-for service, so I’m not going to link it.

I will rant a bit though…

Maybe the ad industry has jaded me, I’ve become extremely resistant to people/companies trying to sell me their own products. I don’t want to hear a sales pitch from someone who stands to profit from my business. Most of the time, when I sign up for new services or get new products, it’s because of a first-hand recommendation from a personal friend, or I’ll do all the research myself, weigh the options and still go over the findings until a choice becomes obvious. Personally I think I’ll stick with Google Analytics.

Next was Tyler Sticka’s AMAZING presentation on using WordPress to develop your own portfolios, using ~3 snippets of PHP code. This really turned some heads, and got a lot of attention from the #wcpdx Twitter stream. I’m not sure I could do the presentation justice, so here is his sideshow (hoping web streaming from the event will be up soon)

WordPress-Powered Portfolios

Then John Hawkins demonstrated creating a plugin to fetch author graphic and information from gravitar.com. He so kindly provided lots of documentation for his presentation on How to Write a WordPress Plugin on his site. Sometime after this, there was a breakout discussion on Advanced Plugin Development. Notes to take from this:

• Avoid custom tables
• Output buffers are bad, but Matt Mullenweg loves them
• Check out http://codex.wordpress.org/Data_Validation
• IRC Channels: #wordpress-dev or #wordpress on freenode
• WPHackers mailing list, WP mailing lists may need some restructuring

Very infotaining speech by Scott Porad of the Cheezburger network explaining the “Lazy, Messy & Backwards” mindset behind their business model. Found out they have about 47 blogs of mainly funny pictures, 10,000 images are submitted daily, and roughly 200 make it on to the sites. Every image uploaded is backed-up/archived in 4 places immediately, and moderated by real people.

Lazy, Messy, Backwards – Scott Porad

The conference ended with a panel of experts on an SEO SMACKDOWN. The debate was “Good Content” vs “Findability.” The consensus here seemed to be overwhelmingly that content is more important than SEO. But my take on the issue is to excercise “best practice” as far as SEO first, then forget about it so you can focus on content.

Other Plugins of Note:

• More-Fields
• Multi-Level Navigaion
• Flexi-Pages
• WP-DB-Backup
• Socializer
• All-in-one SEO Pack

Random Links:

• Starkers (a really barebones theme, use as a starting point for development)
• Web Worker Daily
• There, I fixed it!
• Picture is Unrelated

The major I’ve been working on for so long was in Digital Arts, and I found out about 3/4 of the way in that I probably should have been a Journalism major. It was too late to change, so I made the best out of things, took many diverse classes— from photography, to digital music, writing for media (a journalism class), to advanced video effects & compositing, I even took a class on programming circuitboards!

Now that I’m out of school, looking for jobs, I’m having to re-learn some things I’ve taken for granted, and teach myself new things that I wish my education would have covered. Things like personal marketing / branding, professional networking, and more recently this week, logo design. While I have a lot more flexibility doing these things for myself currently (as opposed to a class assignment, or in a professional context for a client), I’ve also come to appreciate the semi-structured nature of the classroom. I also look forward to the opportunities to work in a professional realm working with clients in real-world scenarios.

• competed in a city league ski racing league, and our team won the whole season
• had the worst Christmas ever #christmasfail08
• been [positively] excited about a presidential inauguration
• played a UO officially sanctioned flip cup tournament with the club sports olympics, and we WON
• broke a slalom ski
• went from 5 down to 2 e-mail accounts, and one of those may be going a way soon
• met a girl, her name is Angela, many of you have even met her by now
• graduated from college!!!!!!!!!
• successfully survived a road trip with Angela through 9 states
  • Yellowstone, Ren Faire, Badlands, Wall Drug, SLC, etc…
• partaken in a few dancing lessons (ssssh! don’t tell anyone!)
• somehow convinced Angela to buy a Mac
• dealt with 2 flat tires in 2 different states I don’t live in, and neither one on my personal vehicle
• turned 27
• competed in 9 waterski tournaments in 6 different states, and waterskied in a 7th state
  • including Collegiate National All-Stars for slalom+trick, and AWSA Western Regionals for 3-event (and qualified for but didn’t go to AWSA Nationals)!
• upgraded my wordpress blog, twice, without posting anything
• volunteered with a church group on a construction project
• bought a Playstation 2 from a thrift store for $12.50 and repaired it myself
• sold my old DSLR and bought a spiffy new one, and taken thousands of photos with it
• attended a number of concerts
• given up on my football team, due to some unFavreable circumstances
• finally started getting my online portfolio and résumé up-to-date

…and some other stuff too, I assure you. But now that you’re updated on my life, maybe now I can get this site fully back on track again?