It’s hard thing to explain to someone, but every so often when I’m walking around with my mp3 player, a song comes on that makes me walk with my head held a little higher. Even though this song is actually a little sad, I simply identify with every single part of of it. When I’m walking around the city and this comes on shuffle, it makes me want to start running and never stop.

For now I’ll just have to carry around my broken heart in my backpack.

Wilco – Hell is Chrome*

Also, I’m currently in the midst of a really difficult quarter at school. I don’t really have time for much at the moment; the more my free time suffers the more this blog suffers, obviously. With any luck, after this week I’ll have some free left over to get some reading done, as well as time to write something worth reading for whoever still reads this blog. I wouldn’t even presume to say hello to someone who I think might be a reader. Sometimes I feel embarrassed that this blog is still online – but how else am I supposed to feed my id? I don’t have enough troll experience to make it at reddit.

*Two things: I couldn’t find a youtube video of this song being performed, and my ‘wordpress flash audio player plugin’ doesn’t support m4a files.

Under the harvest moon,
When the soft silver
Drips shimmering
Over the garden nights,
Death, the gray mocker,
Comes and whispers to you
As a beautiful friend
Who remembers.

Under the summer roses
When the flagrant crimson
Lurks in the dusk
Of the wild red leaves,
Love, with little hands,
Comes and touches you
With a thousand memories,
And asks you
Beautiful, unanswerable questions.

A poem by Carl Sandburg.

I spent four long years of my life at a High School that shared his name; all that time I didn’t know, or didn’t care, or never gave a thought, as to why so many schools across our nation share his namesake.

Getting lost in poetry on your own is much sweeter than being forced to swallow it in English class. I’ve grown up since then.

My favorite contribution to the Kanye frenzy is by far this mash up:

It’s just so genius.

Now, upon my discovery of this – I flipped my shit almost instantaneously. I considered this bug as a problem that definitely needed an immediate fix. fortunately, through my earlier PHP hackery that I used to throw together this random thoughts section, I was able to figure out exactly what the problem was very quickly. Wordpress allows you to set the number of posts you’d like to display on any given page. This number had previously been set to ten, but I had moved it down to one so the Wordpress post display loop wouldn’t muck up my fancy new looking layout by trying to throw like 9 other posts on the page where the random thoughts are. That wouldn’t have been pretty. So I set it to one, not knowing that the same number affected how stuff was displayed in the category archives.

It was a pretty easy fix; I set the number back to a reasonable ten, and threw in a break statement at the end of the loop so it wouldn’t go looking for nine other posts to display after it found one that wasn’t in the random thoughts category to display.

While my fix could have likely been improved upon vastly, I’m sure, I’m still flooded with the feeling that I accomplished something awesome; it feels like I made an important discovery about something previously known to mankind – like I discovered a new tribe of Homininae and beat them all in an arm wrestling tournament. Fixing bugs is often like this. It’s a dirty bomb of feel good chemicals. I’ve had an opportunity to fix many of my own when I was writing simple little applications in school, or at home, and I know as my education progresses into a career I’ll have a never ending supply of bugs that need fixing. So that’s something to look forward to I suppose. I’ll be stuck in a cubicle the rest of my life, at least I’ll have something to do.

I’ve been with Bluehost since the middle of 2008, and have been extremely satisfied with the services that Bluehost has provided. Below are my thoughts on my experience using Bluehost up to this point in time.

Features:

As I mentioned before, in order to run Wordpress (if you remember, this is a blog I’m running here), I needed a provider that offered both PHP and MySQL support. Providers who offered those features are a dime a dozen on the internet, so I was also looking for a provider who could offer an array of services in addition to the bare bones basics that everyone would have. If I wanted to switch blogging software, or if I wanted to use Python, or Perl applications at some point in the future – I didn’t want to be up a creek without propper scripting support! Bluehost seemed to deliver on this front by providing not only PHP, and MySQL support, but they also have Ruby/Rails, Perl, Python, Javascript, Flash, and PostreSQL, and CGI support working right out of the box. As a programmer, it’s really awesome to have all of this available.  The full list of features that Bluehost offers can be found at this location.

Equipment:

The servers at Bluhost run Linux/apache, and have impeccable uptime ratios. There’s not much else to say really, I don’t have any uptime problems to even complain about.

Service:

One of the things that attracted me to Bluehost was how they prided themselves on their great customer service. At the time that I signed up for Bluehost, I didn’t realize the importance of having good customer service, until I had to use it. I was a little wet behind the ears with this sort of thing, and I ended up wanting to change my domain name from something else to what it is now, so I called up tech support and I was walked through every step of the process by a  representative, they even assisted me in installing the backups that I had made. I was also able to get assistance very easily for troubleshooting the installation of  a couple Perl Modules in a very quick fashion.

Support is available to 24/7 via chat or telephone, for both subscribers, and people who have questions about the service.

Extras:

Bluehost also offers some pretty cool extras. They have a top notch administration interface where you can add perl modules, set up email accounts, make backups, view statistics and logs, manage domains and databases, and tons of other stuff. I’m pretty sure that without being able to use the administration interface – The Angry Walrus probably wouldn’t exist as it does today.

Through the admin panel, Bluehost offers something called SimpleScripts, that will set up an installation of popular web software FOR YOU, so you don;t have to do it manually. I used the service to set up this exact installation of Wordpress. Your able to chose from various types of software including eCommerce, photo galleries, content management/blogging, forums, mailing, forms, and even wikis. Of course, you can install whatever you want manually, but it’s so much nicer to have SimpleScripts do it for you. It’ll even install updates for you.

You can see a demo of the admin interface, and the simplescripts tool (which is part of the interface) here.

General Recap:

Bluehost is a fantastic service. This is the one purchase in my life that I don’t regret at all. As a programmer, I’m able to make use of a bunch of absolutely fantastic features, and as a blogger I’m able to easily, cleanly, and simply, deploy a blog that benefits from fantastic uptime, and reliable service. The little bit of me that’s a bumbling idiot benefits from kind and courteous customer support as well. It’s the complete package. It’s really inexpensive too – which was also a huge plus.

I’m glad that I chose Bluehost; I’d recommend them to anyone who is looking for personal web hosting at an affordable and competitive price. If you’re looking to inquire further about my experience with Bluehost don’t hesitate to shoot me an email at matt@theangrywalrus.com with any questions you may have. I’ll be happy to answer them.

Also, seeing Maritime at the Green Music Festival at Eckhart Park was a lot of fun – even though I almost melted because it was so hot outside last weekend in the city of Chicago. Maritime gave an excellent set; if you get a chance click yourself to their myspace page. I was also lucky enough to see a Cubs game from the bleachers at Wrigley Field while the air show was going on at the lakefront. The game  started with about six or seven people parachuting into center field, and throughout the game we were lucky enough to be graced with something like a dozen flybys from various planes in the area (including, if I’m not mistaken, the ifnamous Blue Angels). All of this made for a pretty exciting, and loud, Cubs victory over the Pirates. (Fourteen runs in two innings, with a final score of 17-2. Go Cubbies – amirite?)

I only wish the planes would have supply dropped some ice cubes, or those water bottles with the fans – the heat was murderous.

(Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, I couldn’t find this picture on tumblr a second time so I can’t link to the artist’s website like I wanted to.)

Update: The name of this wonderful artist is the talented Rafael Grampá.