Jared’s Blog

You might have noticed a few things have changed around here. I have finally bought a domain and moved my blog over. In the process, I decided to ditch the not-often-updated other sections of my site such as my music, art, and poetry. They may make a reappearance, but for now it’ll just be the blog. So change those RSS feeds and bookmarks. The new address is jrmehle.com. Much easier to remember.

As I made mention to in my last post, I’ve joined Jaiku. Since then, I’ve contracted the Jaiku bug. I’m on it every day several times a day. Though I have a feeling no one is paying attention to my feed. Maybe this will help that.

I’m divided. While I like writing these longer posts at times, often I find that it’s the very reason I don’t post to my blog more. I don’t feel like sitting down and writing a full blog post all the time. Not to mention that I tend to edit constantly and what starts as a 10 minute project easily turns into 20 or 30 minutes. Jaiku’s 140 character per post limit is useful at times because it forces you to say exactly what you want without any fluff.

For a couple of weeks now I’ve been debating on whether or not I want to continue hosting my blog. I bought hosting and a domain from GoDaddy back in February, but I haven’t bothered to transfer anything over yet. The main reason was because I planned to rewrite my own blog software in Ruby on Rails. The problem with that, however, is that I have to migrate all of my blog posts over to the new system. Also, Go Daddy’s Rails performance is poor. Not to mention that they don’t offer ssh access on my account (no Rails migrations).

The 3rd option is to move the blog over to a hosted blogging service. It’d probably be easy to import my posts, but I’m also sacrificing what I can do in terms of control. When I host it, I can customize things much more and I like that.

So I’m still undecided. One of these nights I just need to sit down and figure it all out or at least move my hosting over to Go Daddy.

Friday, I went to bed and there was only a couple inches of snow on the ground. By the time this weekend blizzard passed, eight or ten inches of new snow covered everything. It’s the most snow I can remember getting in recent years.

Then today, I get to work and open my email to find our lead developer is leaving for another job in a little more than 2 weeks. I think everyone in the company was a little surprised. Granted, he wasn’t a true employee (only on a long term contract basis), but we still thought he enjoyed things enough to stick around. I kind of thought that we would be bringing him on as a full time employee as the company matured. Maybe he just got sick of waiting around.

Frankly, I’m scared. The only other dev (also on a contract) was brought to us by the guy who is leaving. It’s not that James and I don’t get along or work well together because I think we do. The problem is, I think I saw him coming to us as sort of a “favor” to Jeff. I know there was some dispute over wages prior to James’ contract signing, and I have a feeling Jeff sort of talked him into the job. Now that Jeff is abandoning ship, I don’t see James sticking around for long. His only reason for being loyal is now on it’s way out the door.

That leaves me; alone. Now, I’m sure Scott will be gearing up to hire a new developer soon and hopefully that person can be as good of a programmer and mentor as Jeff is. I just have this feeling that it’s not going to be an easy road the next couple of months. It’s kind of like that feeling you get when someone breaks up with you and you never knew there was a relationship problem (it’s happened to me twice).

And on a small side note, I’ve bought a domain name and hosting from GoDaddy. My hope is to get everything on Rails. I’ve yet to choose between Typo and Mephisto for a blogging engine, but if last night is any indicator, I’ll be going with Mephisto. I spent a good 3 hours trying to get Typo installed on my new host, and it didn’t go very smooth. In time, I also hope to rewrite the other portions of my site in Rails. And lastly, because I now own my own domain, the address will be changing. What I plan to do is point this domain at my new host or set up a redirect until my time runs out with my former host. Regardless, jrmehle.homelinux.net will become jrmehle.com.

I caught up posting what I had done for reviews and a few albums I’ve gotten the last couple of months. Hit the music section to see what’s new.

This is really sad. I don’t remember exactly when it was that I installed Wordpress 2 (which is when Askimet was added to Wordpress), but that’s a lot of junk it’s caught. Go Askimet!

Two posts in one day, wow! This is worth it, I assure you. I added a link to someone’s blog today. His name is Kevin and he is a homeless man who currently is in Nashville, TN. I’ve becomes quite the avid reader of this guy’s blog. Despite all the connotations of being homeless, he’s very intelligent and he has some great perspectives on homelessness.

Now you might be asking yourself, how the hell can a homeless man have a blog. Well, he was given a laptop by a local computer store and he uses wi-fi mostly from local coffee shops to get on the Internet. He also has a digital camera that was given to him and he sometimes posts videos. Amazing! The cool thing is, even if he didn’t have his own laptop and camera (which I’m sure could get him mugged real quick if they’re ever discovered by the wrong people), he could be doing this from some kind of public terminal like a library. He doesn’t need hosting as he just uses Blogger.