jrmehle.com

Tuesday started innocently enough. I got to work, felt groggy, and went over to grab a latte at the local coffee shop. My first sip was cautious, but not enough to avoid the burning. I jerked back a little bit and spilled a drop of latte the size of maybe a quarter on the arrow keys of my Macbook. That’s when the trouble started.

First it was left shift + ‘i’ that wouldn’t work. Then it was the arrow keys. Finally, the whole damn keyboard just stopped working. Now I’d doused the laptop in much worse in the time I’ve had it so I didn’t think much of this relatively small spill. Given how fast things progressed, I was concerned.

The next few hours I spent researching keyboard replacement. Let’s just say there’s a reason Apple doesn’t just send you a replacement keyboard and let you fix yourself. Take the battery out, unscrew the memory cover plate, remove the bottom cover, remove the non-conductive black tape, remove a dozen screws, unclip ribbon cable… you get the idea.

So it was either use an external keyboard, send the thing into Apple for a few hundred dollars and a couple of weeks of time, or try to fix a replacement and fix it myself. The external keyboard worked fine in the office, but I wasn’t going to be lugging around a keyboard with me for work away from the office. Instead, I started searching for a replacement keyboard online. They were at least $70. At that point, I decided an Apple Wireless Keyboard was in order as it would cost just as much and have no installation. It’s also small and easily tossed in my laptop bag.

Consequently a few hours after I got the new keyboard, the Macbook keyboard started working again. It’s not back 100% though because random arrow keys get triggered from time to time. It also won’t sleep reliably as it keeps getting input from the keyboard. Things seemed to have gotten better since yesterday, but I’ll still be taking this external keyboard around with me for at least awhile.

A discussion I was having with my boss prompted me to write this and I thought that it was too good not to share with the world.

My problem is with the Internet community as a whole placing so much importance on SEO and Google SEO in particular. I believe it’s possible to rank highly on search engines without SEO. I believe it’s futile to optimize for an algorithm that 1) you can’t and won’t ever see and 2) is ever changing. Human powered search is starting to gain ground (like Wikia and Mahalo, or even Digg and Delicious). And as technology progresses, the algorithms are going to get better at separating useful content from spam. I believe that Google (and others) could do a much better job of giving results if no one did any SEO at all. If people took the time they spend on SEO and instead spent that time on improving their site, coming up with new features, thinking about accessibility, etc., they (and the Internet as a whole) would be much better off.

The more I think about it, the more I consider myself anti-social. I feel most comfortable when I’m alone. Going days without leaving my house or speaking to anyone doesn’t bother me. Silence is only awkward because of others expectations, not because I feel awkward. Making conversation or small talk is a chore.

While growing up, I was always a shy kid. I was even shy around family I knew, but didn’t see all that often. For instance, I had an uncle, aunt, and cousins who live about an hour away. We’d see them maybe 5-6 times a year so it was never more than a few months in between. It’s not like these people were strangers. Still, every time we pulled up to their house, I felt a slight tinge of anxiety.

In high school, the most socially awkward time in one’s life, the biggest social anxiety problem I had was giving talks in Speech class or dancing with a girl for the first time at a dance. Most everyone else was the same way. I also never felt like I was part of any clique and had friends in all the major ones (jocks, nerds, goths, etc.).

College was relatively the same as high school in terms of befriending new people. Though I think it was in college that I started to become increasingly critical of others. As a customer service rep for a major broadband supplier in the US, for the first time, I was introduced to a large number of people outside the world I had become familiar with. I can remember sitting in my cube one evening and having the realization that the world was collectively a whole lot dumber than I could have imagined. Sure, I had met stupid and ignorant people in my life before. What I didn’t realize was how many of them there are on this planet. It felt a little like Luke Wilson’s character in Idiocray after he wakes up in the future and figures out that he’s the smartest person alive.

Then again, maybe I’m just an overly critical, pre-judgmental asshole who needs to stop selfishly thinking he knows how the world should be. I’m going to go back in my hole now.

You may have noticed a lack of posting in the last several weeks from yours truely. I have been putting in extreme hours at work. The good news is we finally launched our Ruby on Rails based site on Monday. For a team of 3 guys, 2 of whom started the project without knowing a lick of Ruby, we managed to crank out a solid app in 9 months.

This launch is especially exciting for me as I did pretty much all of the visual design. There’s a ton of work to be done and I best be getting back to it.

TheHoneymoon.com Check it out!

Let’s play a game. It’s called “What’s under the sheet?” It looks human. It’s been sitting in that exact position for at least 3 hours. Whatever it is under the sheet, it’s wearing shoes because I could see them from the back when I got close. Unfortunately none of us in the office were brave enough to see what was under the sheet.

Yesterday, I came in to work just like any other day. While checking some bugs out, I went to load the staging version of our site. Lo and behold, the site was down. No big deal, I thought, maybe Apache died and needs to be restarted. I’d been messing with the Apache configs quite heavily last week, and so I just assumed that was what caused the problem.

I brought up my console and typed in the ssh command to which there was no response. The server is located in my building, so I walked over to see what the deal was. The server was still running, so I gave it a restart. Though Linux is known for being rock solid, you’d be amazed at the problems a restart will solve. Well, it finished restarting and still no connection.

After poking around some more, I discovered the server wasn’t even online. I couldn’t ping out. I tried disabling the firewall for awhile, no luck. I tried changing the DNS to OpenDNS, still nothing. Finally, I walked over to the IT admin’s office and asked him if there had been any changes over the weekend. Of course his reply was a “Yes…”

It seems that over the weekend, they decided to switch the IP block they had. And it wasn’t like a subnet changed, the entire block was different. A change like this doesn’t just happen. There needs to be planning done so that server configurations can be changed, DNS needs time to propagate, people need to be notified. Apparently, I wasn’t on that “to notify” list. I was told “we tried to find you on Friday, but we couldn’t.” Bullshit. I was in the office all day on Friday and the IT admin even came in to our office earlier in the day.

I spent the first half of my day yesterday dealing with getting our staging server up and running. All that really needed to be done was to change a few config files. A task I could’ve easily prepared for last weekend and finished in minutes yesterday had I known in advance. That kind of inconsiderate behavior is unprofessional and it really pissed me off.