I'm launching the start of a new personal site built on WordPress (and finally eating my own dog food) and am archiving this content.
I didn't write about it here when I built it, but last year, I built a script that would fetch JSON feeds from my Twitter and Tumblr accounts on an hourly basis and write a flat HTML containing that content to the disk. This was a fun exercise but I never got around to saving that content to posts on this, my old school custom content management system. I'm going back and forth about whether or not I want to do this on the new site, so we'll see.
Anyhow, this is now an archive and will no longer be updated. Keep track of me on Twitter, Instagram, and Github.
I turned 38 yesterday, which seemed surreal until it arrived. Now I feel 38. Perhaps I prefer even numbers?
Anyhow, what went on since I hit 37? I worked at NorthPoint, left NorthPoint, worked for Avery, ran out my summer spending a lot of time on the bike, some time in Montauk, and on various and sundry patios, and didn’t get a single sunburn, saw a lot of shows both comedic and musical such as Bill Burr three times, Thievery Corporation a couple of times, Hot Chip, Bjork, Interpol, Louis CK, Trans Am, and who knows who all else, went to Dallas, Austin, Las Vegas, Denver, Boulder, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Francisco and got to see a lot of friends, ended my work with Avery, had my mom in town on her way to moving to Italy for a year, stopped keeping the journal I’d kept for the past five years and started up keeping track of every restaurant meal I had (everybody needs a hobby!), booted my roommate of four and a half years, went to Japan, started working for Hearst, went to Boston, went to Barcelona and Rome, took a lot of photos that I’ll probably never get around to putting up on the web, and had a great Fourth of July weekend. I’ve often written about things that I didn’t do but wanted to, but I think 37 was a year where I did just about everything that I wanted to and it worked out great. I’m going to keep up the good work.
Ten years ago today I celebrated my first full day in New York after moving to Williamsburg, Brooklyn with $400 and 98 pounds of belongings. Since then, these are some of the things that have happened:
Worked for Apple in SoHo
Worked for myself
Was told I needed to leave Williamsburg
Watched Sex and the City for a few months
Turned 27
*
Moved to TriBeCa
Turned 28
Worked for MTV
Moved to the Lower East Side
Turned 29
Worked for Tekserve
Moved to Crown Heights, Brooklyn
Worked for MTV again
Turned 30
*
Rode my bicycle
Turned 31
Spent time on the West Coast
Invested in Beer Table
Went to Italy
Got a motorcycle
Summered on Fire Island
Turned 32
*
Went to England
Turned 33
Summered on Fire Island again
Turned 34
*
*
Turned 35
Somehow made it through 2012 (but just barely)
Went to a lot of weddings and sadly, but thankfully, only one funeral
Worked for myself
Worked for NorthPoint
Turned 36
Went to Spain
Celebrated ten years in New York
Started plotting my escape
Recently I refactored almost all of the code that powers the backend of this site, a lot of which has been around for however long it's been since I built the content management system that powers it (and perhaps before - I had another blog that I ran on my Mac out of my apartment when I lived in Oakland whose code made its way into this site). Tired of being the cobbler whose kids have no shoes.
First, permalinks. They have always been something like evanrose.com/?entry=100 which I thought was cool back in the day (hey, I know PHP!) but long past their sell by date. I built a system that turns the blog post's title into a slug and am using those for permalinks (and being a good web citizen, should someone come into the site via a link to a post with an entry id, they will get seamlessly redirected). Secondly, I changed an .htaccess redirect that would, for example, redirect evanrose.com/work to evanrose.com/?section=work. This has been changed so that all requests end up on index.php and the non-query-stringed URL is split and used. Even the HTML templates I used before I entered blog posts in to a database work with this new scheme (for the most part, at least they're used in the virtual blog directory) for instance, my first month of blogging on evanrose.com (and not on my previous sites) in July of 2001 and without touching that templated file, it validates as HTML 5!
Finally, back in the day, I didn't know about how to deal with dates and math and whatnot coming from a database so my noob self saved date oriented data like so: insert "Tuesday" into `day name`, etc., which is just NASTY. I was young and I needed the money. Fixed all that garbage (and should have years ago). I also fixed a bunch of hacky crap to deal with page titles and whatnot which was also trivial. It was pleasant work cleaning this business up and by god it might last me another ten years.
Last month, I spent a week on a sailboat, bopping around from Florida Key to Florid Key and bopping around in Key West. I had no idea how much fun this would be, though a week was probably a couple of days too long. I took a bunch of photos and shot some really cool video. Check 'em out.
Went to Dallas and Austin recently (here are the pics) for the State Fair of Texas (RIP, Big Tex) and to take part in the nuptuals of Gunnar and Ingrid, two of the finest people a man would want to know. Much fun was had and much fried food was consumed. At the fair alone:
1/2 fried frito pie
1/2 fried okra
1/4 frito pie
1/2 fried okra
1/2 fried max cheese slider
1/2 fried okra
1 corny dog
Yes, "corny dog." In addition, there was lots of driving, lots of meals with my mom, a Dale Chihuly show at the Dallas Arboretum, lots of catching up with old and making new friends and hell of fun in general. Though it was fun, I got stuck there while Sandy descended upon New York and couldn't wait to get home, which is exactly why I'm going back to Texas again tomorrow. See you Texas peops soon.
Did some more cleaning up around here. Even though those sites have moved on to greener pastures, I've put up links to some of my older freelance work that lives on my own server, Beer Table version 1, Beer Table version 2, Beer Table Pantry and Nikki Stager, the last being one, I really like but which never got used, though the images getting pulled in from Flickr can be a little flaky.
Also, my first project for people.com is now live: Reader React. I built this almost from scratch, using only the container and a forked copy of their javascript commenting system. First, PHP fetches a JSON feed of all of the articles that have had the highest comment counts for the past 24 hours. Next, each article gets a container and its data is put into it (though in the case of data from People's Wordpress blog, another JSON feed is fetched, parsed and inserted). Following that, each article id is put into an array which builds an url which is fetched by JQuery and parsed so that each article gets its comment counts as well as the commenting module for that article itself (which required the fork of their commenting system - this need was not foreseen). Finally, valid XHTML and CSS style the results, which have get written to disk as HTML by a cron job that runs every ten minutes. Fun project. Keep 'em coming.
Today, I'm off for a long weekend of dinner, the nuptials of my friends Katherine and Jim, Katherine being one of the first friends I made when I moved to New York eight and a half years ago and Jim being one of the greatest dudes I've ever met, and a brunch in Connecticut and Massachusetts. I'm almost positive much fun will be had. Today also marks the date of a sad day a year ago, and I'll let my journal entry from that day speak for itself:
"October 5, 2011
"My mom wrote me an email talking about what she wanted to have happen if she suffered from dementia [she said she wanted me to take her to a place in Oregon where they euthanize people] and I got so sad I went into our freight elevator area and cried. Sobbed. Later in the day, left work... and went and saw Portishead, who were great. But right before the show, I looked at my phone and saw immediately on Twitter that Steve Jobs had died and I cried again."
I am so pleased for my friends. They are wonderful people, they are wonderful together, and we should all be so lucky. Today is a far happier day.
