On Work
First, Louis CK on work (and of course, being awesome)
And recently, a note to self on work:
- Treat it like it's the most important thing in the world because it is.
- Be nice.
- Smile!
- Don't use your phone.
- Not a single personal social web site [ed: not really doing much of this anyway, but still].
- Work. Hard. This is your life.
- *
- They like you. They wanted you. They're paying you, but they will stop if you don't do a good job.
- Don't forget how painful and humiliating the interview process was.
- Don't forget about the loss of respect.*
- Don't leave the office; they are paying attentiion.
- You make X per hour. That is a ton of money. Earn as much as you can every day. 9 to six, no matter how painful that is.
- This project will be harder than you think it will be, but it can be done. Don't get cocky, but don't get mad. Do the work.
Finally, read this every single day.
Wednesday, November 14, 2012
Texas, Then and Now
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.
Monday, November 12, 2012
Recently, On My Corner of the Web...
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.
Friday, October 5, 2012
Katherine, Jim, and Steve
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.
Monday, October 1, 2012
Big Changes Around Here
Now that I've gotten back in the swing with a new gig and have gotten in the habit of doing something productive with my life, that being productive has beget more productivity, though that hasn't yet extended to my yoga practice. It has, however, gotten me into a bunch of new cool web stuff I've not done much with over the past few years, given me some new ideas, and so I finally gave this neglected site some much needed TLC and added some cool stuff.
First, the site is a hundred pixels slimmer and have hidden the overflow of my Flickr photo stream and trimmed down some of the descriptions on the header links. I also got rid of the contact page (which at one time contained a contact form that I got rid of long ago) and moved the functionality that displayed the ten most recent (though infrequent) blog posts to the archive page which now contains the last ten posts by default, the ability to choose posts by month, or if passed a post ID, a permalink page. Some work under the hood included a bunch of changes to the site's date and time functionality, as when I built this site almost ten years ago, I didn't understand PHP's date and time functionality very well so cleaned up a ton of crappy date/time crap, deleted old deprecated code, and did a lot of general refactoring.
The new cool jam here though is the home page which has a bunch of new stuff. I built a script that, when called by a cron job every hour, grabs my most recent 22 Tweets (why 22 is the limit, I have no idea), my 15 most recent Tumblr image posts (which are 500 pixels wide, hence the site's new slimness), and the last ten evanrose.com blog entries (which are obviously way down at the bottom of the page as there aren't many recent ones), puts them all together, and then saves them in a separate file in reverse chronological order. This file is then included on the home page which, because it's just included and not requesting all this stuff every time the page loads, the page loads much faster. I know anyone who comes to this site probably already looks at my stuff elsewhere, but this was a fun project and I feel like this site hasn't gotten as much attention it's deserved.
Next up: taking those tweets and Tumblr posts and putting them into my database, downloading the Tumblr photos to keep here for safekeeping, and having that same script update my RSS feed on a daily basis with a digest of the stuff I've put on the internet that day. If you've made it this far, you are now an honorary nerd. Welcome to the club.
Tuesday, September 4, 2012
The End of Summer
It isn't the end of summer, technically, but new things start on Memorial Day weekend and other new things start on Labor Day weekend. Lots of things went on and here are some of them:
- weddings attended: 2
- states visited: 6.5
- pools swam in: 8
- beaches visited: 3
- visits to beaches in New York: 4
- visits to pools in New York despite my saying I was going to ride my bike to one every day: 3
- times I actually rode my bike to the pool: 1
- golf lessons: 1
- new lows: 3
- trips to Boston: 2
- times someone tried to pick me up on the street: 1
- times they succeeded: 0
- friends in town: 3
- sunsets watched: 2.5
- times fried okra was eaten: 3
- really, really unpleasant experiences: 5
- dental surgeries: 2
- books read: 9
- times key was left in motorbike's ignition: 3
- times that caused a huge problem: 1
- meals at Applebee's: 1
- visits to Staten Island: 2
- friends who died: 1
- funerals attended: 1
- iPhones smashed: 1
- concerts attended: 2.5
- concerts missed: 1.5
- irons purchased: 1
- times on television: 1
- birthdays celebrated: 3
- New York documentaries finished: 0
- meals at the Chef's Table: 0
- Diner en Blancs attended: 0
- visits to the Cloisters: 0
- visits to Governors Island: 0
- days worked: 0
- jobs offered: 2
- jobs accepted: 1
Look out Fall, here we come! I'm looking forward to a shorter list at the end of it.
Thursday, July 19, 2012
New Things
A new year (just started on my 36th a fact that makes my mother impossibly young), a new watch, a new DJ mix (about which I've been talking forever), and a really amazing yoga and meditation practice. The second half of 2012 is going very well and I like that.
I'm not posting a ton here, but you can keep up with me on Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Flickr.
Thursday, June 21, 2012
New Objectives
More joy
Less fear
Greater rate of fulfillment [a shorter time between wanting the right thing and achieving it]
Additionally: golf, private yoga instruction, daily bicycling and swimming and returning to paleo (minus the eggs and the bacon)
There were some others though, that I can't remember, things I need to tape up on my mirror at home and read every time I look in it. I need to keep having the kinds of conversations where ideas like these come up. They're good for me.
PS Happy spring, it was great to see all of you in Dallas, even under such sad circumstances, and I've made it home safe and sound. Lots of love.
Monday, June 11, 2012
December 2011, Recapped
Finally, this is over.
Met Steven Sondheim
Went to a crazy fundraiser for the Gowanus Canal and saw tons of people I hadn't in forever. The night went downhill from there
Mom came into town
Went to Elizabeth Taylor jewelry auction show at Christie's
Saw the new 9/11 memorial
Started Tristam Shandy, but couldn't get it going - put it down and started God Bless You Mr. Rosewater
Got super sick
Went to Los Angeles to visit Stephen, Maggie and Carolyn and had mad fun (pics)
Went to San Francisco/the Bay Area to see Brian, Justin & Mary, Avery & Cortney and Peter & Stacy and all their younguns (pics)
Saw a great Dieter Rams exhibition at SF MoMA and ate at In N' Out Burger
Went to Las Vegas to hang with my dad and stepmom and had mad fun (pics)
Made an unexpected pit-stop in Philadelphia
Went to the Cline's Christmas Eve pary and then had a fantastic Christmas dinner at Red Rooster
Got hell of sick, again
Went to Boston
Rang in the new year seeing a great burlesque show at The Dressler
Tuesday, May 22, 2012
October 2011, Recapped
Went to all kinds of cool things in Portland; Beast, Sparrow, the Japanese and Rose gardens
Learned my one of my doctors had died
Learned Steve Jobs had died, for the second time that day, and saw Portishead (also may have noted that it'd been 25 years since the day I broke my leg)
Had a lovely evening at the Lamb's Club, Grand Central, and Pipa*
Saw the ballet Jewels, which was lovely
Saw Trans Am play Futureworld in its entirety after a great day
Kinda started going bananas*
Got an iPhone 4 to replace my ailing 3GS and soon after, dropped and smashed it, but ended up getting it fixed for free
Went to an opening which had a couple of Trevor Young's in it and a party at Romainian place
Had a Charlie Chaplin fest at Pink Pony
Went on a circle line boat tour around Manhattan which was hell of fun
Blew through a season of The Office
Finished Most Elligible Dallas, which sadly, ended before its prime
Saw Amon Tobin perform ISAM which was incredible
Went to a great birthday party at Cafeteria and Vepenios(?) and tons of peops came.
Went to Bayside (and played the drums), came back, went to a dinner party, watching football all day
In other news, this is the 600th post since I built the content management system on which this blog runs in 2002!