RandomThink.net

I’m hoping to make this more of a thing, where I make fun little toys in HTML5. I made my drum kit sometime back, and had played around with <canvas> some last year. Since I’m kind of signed up to talk at Webuquerque on the topic of <canvas> and similar such technology (at the time of my speech in April, Firefox 3.7 should be in some late beta, if not RC, hopefully, meaning WebGL will soon be upon us), well, I should probably actually learn what the heck I’m talking about.

So then, here’s a fun little toy I made. For lack of a better name, I just called it Stars and put it somewhere under my RandomThink.net Labs area (which may someday get its own content management setup, which I hoped to do in EE but it’s just easier to hack on plain files for that so who knows). It needs some better documentation, but I’m sorta-working on a better version with more controls. I’ll be sure to blather on about it at that point.

I’m more apt to quickly shout about these sorts of things on Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Facebook), so if you want to be in the know, you should maybe follow me on Twitter here or add me on Facebook here. Also worth noting, there’s an RSS feed of my tweets here, if you want to listen without being a tweeter. However, that doesn’t filter out any replies I make to others, so, y’know, you’ll be getting one side of a conversation without seeing the rest. Anyhow. Maybe I’ll install Twitter Tools to incorporate my tweets more heavily into the blog or something.

But yeah. Stars. Go play. Start the animation, then move over and hold down the mouse button somewhere for a fast spray of stars, or use the click-hold to queue up a ton of stars while not animating. Dabble a bit. Trace out your name in stars before animating and then start it up. Eventually you can put enough stars to cause some lag, but it’s really not too terrible.

Well, that was a fun experiment of sorts.

As I wrote back in July, I converted my site to ExpressionEngine. I thought it’d be this great revolution for me. Instead, I just about fell off the face of the planet.

It’s not that EE isn’t a great platform — truly, it is. However, it’s a CMS. Really, it’s more of a content management framework than a CMS. However, for as much as I thought that’s what I’d do with it, to turn my site into some huge hub, it wound up kind of crippling my ability to just write.

Okay, it didn’t do that. That’s all me. However, I just felt this… this block. I didn’t like it. EE2 is a big improvement, but it’s still not quite right.

I’d also moved hosts at the time for awhile, but after doing some testing and experimenting, I found that really, DreamHost worked well for me. I even signed up for DreamHost PS, which is pretty great.

Also, upon returning, I realized I still had my old WordPress setup, still ready to go — but I didn’t just want to flip it back over. I liked the idea of at least staying in HTML5 with a clean presentation. I then explored the Carrington theme framework for WordPress. I used Carrington JAM (Just Add Markup) and basically took my EE themes and put them out into the file architecture here.

After a couple of nights and a little time, I think I’m set. I’m back in WordPress, just in time for the 2.9 upgrade. I’ve got my EE theme (courtesy of Evan for the design, my markup/CSS) in place in WordPress with the awesomeness of Carrington, and I just feel… it just feels more like home. It’s more me.

So, here goes. I’m hoping that the move back will open up my mental block a bit, and who knows, maybe I can explore Carrington a bit more in building my next theme.

I’ve had a number of other titles floating around in my head for this post.

• Thinking, Rethinking, Overthinking
• Too many tools
• Endings, beginnings
• Restarts
• Reboot

Then I realized I’d already written one of those posts, back in April.

It’s pretty apparent that I haven’t been blogging lately. I feel stuck. Stymied. I don’t know why. Life is kind of crazy busy. I spent a weekend reworking my blog and then fell away from it for months — really, the longest time I’ve ever been away from writing on this site. I’ve thought about deleting it, resetting it, putting all the old content on some subdomain, moving back to WordPress, not sure.

Next week, ExpressionEngine 2.0 goes into a public pre-release of sorts. I don’t really do a lot with plugins or whatnot, since I’ve barely touched EE, so I’ve thought about upgrading to that. WordPress 2.9 is also on the horizon. I’ve been intrigued by a variety of CMSes lately. I get hung up on the tools. I miss writing, in a way. I tried installing OmmWriter, which is an interesting full-screen editor for the Mac. I could see it being interesting to write with too, but it’s almost too spartan.

But none of that matters to the process of writing, really. I should be able to just write. I don’t know why I can’t. I know that Twitter and social networking in general have kind of sapped the topics I’d write about in the past, acting as kind of a pressure valve, letting the little things out before they built up into a real post.

So, all of this is to say “I’m still here, I’m still alive, and I’m thinking about things — probably too much”.

Lisa and I are going to NYC for a vacation in just a couple of days. I can barely believe it’s so soon, and I simultaneously know it’ll be over and done and we’ll be home before I know it. I’m dabbling with Gowalla, and you can find me on Gowalla. I suspect I’ll be doing several check-ins across NYC, and letting at least a few pass some geo-referenced tweets on through. I doubt I’ll get around to actually posting on here about much of it at all. I still think I didn’t ever finish posting my daily write-ups of our European trip in 2007 — though I did actually write something then.

When I get back, I suspect I’ll dork around with EE 2.0 and see what I think. In a way, it kind of feels like huge overkill for a blog, but I have all these hopes of doing other creative things with it. I’ll also play with WordPress 2.9 and see about maybe moving back. Who knows.

Well, I finally did it. Back in April, I talked about rebooting. At first, I thought I’d maybe start totally fresh. Then I realized that, “Hey, I have a lot of content here, I’d hate to lose it”.

So, I did some dancing with scripts and HTML and ported the site on over to Expression Engine. There’s been a lot of noise about WordPress and the GPL and such lately, but that wasn’t the motivator. Really, after working with it for awhile, the motivator was that it’s simply an amazing system. It’s not open source, GPL, or any sort of open license. However, it’s still very modifiable and extensible and on the whole, I’m pretty pleased so far.

There are still a few rough edges (such as comments – they can be left but the author stuff is messed up, I need to figure that out), and some spots that could use some more styling, but for now, I’m working in EE and really, pretty pleased. It feels so much easier to work in this system. I think it’ll much more easily facilitate me doing things like more RandomThink.net Labs experiments.

So, here’s to more! More blog posts, more experiments, more of me, hopefully.

Hello!

If you’re finding this blog for the first time from my HTML5 Drum Kit from this post on Ajaxian.com, welcome to my meager site!

I feel like a cobbler who has no shoes of his own – or perhaps, one that is wearing a brand name instead of his own. I haven’t invested proper time on my personal site. For that I apologize. I’m working on a better version (possibly either a custom CMS or moved into ExpressionEngine). Hopefully I’ll get to do that over the fourth.

I’ve done a few other things, namely some stuff with <canvas> a year ago or so. It’s all in the RandomThink Labs, which are all pretty ugly right now visually, but hey, that’s part of the cleanup/rework I want to undertake. All the code in the labs is under an MIT license and also available at this GitHub repo if you want to just grab it all.

Thanks for stopping by!

Seriously, I need to do something to refresh this excuse of a blog. I used to post about stuff. Then Twitter came along and I find it just so much easier to spout off in 140 character bursts.

Part of me is tempted to clean out the domain and start fresh. I only have one or two posts that get any sort of regular traffic, and one of them is like four years old now and totally irrelevant. However, I have some sort of nostalgic attachment to this domain.

I own a couple of variations of my name, as well as a few other random domains that could be interesting to start something fresh on. However, I’m just not sure.

I’m not sure moving from one domain to another would really help, though. I blame social networking. Anymore, I talk so much about the day-to-day on Twitter and through the occasional Facebook status update that stuff just doesn’t stick in my mind long enough to get to the blog.

On occasion, I get a wild hair to come in and redo things in here. Move to Expression Engine perhaps, or really take the time to craft up a nice WP theme, either using Carrington as more than its default state like it is now or building off of Sandbox or something. Then I remember the other side projects I have brewing, all of which are of higher priority than this site.

The things I stew on longer, to think about and share, are primarily of a technical nature anymore, and it feels funny to go blathering on about jQuery in this environment because it’s generally much more personal. At the same time, I find that it’s one of the more exciting things I deal with on a day-to-day, and I mix it into tweets about other stuff, so perhaps I shouldn’t be concerned with crossover here.

I’ve also thought about keeping this place personal and using more of a normal-namespace type blog (I own 2 or 3 variations of BrianArnold.___) for more technical, professional stuff.

If anyone even still reads this, I’d love a comment, to get some feedback. I’m not sure it’s worth even really bothering with at this point – hard to say.

For those not in the know, MacHeist is back. It’s a large bundle of Mac software for an amazing price, and it seems to create this huge amount of drama in the Mac software developer community. As someone who’s just started to get into Apple development (iPhone for now, maybe more later), I find the responses really interesting, especially the people who are so vehemently opposed to selling product at such a markdown (currently $626.75 worth of software for $39, 25% of which goes to a charity of the purchaser’s choosing, with potential to be $975.70 worth of software – still for $39).

Personally, coming from the perspective of development, I think it’s a great way to reach out to people who may not normally dive into your products. To draw an analogy, a common argument as to why piracy isn’t a big deal is often that the pirates aren’t people who’d buy the music/software anyways, so it’s not a lost sale. I see MacHeist as the same thing, except that the developers do get a small amount of money.

I already own one or two of the applications in MacHeist 3, and so now I have dual licenses (as I don’t really know anyone else I’d have gifted the licenses to), so those devs are actually getting more of my money than normal — and I’m okay with that, because they’re great products. I’ve bought into every MacHeist so far, and out of all of that, I maybe actually still use one or two of the apps. The rest linger, gathering digital dust and cobwebs, eventually to be AppZapped into oblivion (the irony being that I got AppZapper in MH2).

Delicious Library would be an exception worth noting. I still use it on occasion and enjoy it, and I’ve paid for the upgrade to DL2. I wouldn’t have used it, were it not for MacHeist, and now he’s gotten more of my cash because I’m willing to pay for a product I enjoy.

I happily bought into MH3. It’s an amazing deal. These developers are getting some of my money that they normally wouldn’t have, and charities benefit. I don’t see myself using 90% of it more than for a few days as an amusing cheaply-paid trial. If I wind up sticking with some of them, I’ll become a paying customer for further upgrades, as well as a word-of-mouth promoter, because I like to make noise about great software.

Incidentally, if you want to dive in, and use my MacHeist referrer link, you’ll unlock another piece of software or two for me, although it’s not a big deal either way.

I’ve been holding back on posting this one, because I wanted to wait until Jason had a chance to see it in person. Not sure why, just, felt like I wanted to share with him and a few others in person before I went and said it more loudly.

Nearly three years ago, I talked about our new Honda Accord. I was very excited about it at the time, and I made the comment that “it’s kind of like a big Civic”.

However, it turns out, I don’t really like bigger cars.

I really don’t like to complain too much. Frankly, I’m blessed to have been able to get the car at all, and am very thankful for the three years that it carried me from A to B. However, I never felt comfortable in it. I mean, perhaps I was physically comfortable, but it just felt way too big for me. I never developed a good sense of space with it. I was never comfortable parking it. It was much harder to drive comfortably than the Pilot ever has been.

For the past few months, we’ve been thinking about what to do with the Accord. We figured we wouldn’t be keeping it. We went to a number of dealerships and test drove a few cars, but nothing felt quite right. There was one car that we hadn’t test driven yet that I wanted to check out, but we just couldn’t find the time.

Well, the Pilot was nearing the end of its lease, and we were in talking to the financial people, and they noted that the Accord was coming up due, and if we were willing to wrap up both vehicles in one day, they could get us some breaks. Then they suggested that they had some cars we could try out, and a salesman brought around a Honda Fit.

The month after we got the Accord, Honda brought the Fit to the US. For years, I have been reading about this car, and really, it’s all I’ve wanted since. It doesn’t hurt that it’s gotten really good ratings for years now and is incredibly economic when it comes to fuel. We test drove it and both of us fell in love. It’s really a good fit for us.

I want to take some nice daylight pictures (like I did for the Accord), but for now, here’s a picture from the website (again, like the way I posted about the Accord).

On the whole, I’m immensely pleased. It’s way more fun to drive than the Accord ever was. It’s much more fitting to me. It’s smaller, more nimble, way more fuel efficient, and even safer than the Accord, and I fully look forward to driving it for at least the next thirteen years.

I may even pick up an amp and some beefed-up speakers. For old time’s sake. (My cars in high school had ridiculously overpowered audio systems for such small cars.)

So yeah, I made it six days into NaBloPoMo. That’s amusing. Oh well. I enjoy writing and all, but trying to do it as a daily thing wound up turning it into something of a chore, and that’s not pleasant.

Life has been ridiculously busy and shows no signs of slowing down. Things are kind of crazy and chaotic. I’m recovering from a cold that made me take a couple of days off. I’m level 79 in WoW although aside from the sick day yesterday, I haven’t really played in any serious capacity in a month or more. I’m juggling the day job with no less than four side experiments/projects, and Lisa’s working on thesis research. Life is just speeding along and it feels hard to take a moment to sit and reflect.

I turn 30 in a couple of weeks (February 1st, specifically). I was reading an old post from ~3 years ago, talking about how from 2002 to early 2006, I had over 580 posts. Now? This will be post 680. Only 100 posts in the last three years. I’d like to post more, I just don’t take the time to stop and write it all up. I feel like I should though, because, well, it makes for good ways to remember things. I still haven’t fully put all the posts that I wrote up in Europe up here, and that was nearly two years ago now (which is so hard to believe).

On the other hand, I’ve considered archiving this whole blog and starting fresh. Total reboot. Maybe a split, wherein I have a more personal blog and then a more “professional” blog where I can nerd out about jQuery and JSON and AJAX and blah blah blah without boring the people who come here for more personal stuff. Still noodling some ideas there. I posted one mockup the other night (built with the amazing Balsamiq Mockups, expect a post on that soon hopefully)

I also fully intend on fulfilling the photo meme. I got some ideas for pictures that I liked. I just haven’t actually taken the shots yet.

I saw this meme posted and thought it sounded interesting, so I figure, I’ll post it up here. It seems like an interesting way to get to know people better.

• Ask me to take pictures of any aspect of my life you’re curious about.
• Leave your requests as comments to this entry. One request per person.
• Please look at the previous requests as to not do repeats.
• I’ll snap the pictures and post them.

I’m adding an additional caveat, in that I reserve the right to deem something too personal to post out here. Not that I expect people to be asking for pictures of a sensitive or overly personal nature, but hey, it seems worth attaching a disclaimer.

I may make a general state of life post at some point soon, or perhaps like my makeover in Albuquerque the Magazine, I’ll wind up never writing about it. Only time will tell!