The Answer to Life, the Universe and Everything...
- Sunday, 29 July 2012 15:17
This has been an eventful month for me: I graduated from college with 2 Associates degrees, and I started a new job (which was a conversion from an independent contractor gig I lined up in May) and it was my birthday the other day - I turned 42 (hence the title of this entry).
So, the graduation went well - until I was set to cross over and get my diploma (cover). The dean of the Physical Sciences, Mathematics & Engineering Division apparently failed to say my name or mention my honors. This displeased my wife and our contingent of friends and family - as they didn't have their cue to whoop it up, and by the time they'd realized I'd been up I was gone. My wife says that along with showing up for the final naked, not having your name called at graduation is one of those nightmares soon to be graduates have. Oddly enough, it didn't bother me. I have since dubbed my self as The Unknown Graduate.
Getting proper employment was also a great step, even if it is only part time. Discussions had actually been going on since before my graduation, but my new employers have a really crammed summer schedule - which made it difficult to meet with them. While I've only been employed by them for a little over a week, I did start doing project for them in May when they needed someone with Joomla experience to deal with their website. I think it also helps that the Wife and I have been dedicated patrons of their business since they opened, and have taken the time to get to know the staff (definitely much easier to settle in to a new job when you know everyone...) My primary roll is dealing with their Social Media presence, but I also handle some of their other online mentions and will do some occasional customer facing work.
And, finally, it was my 42nd birthday. As a geek, I consider this to be one of my milestone birthdays - since Douglas Adams claimed that 42 is the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything (just that we don't actually know what the questions is...) Although, I've recently discovered that Graham Chapman may have been responsible for picking the number when Adams rang him and asked what the "Answer" is (Adams denied this claim). But this diverges a little from my day, which was part of a fairly busy weekend. On the actual day, I was sang to by 38 kids (all budding actors) at my work, followed by a monthly gathering of friends (one of which had a birthday earlier in the week, so cards were exchanged - but the Wife and I tend to make more of a production out of it...) Then the next day is was - what will probably be - the highlight of the Summer: Airplane! the Quote Along Experience. Twenty of us, all in the first two seats off both sides of the aisle at our favorite local theatre (some of us in costumes - Krisnas, pilots and tower crew) to see one of the funniest films of all time in an environment that encourages audience participation.
All this points to 42 being a good age for me...
It's Been an Awful Long Time...
- Monday, 04 June 2012 00:10
I really haven't had much drive to update this site for a while. For the past three years I've been back in school - in fact, the last time I wrote anything substantial was about the end of my first term. The first year of classes was me just taking some classes to expand my mind a little. When I embarked on the second year, I had decided to pursue certificates with the plan to continue on to a degree if I had failed to land a job. Guess, what. At the end of this month I graduate with two Associates of Science degrees - Web Programming and Web Administration - and with high honors (yes, that surprised me as well).
Since my area of study was Web Programming and Administration, it seemed a shame that my own internet "properties" have fallen into disrepair. So I started with this - my very first domain - and began with fixing up the theme a bit. The site uses Joomla 2.5, and since the upgrade from Joomla 1.5 the theme hasn't been very well utilized, I decided to try and create a custom theme. There's something about a clean theme, and this one reminds me a little of my old MoveableType environment. The logo has also been updated (I've been taking a graphics arts class this term, and now know a little more of how to use Adobe's Creative Suite...) it now uses the altered Albertus typeface that was used in the Prisoner TV series, and the text is filled in with the HD BBC Test Card.
Speaking of the BBC, my old BBC clock was a Flash based widget - which meant it didn't work everywhere - so I discovered that a BBC web engineer had designed an HTML5 version of the clock. All I needed to do was adjust the dimensions and colour, and add the static graphics. Sadly, there will always be items that don't play on all systems - the last article I published before this one contains a music video from Vimeo, which appears to be Flash as well...
One of the other things I started to take care of (and hopefully caught all of) was missing images in the articles. Various moves from various platforms over the years, a lot of the images and internal links were broken. Also, a lot of the dates are wrong (or indeed missing) and I'll try to fix that as I have time. It may be a simple fix (created v. published dates showing up)
So hopefully, for the few of you who stop by, this site will look and work a whole lot better.