Brightness and Cheer

It was a wet, dreary, stay-inside-and-watch-movies kind of weekend. I’m pretty sure I didn’t leave the apartment at all once the rain started, at least until this morning. I got nicely soaked on my way to work, wishing every step of the way that I had some proper foul weather gear instead of a flimsy street vendor umbrella and a wool coat.

On the bright side, I do get to leave work early today… to go to the dentist. I think it’s going to be one of those weeks.

I’m glad you made it.

Welcome to the new Caoine.org. I am, of course, still smoothing out various rough edges: this means that some weirdness should be expected. But I knew if I didn’t get the site up I could easily spend another two months tinkering with it, so this is probably the lesser of two evils.

Here’s a behind-the-scenes tidbit for you: this time around, I’m using WordPress instead of MovableType. Although I’ve been a devoted MT user for five years and have helped dozens of friends and clients get started using it, the sheer number of people recommending I try out WP finally reached the point at which I became willing to do so. And lo and behold, I found it to be remarkably flexible and adept at doing what I need it to do. I found their template tags refreshingly easy to pick up, and turning my design into a functional theme was the work of only an evening or two. Now, I’m not recommending anyone make the switch to WordPress just because I’ve had a good experience so far: it’s only been about a week. Check in with me again next year and see if I’m still using it.

There are still a number of broken links and such scattered throughout the archives. Someday I’ll go through and clean it all up, but given that this site is over eight years old now I think a certain amount of creaking is to be expected. You are warned.

I am tremendously grateful to Scott for once again being more awesome than any single human has the right to be, and to Chris for putting up with me while I worked on this shit.

links for 2007-04-12

links for 2007-04-11

Recommended

  1. Pistachio madeleines from the bakery at Balthazar. Astoundingly good and not too pricey. They’re probably also the least messy thing you can buy at the bakery, where everything is fantastic but often too flaky or sticky to eat at one’s desk.
  2. Staying the hell away from the Kid Robot store. I love Kid Robot’s toys, but that’s kind of the problem. The SoHo store itself is exquisitely designed to gently but firmly separate me from my money, and I am powerless to resist.
  3. Amy Winehouse, specifically Back to Black. Thanks to Rands for tipping me off.
  4. Not over-using Ajax on your website. Yes, it’s neat stuff. But just like Flash, Ajax is something that shouldn’t be used just for the sake of using it.
  5. Twitterific 2.0. Just download it, already.

links for 2007-04-10

links for 2007-04-09

Puzzle Quest

My friend Colin, one of the evil geniuses behind Puzzle Quest: Challenge of the Warlords, sent me a copy of the DS version recently, and it only took a few hours for me to get more firmly hooked on it than I have on a portable game since probably FFTA. I think it’s going to become my subway companion for the forseeable future. My DS hasn’t actually seen much use the past year or so, perhaps because I still believe the GBA SP to be the best handheld system ever, but I think Puzzle Quest definitely merits finding a spot for it in my bag.

links for 2007-04-06

Advice To Job Seekers

If you’re applying for a job as a front-end web developer, it’s probably a bad idea if your portfolio site looks like this:

Very classy.