Cafe Bucky

2005 built character. Enough already.

There are some highlights from this year that I really enjoyed, such as living in NYC, driving across the country, and making significant progress on FlexiPhoto. My daughter got to go to a stellar school in NYC, and thrived. My wife got photos into a couple of exhibitions. I’m frikken healthy.

But there were mistakes aplenty. A bunch of “should haves”. Shoulda pulled the plug on working with AOLServer & Tcl much earlier (career detour). Shoulda rented out the West Coast house so that we could have stayed in NYC. I haven’t done a good job at marketing FlexiPhoto, or my own blog, or myself, for that matter (my resume and site need a going-over). I haven’t done enough to keep up with friends. Wasted a lot of time fretting about things I can’t change. bla bla bla. Terrible birthday [1], and worse Christmas (not in the materialistic sense, but in the sense of not being enthusiastic about either one).

It’s not a true “Annus Horriblus” (just sounds more dramatic than “year that sucked”). If it were, I may not be fortunate enough to write the words, right? No Hurricane Katrina here. No car crashes. No upside-down goldfish. It could have been a lot worse. Still, I’m glad it’s just about over. Onward.

[1] with the exception of being with a couple of wonderful folks in Mill Valley for a few hours.

Last year I wrote “Christmas Sanity”. Hmm, it still holds true. There’s an awful lot of JUNK being bought on this Black Friday. Go, Economy, Go :=/ I don’t need anything, but if someone insisted, they could check out my wishlist. I admire gifts that take a little thought (a plane ticket to, say, Sydney Australia would be excellent, or failing that, a Pastrami Sandwich from Katz’s in NYC). All I really want for Christmas is camraderie and yummy food.

I don’t want every post here to mention FlexiPhoto, but until I get the word out, and start some momentum on that site, I’ll get ta mentionin’ …

Ok, 2.5a4 (Jamaica) is out!

Now I can get to scary things, like Halloween and PHP Security.

I’d missed the last couple of years of Halloween on D Street in Petaluma. We get 3000 trick or treaters. No, that’s not a typo. It’s insane! We live next to some people who give out cartons of chocolate milk every year (they run a dairy), and everyone that goes there, comes here. 3000 of them. Ask me about my candy bill sometime.

The other scary thing (boo!) can be PHP security. Fortunately, there’s a new O’Reilly book out: “Essential PHP Security”, by Chris Shiflett. I was on the verge of buying the print edition, and was relieved to see it come up in Safari. I know it will help me whip FlexiPhoto into shape.

Back in June I wrote No More Than A Mac Mini For Now

How completely silly of me. I wish to use these pixels to express my nearly unbridled lust for the new dual-processor, dual core core G5. The machine is ffffast! Yes, I know there will be an Intel box (eventually), but there’s also the idea of Getting More Done Now. Yes, it’s irrational, and yes, it’s just a shiny aluminum box. It’s one of those “if you don’t know, you’ll never get it, and if you do, no explanation is necessary” things.

I bet Susan will get one first. We both use our 17″ PowerBooks as our main machines, and with just 1gb of RAM, we’re in memory to disk swapping hell. We could buy more ram, but what’s the fun in that? She’s going to come back from PhotoPlus Expo all jazzed (rightfully so) about Aperture, and will need a hefty Mac to make good use if it.

And with Winter coming, it doubles as a heater!

Quick mentions … The Party is Scaled Back!. Webzine 2005 was fun, strange, and inspirational. Wish I could have gone back for Sunday.

I’m keeping my eyes out for a contract. In the meantime, I’ve been putting a lot of work into porting FlexiPhoto to PHP 5. More about that when it’s time to post it.

I’m pretty happy to be back home in California. The echoes of NYC car alarms and other stimuli fade away. I’ll be back there in mid-August for a few days, and then comes the Long Drive West across the Country!

There’s a lot I can say about the pros and cons of NYC and Petaluma. If I were really hip, I could just podcast it in 5 minutes. To write it down has taken longer, and I’m not happy with the result.

The gist of it is that I love both places, but don’t want to spend 12 months a year in either.

A big thing I have learned from the bi-coastal experiment is a new-found appreciation for California, and for Petaluma in particular. No place is utopia, but Petaluma is undergoing a pretty significant change for the better these days. It’s a great place to be based.

Consolidation.

We are going to head back to California in August. I do love NYC. It is expensive though, and that’s something made much more apparent when you’re spread amongst two places and two coasts. In a Walnut-shell, we’re in a tiny place in the UWS (5 of us, counting two cats), and if we wanted something decent-sized, we’d have to rent/sell our house in California (which would be a pretty big project), and use that money to rent in NYC. It works on paper, but I don’t live in origami. It’s not the right chapter, right now, to take on that project.

I won’t detail the next two months here. Suffice to say it’ll involve studying, driving, packing, taking lots of photos, and more driving! I’ve never driven across the country, so I’m really looking forward to that. If anyone has a good lead on how to rent a mini-van for a one way trip NYC -> SF, let me know. I’m well aware of how to do that for $1000 … $500 would be better though :-)

I’ve been mostly in NYC since October 2003, and California has been my escape - the place where I could spread out a bit. The experience has made me appreciate many things about my native state, and my West Coast DNA. I have some experience with the people who live on the Island Off The Coast Of Europe. There really is a New York State of Mind - It’s not just a song. I’ll miss it.

This is a followup to my post about FAME, AJAX, & LAMP. As I wind up what I am currently doing, and look forward to the O’Reilly OSCON 2005 (first week of August), I see July as an opportunity to do a lot of intensive study.

Of course, it’d be great to do some part-time gig in July, and I’m certainly capable as is. Don’t get me wrong here :-) I just don’t want to get into a situation where I have to bail on the conference.

What I am thinking is that I want the conference to cap off a period of reorienting full-time to the technologies I want to be a part of.

So here’s where I wish I had a ton of readers, because I’d really love to get some feedback … If you could take a month and just spend time learning tools and methodologies, where would you start? How would you organize it? How would you pace yourself?

The answers are, of course, completely variable from one developer to the next. My general idea is:

• Patterns, Unit Testing - I want to improve
• Eclipse / FAME environment - The OSFlash method of Flash development
• AJAX + WordPress Plugins
• PHP5 + Apache 2 migration

I’m not saying I’m going to master anything in a month. The goal is to bring some skills up to the next level. We all (should) know that most of the development world is constantly moving target.

I do have a project that I can resume that fits nicely into those areas, so I can apply new knowledge to something that’s real. Would be interesting to hear from others that have taken the time to do a “tech reset”. What would did you learn, and how would you have done things differently?