Hello, Hexo

Time for a new beginning. “Take the First Step” is now brought to you by Hexo.

Why Hexo?

It is built in node.js. I’ve been meaning to start exploring node.js and JavaScript. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Here is my first step.

It generates static sites. My hosting situation is in flux right now. Static sites are fast, lightweight and portable. Have site, will travel.

My search quickly brought me to Static Site Generators, the self described “Definitive list of Static Site Generators”. Sorting the list by language narrowed the list from 237 to 39. Looking at github commits and contributors narrowed the list to two: Assemble and Hexo. I really wanted to like Assemble, but it was just too ambitious for my simple little weblog. So I went with Hexo.

Two Lifetimes

Well, those two lifetimes went by quickly.

My first TextDrive lifetime lasted about nine years. That ended in disappointment as parent Joyent discarded TextDrive and its obligations for lifetime hosting and lifetime accelerators (VPS).

My second TextDrive lifetime lasted just over a year. That ended on Friday when I noticed my weblog was down. A visit to TextDrive yielded this:

As anyone looking for decent support or even useful information over the past few months can attest, the revival of TextDrive has not been a success.

What began in mid-2012 as an exciting challenge fuelled by good intentions and lean resources quickly turned into a cleanup project with almost no resources.

It is disappointing to report that after a year and a half of uphill battles and unimagined setbacks, after several costly efforts to regroup and find another way, options to keep TextDrive growing have run out, and we will cease operations on the 14th of March, 2014.

For those who wish to know, details of what went wrong will be made available once shutdown operations have completed.

Sorry to have let you down.

Dean

I had several months warning the first time around. This time I was completely unprepared. Fortunately, Jacques Marneweck at Kaizen Garden has stepped in to help recover data. Thank goodness for the kindness of strangers.

RIP Roger Ebert

I spent more time than is healthy reading about you this weekend.

You lived such a full life and left such a rich record of it. Lived a career that you were passionate about. Shared great success with a frenemy who you grew to love as a brother. Met and wed the great love of your life. Faced adversity in your later years with great grace.

I don’t really know you, but I know I will miss you.

I'm so happy to see you

Annie was so happy to see us on Saturday. She called out to us as they brought her out to the visiting room at the Vet. And she talked to us as we held her in our arms. But after the excitement of seeing us faded away, she became quiet and was no longer able to stand up.

And that was when we knew that our Annie was ready to go.

Didn't it go by awfully fast

Said by Howard Austen, Gore Vidal’s companion of 53 years, on his deathbed. That was my takeaway from Gore Vidal’s obituary earlier this week. 53 years, how wonderful those 53 years must have been.

We had not quite 5 years with Annie. Those years went by awfully fast.

Boy cats can't rock the look

Doctor Princess Annie Chloe of the Kingdom of Calico left this earth around 1pm this day. She is survived by her mother, her bear and her brother Mark.

I’ll always remember that she asked

Why are most calicoes girls?

and answered her own question with

Because boy cats can’t rock the look.

No Bright Shining Line

I listen to football players defending bounties and it reminds me of fraternity brothers defending hazing or hockey insiders defending fighting. As a football fan I expect my team to hurt “our” opponents, not injure them. Unfortunately, there is no bright shining line separating the two, only broad fuzzy ones.

The instant you start thinking that outsiders just don’t understand is the instant that you need to start looking for that broad fuzzy line. Because you have started to think that the mores of your group of insiders trump the mores of the world you live in.

And trust me, they don’t.

Authoritative, but not Illuminating

I almost returned “Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson” to the library unread. Dave Winer’s Why Jobs chose Isaacson and Thomas Q Brady’s Steve Jobs picked the wrong guy had created doubt in my mind. It was a library book, so I had no skin in the game. But Jobs was a totem for my generation of developers and I started leafing through the pages.

The pages pulled me in. I knew the main story. I knew much of the back story. But the biography depicted a depth and nuance that was all new to me. And so I inhaled the book over the weekend.

In the end, Winer and Brady were right. The Isaacson biography was authoritative, but not illuminating. Worth reading, but not worth a spot on my bookshelf (digital or analog).

Stalk WebCam

It’s hard to maintain eye contact in a web chat. If you look at your correspondent in your screen, then you’re not looking at your web cam. And if you look at your web cam, then you’re only seeing your correspondent in your peripheral vision.

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could buy a web cam on a stalk. Then you could place the web cam within your field of view while looking at your correspondent. Or how about some mirrors to shift the built in web cam focal point from the top to the interior of the screen.

Add in some software to move your correspondent’s picture into alignment with the webcam location and you have a complete solution.