kartooner.com

It’s been several months since I’ve written on here, since August of last year in fact, which equals to roughly 5 years in Internet time.

What have I been up to since I last mashed my fingers across the keyboard and published something of worth? Well, I was offered and accepted a position with AOL/Weblogs, Inc. as a designer for their network of sites. My first thought was; they pay people to design blogs? It’s become more than a dream job for me and I couldn’t be more thankful for the friendships I’ve formed and lessons learned.

There’s that, on the job end of things, and as a far as my personal life is concerned we’re plugging along quite nicely. My daughter Zoe just turned 4. For those of you who’ve followed this site for the 4+ years I’ve been maintaining it this is a huge milestone. My son, Quinn, is now 2 and between the two they manage to keep us busy, thanks in part to how often they annoy each other. We are expecting another child as well so there are more adventures to look forward to.

Speaking of which, this site, my favorite pet project has become more stagnant than ever. You could search the archives… oh wait, no you can’t because that’s yet to be fixed, but hey, if you could you’d find plenty of posts describing some sort of post-mortem. Moving on from here I’ve finally decided to use Expression Engine to use as the engine of this site. One reason for settling on EE is because I’ve used it sparingly in the past for projects and the road map of feature additions & interface enhancements (as showcased at SXSW ‘08) looks pretty fantastic.

The other reason is I had dinner with Michael Boyink, recent hire of Ellis Labs (the team behind EE), and through his own articulation and excitement I myself became utterly convinced this was for me. He’s also the man behind Train-EE which is both an incredible and informative resource on all that is Expression Engine, oh, and he offers training course ware on it. How cool is that?

It’s been awhile and I realize that and it bothers me, but, it’s clear to me that the progression of this site is to become something more than a blog, but also it needs to be fun again for me.

Lately I’ve been taking afternoon walks to free my mind of creative restraint or to just breath in the fresh air. It’s a change that I’ve welcomed, even if my legs don’t always thank me for it.

Instead of just taking in the sights around me I’m also beginning to listen more, paying close attention to the sounds of nature and the partial conversations I pick up on while on my walk.

Since we live in a village (with a population of less than 5,000), small talk carries itself through the walls of homes, in meeting hot spots like the park or the local supermarket and you’re always bound to run into someone you know.

It’s a lot like Cheers, where everyone knows your name or at least your family name.

On my most recent stroll through the village I noticed a fellow standing on the street corner in front of a Mom & Pop diner. He looked about in his 50s, but with all of his hair still intact and I kid you not, his attire consisted of a tank top, shorts and dress shoes. He was yelling to a friend across the street, who nonchalantly continued on his way until he noticed his loud companion.

They both laughed, one teasing the other and I moved on. You might see this kind of thing in everyday life, to you it might even be mundane or commonplace.

For someone like me who has tendency to extrapolate the small stuff, which works to my benefit and sometimes just the opposite, these kinds of occurrences are important for a few reasons.

One, that life really is like a play and there are patterns that we all recognize and become used to. There’s no special formula to observation, you either pay attention to details or you don’t. I’ve been informed by people that small occurrences in life like two guys meeting on the street aren’t worth remembering or mentally archiving.

Yet, life is an experience. It’s more than just a few months strung into years, it’s moments and memories and everything else.

When someone lets you know that their child stood up for the very first time, you might be interested for a moment and then together your reactions don’t align. For the parent of the child, this is monumental, a milestone in the growth and development of their child.

To you, even if you might be related, that same feeling the parent had isn’t what you are feeling because it may not be as important. We’ve got to keep track of a lot of information, this may not deserve a folder in the storage of our minds.

I might be a special case because I can selectively recall things/thoughts/occurrences that happened years ago. Most of these moments in time would’ve been long forgotten by most, but I hang onto things that might have made a difference to me.

Even if that means not having the same emotional attachment as the person who delivered the message or the guy yelling at his friend across the street, it’s something I cherish.

The only downside is my short-term memory leaves something to be desired. Recalling memories from years ago is no problem (in some cases), but there are times when I remind myself of something and moments later the memory or reminder only partially remains.

Driving home tonight after a delicious meal, my daughter, spontaneous as ever, looks up at me and in her best pirate expression growls; “Arghh! I’m a pirate!”.

What followed was a conversation between a three-year-old pirate, her parrot Steve and me, her “Pirate Daddy”.

Zoe: Arggh! I’m a pirate. You are a pirate too.

Me: Avast, ye scurvy sea dog! Y’best walk the plank.

Zoe: Okay. Daddy, this plank is heavy. I can’t carry it.

Me: (laughing) I said walk the plank, not carry it.

Zoe: I put it down here. That was so heavy, Pirate Daddy.

Me: Shiver me timbers! Where be your parrot, Steve?

Zoe: He flewed away! In the sky. Argggh!

Me: Yar! Next time keep an eye on Steve. A pirate isn’t a pirate without his parrot.

Zoe: Hand me a map. We need to go there. (points) And where we’re there, we then go here.

For those who aren’t aware Dreamhost experienced a security breach. According to Dreamhost, approximately 3,500 accounts were compromised, the hackers taking note of FTP user accounts, user names and passwords.

With this data the hackers, using an automated script of some sort, added SEO links/inframes to every instance of index.html or php.

This is the last straw. I’ve been with Dreamhost since mid-2004 and recommended them on more than one occasion and even went so far as defending them when others complained about slow service or half-baked customer support, the latter being something I never experienced.

Not any more. It’s time to look for a new home.

Over the past two hours I’ve had to comb over my files, looking for anything that could have been stolen and to my knowledge some files might have been removed.

Not only that, but the password I used was one of the best passwords I’ve used in a long time and now, thanks to this, I have to piece together a franken-mash of numbers.

It’s sad because while I represent, according to DH, only .15% of the customers whose data was changed in some way, I just wish something could’ve been done to prevent this.

Yet, who am I to say that web hosting is safe from this kind of thing, which apparently it isn’t. I suppose I wanted to believe that they were impenetrable, even if that was a premature wish.

The culprits added inframes and linkage pointing to offshore sites displaying garbled information; SEO tactics indeed.

On the bright side of things, my entries are safe, every one of them accounted for since 2004. This wasn’t an issue really considering I’ve kept backups of my DB since the beginning and make it habit to do it frequently.

I’m also planning on moving to a new CMS and will be taking the entries with me to preserve for the future, when robots make swiss cheese sandwiches with George Forman machines.

Does anyone out there have any suggestions for a new host?