Twev1701.net 2002-2012

While I was making my last post about a great Doctor Who graphic I found, I had to stop and laugh at myself. WordPress has a great set of posting tools that allow you to effortlessly post images. Hell, you don’t even need an FTP program as it will automatically upload your image to your server.

So why did this make me laugh?

Because to this day I’m still old school. I still manually name and thumbnail all my images. I manually upload them to my server using a standalone FTP program (FileZilla for Windows, Cyberduck for OSX) and still manually put in the HTML to post said pictures. Even though the built in WordPress tools are indeed easier, I still prefer to write my own code manually so I know 100% how this picture will appear. It’s an old habit I doubt I will ever be broken of.

Found this great infographic online today. Maybe now some of friends won’t be so lost when I start talking about Doctor Who.

Click Picture For Larger Image

I have an odd fascination with my desk. All in all, I have owned a total of 3 desks in my lifetime. The first was a flip-top desk my father restored for me. This desk served me well through grade school. In 1990 for my birthday I got a little white, 2 level desk. I would use this desk every single day for the next 5 years. Then for my birthday in 1995, I out grew my desk. I needed a new one. I found one at Sam’s Club.

This desk saw me through think and thin for the next 14 years. I literally sat at it every single day and did my computer work. I loved this desk.

Then in 2009 we got the news that we were going to have a baby. Being that the only extra bedroom in the house was my computer room, things needed to change. The first thing to change was my desk. Gone was my beloved 5ft desk…

And in was a 30″ workstation from Ikea…

For almost 2 years I was forced to do work on this miniature monstrosity. That is, until this past Monday. After some careful measuring and some creative thinking, I was finally able to bring my desk out of storage and back to its rightful place as keeper of my computers. All hail the desk!!

In a effort to finish a project started long ago, I need something we are always in very short supply of here at casa de Shafer — more space. Specifically, I need more office space. Given that I have downsized as much as I can and don’t have any extra room upstairs to spare, how do I accomplish this feat? Easy — think outside the box.

For me to go forward I must quite literally go back. I have been working on a 30″ Ikea workstation for almost 2 years now. This is a dramatic downsize for me given that I have been working on a 60″ desk for the past 14 years. After doing a lot of thinking tonight at work, I came to once conclusion. To get more space, I need my desk back. If I could reassemble my desk and get rid of my tiny workstation, I should have all the space I need for the foreseeable future.

But how do I do this considering almost every inch of wall space up here is spoken for?

You think outside the box. Once I measured the top of my old desk and the current space I am occupying, in reality, I only need and additional 10 inches. So, to accomplish this, I am turning around 2 bookcases we have in our stairwell leading up here so that the books face the stairwell. This will not affect anything in the stairwell and will leave the flush backside now facing into the room. Jess’s musical keyboard is now between one of those bookcases and one of my bookcases up against the wall. There is more than enough room here to remove the keyboard and move my filing cabinet there. Since the book are on the other side the drawers will be able to open fully and freely. Next, we remove the table I have sideways next to my workstation an move that down to where my CDs are currently being stored on a rack. All of my CDs have been ripped so these will be catalogued and packed away. These simply alterations have now left me with an additional 31″ of room. Take down my Ikea workstation and the blank space against the wall I have open for my laptop back and I suddenly now have 67″ of free wall space for a 60″ desk. More than enough room to ft my desk snuggly into the corner and have Jess’s keyboard at the end of it. Hell, I might actually GAIN an inch or two out of the deal.

I get EXACTLY what I have been desiring for almost 2 years (my beloved desk!) and all it took was some creative thinking.

Of course, all of my plans will be moot until I can figure out a way to run some CAT-5 up here. All attempts so far have been met with the unforgiving bitch named Failure. That’s going to require some Zen Master like creative thinking to solve.

Something amazing has happens this Christmas. I’m calling it my own little Christmas miracle.

I ended up getting 3 video games this Christmas that I have been wanting since they all came out: ‘Batman: Arkham Asylum’, ‘Castlevania: Lords Of Shadow’, and ‘Super Mario Galaxy 2′.

Now what I have typically done in the past is start playing the game for about 2-3 hours, put it down to go back to real life, and then don’t return for about a year or so. It’s an awful habit that started a few years ago when I opened up i/o Computers and lost my free time.

On the night of Christmas Eve, I opened up ‘Batman: Arkham Asylum’ and started playing. After about 90 minutes, I decided to call it a night and go to bed. Normally I wouldn’t have touched the game for a few weeks after that. Much to my surprise, I picked it back up yesterday and played it for about 5 or 6 more hours. Not only is that amazing, but I find myself here at work tonight (closing unfortunately) counting down the hours so I can go home and play some more. I honestly can’t remember the last time I counted down the hours at work so I could go home and play a game. If I had to guess I would say the last game I did this with was ‘Guild Wars’ many, many years ago.

Is the gaming Trevor back? I sure hope so. I like him!

For the past few years I have had a plugin on my site called ‘Twitter Tools’ which has been automatically publishing every post on this site to my Twitter feed. Because of this, I have become more and more critical of what I have been writing on this site. Instead of quick little blurbs like I used to post, I have been holding back and writing, longer, full bodied articles. In doing this, I feel that I am cheating the original purpose of this site.

I have been reading back over quite a few log posts lately going all the way back to 2002. There’s a narrative there. On some dates, I have made up to 3 blog posts. In those 3 little posts, it tells the story of a day as it naturally evolved. In reading these, I wondered why I don’t do this anymore. In the end I came to the conclusion that it was because every post has been posting to Twitter. Because I was basically publicly promoting every post, I became self conscious. I found myself wanting to turn each post into an article. This was not the intended purpose of this site. This is a blog.

blog (bl??)

—n
informal Full name: weblog a journal written on-line and accessible to users of the internet

This is a journal site, not a news site or an online magazine. This is about my life, my thoughts, and my opinions. By literally censoring myself, I feel that I killed the soul of this site.

So I have made the decision to turn off the script that automatically promoted every post on Twitter and only promote those posts that I feel need promotion. With this, I hope that not only will we see more posts, but more posts of a quick, personal nature.

I took the day off from work today because I am sick. Actually, I’ve been sick for almost a month now, but have been in general ignoring it and working through it. I realized that I may need some downtime when I came home from work last night, sat down on the couch with my iPhone, and apparently fell asleep mid-sentence while talking with my wife. I woke up about 30 minutes later covered in a blanket and totally confused. About 3 hours later I went to bed where I thought I would sleep. Instead, I slept in short bursts with lots of tossing and turning in between. I then called off realizing I needed a day to rest with the condition from my wife that I actually rest today and not do things around the house. Thus, I have been upstairs on my computers for almost the entire day.

While doing some file transfers, I decided to go through some old paperwork in my filing cabinet. It was here that I found the original printouts from when I registered Twev1701.com and opened my first hosting account. Much to my surprise, I discovered that I did all of this on February 24, 2002. Why was this surprising to me? I could have sworn I did all of this in December of 2001. I was so sure of this fact, that I have had the date of 2001 on my website for the past few years. It looks like I have been in error.

On the flip side of things, this makes me extremely happy. Buying said site on February 24, 2002, means that I would have not had the NewsPro site setup until at least the 1st of March. I have spent the better part of the past year trying to recover all of my lost posts from those days of using NewsPro. Unlike MovableType (what I used right before WordPress) NewsPro and it’s evolution into Coranto did not employ a database to save previous posts. Posts were saved as text files each month and this made up your archive. This means that I have relied upon the use of what was saved by the Internet Archive and what random NewsPro files I have been able to find on drives and CDs laying around the lab. I have been able to reconstruct quite of bit of those missing years, but holes still remain. But, knowing that posting did not begin until at least March 2002 means that I am not missing as much as I thought. As of this posting, the earliest post I have been able to restore is from April 21, 2002. This means I have a post from the first 60 days of the site. True, I would love to have the very first post from the site but the reality of that happening is not good.

While I will have to wait another year to celebrate 10 years of Twev1701 online, I know now that I have a more complete collection of posts then I thought I had this morning. I’ll take that.

I had a lot of time to just sit and think while in my tree stand on Monday morning. This is one of the things I really enjoy about hunting. It’s just you in your stand, surrounded by nature and your thoughts. No phones, no people, just you and nature. I thought about the future, the past, and the present. At one point, I started to go through a chronological history of all the computers I have owned and how they affected my life. It was really an eye-opening experience.

Since closing down i/o Computers in December of 2007, I have wanted nothing to do with fixing computers. At the behest of my wife, I started to open up another computer business this year, but have been really dragging my feet. Every time I think about getting someone’s virus laden computer and having to spend the time to get it working properly, I literally get sick to my stomach. I want nothing to do with that. I’m not ready to re-enter that world.

In fact, a few months ago I asked on Facebook that if you turn a hobby into a vocation, can it ever be a hobby again. The responses I got back seemed to indicate that you cannot do this. I would also concur with this assessment.

But when I was in my stand thinking about all my past computers, I was also thinking about what was going on in my life during those times and what I was using the computer for. Sometimes I was using them to make primitive computer graphics, other times I was recording lots of audio. I was playing massive amounts of games, and I was downloading like a mad pirate. Not thinking about the individual machines, but what I did with those machines started to get my geek blood flowing again. By the time the sun was sinking into the western horizon and the hunt was coming to a close, I was eager to get back and start to re-build my PC. Yes, me the die hard Mac guy wanted to go and re-build my PC. Why? So I could play around with it. This is the first time in literally years that I have been interested in my PC other than a platform for the games I already own or a media server.

Is this going to user in a new age of the Twev-geek? Not likely given that time have radically changed since I was the die hard geek of yesteryear. What I am hoping this will do is re-open a door that was opened many years ago and sadly shut for me by unfortunate circumstances. I was to be a PC enthusiast again. I want to be that guys that used to download strange new programs just to try them out. I want to try and make things do things that were never designed, or meant, to do. I want to be bored on a Sunday afternoon while Jack is down for a nap so I throw together a little web server from parts that are laying around.

If I can re-light the geek fire within me, maybe, just maybe, I can get to the stage where working on computers will not make me ill. If this does indeed happen, maybe it will be my destiny after all to open up another computer business. Until then, I just want to have fun!

Even thought this was technically Jackson’s 2nd Halloween, in reality, it was his first. Last year he was but 2 weeks old when Halloween came. Not only wasn’t he interested in trick or treating last year, he wasn’t interested in staying awake for more than 20 minutes at a time.

This year was different. This year our little one year old toddler was turned into something dark. Something evil. Something not of this world. Out little Jackson had become…

JACKULA!!!!

Much to our surprise, he seemed to love his costume. He especially loved the medallion. I have a feeling he’ll be wearing that around the house, post-Halloween. He seemed to enjoy his costume so much, even mommy and daddy decided to dress up!

Even Loki got into the spirit and dressed up!

After a few hours of going door to door, Jackson had started to wain, so around 8pm, we decided to head home. Thanks to Jackson’s cousin Kyla, who did the majority of the door-to-door walking for him, he made out like a bandit. In the end, it was one of the best Halloweens ever!