New digs

Jan 14

Things are a little different around here. I finally got ahold of some awesome hosting and have been banging around for the last couple of weeks getting the VPS set up and everything configured, and then doing the first legitimate chunk of web development I've done in — god — almost two years of being a manager and not doing "real work".

The archive has been yanked from Blogger into WordPress, and then from WordPress into Typo. More on that particular transition later.

It's incredibly satisfying having my own live box on the internet again after four years in the desert. I used to have a DSL connection with a static IP and could run a Linux server right out of my bedroom: when I moved, I got cable, and that was the end of that.

There are a bunch of new technologies that I've been skimming over the last few years but haven't really dug into (particularly Rails), because if you haven't got someplace to put your code where somebody can see it, it's like memorizing Hamlet and then delivering it in your bedroom with the door closed.

In case you can't parse that tortured metaphor, I mean it's a bunch of fucking work and then you feel like a dumbass for bellowing "I could be bounded in a nutshell, and count myself a king of infinite space" when you're, well, bounded by a pile of socks and that poster of Alyssa Milano in a hockey jersey that you scraped your allowance together to buy when you were twelve, back when you imagined that some day you'd get laid —

You see, it's not enough just to torture the metaphor. The metaphor will remember, and one day when you least expect it a hired simile will get you like a knife in the back. Consequently, you need to first torture the metaphor, and then shoot it once in the heart, and once in the head. It's the Miller's Crossing school of writing.

I suppose I could have just gotten some shared hosting somewhere, and in fact I did sign up with DreamHost for about fifteen seconds, but when you've been an admin, and you're used to having that kind of control, it's just not acceptable to be told you can only have five MySQL databases and that you can't pick a name for them that someone else has already grabbed.

Ah, the sweet sweet smell of massive nerdery.