Category: Endured

Trials, marathons, or otherwise draining.

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Endured

Losing My Edge

Let me start with a basic truth: I am not the nerd I was when I was 20 years old.

When I started blogging in 2000, it was something resembling a brave new world. I cut my teeth with learning web programming concepts by building my own crude CMS.

A few years later, I would move to Drupal, and try to stay cutting edge with releases. I’d destroy my database one too many times and eventually moved to MovableType, but even though, I still had the deep nerd passions. I was working as a sysadmin, coding VJArmy and Pop’n Navy, and felt like I had a reasonably strong grasp of the technical skills that were necessary for such things.

Then 2006 came, and I moved out of the directly technical field into the somewhat technical field.

Then 2008 came, and I moved out of the somewhat technical field into the technical management field.

It’s been 14 years since I wrote that rudimentary CMS, and 8 years since I was last a sysadmin. And as the world has changed, my ability to feel any gusto for the idea of configuring Apache and/or patching kernels and/or fprotting tarballs has diminished to zero.

So much like when Movable Type’s troubled history eventually lead me to a snap migration to WordPress, today’s news about the ShellShock vulnerability lead me to come to terms with another harsh reality: my energy for dealing with sysadmin work for my own website has emptied.

The box this site was running on was not in any shape to continue. The thought of rebuilding a VM from scratch when I haven’t built a server in nearly a decade sounded painful.

The upshot: I had an easy plan B.

At the day job, we’ve been Pantheon customers for over a year, and their platform is familiar, powerful, and hit the core use case I needed: keep my blog running. (The other stuff, we will come back to.)

The migration process – from registering a personal account, to spinning up the new site, to importing, to configuring and pushing to production, to activating payment and cutting over the DNS, took about 45 minutes. (I’m not including the 5 minutes where I completely screwed up the initial configuration process.)

Quick. Easy. Mostly painless.

The downside: the other stuff that ran on the box – including RemyWiki – is not running on this host.

RemyWiki may not be familiar to the people who read my blog – it was tucked away on the site, almost a separate world – but it is/was a very active and busy MediaWiki install that documented English language Bemani information.

The challenges of running it boil down to three:

  1. It has the same problems as above – not only does it need sysadmin time and energy to maintain the host, but it also needs its own care and feeding for patching, something I had fallen way behind on (and patching MediaWiki is hellish).
  2. It is a natural magnet for spammers, to the point where I had to turn off registrations and ask people to email me if they wanted access (which I was never very quick in turning around).
  3. It probably doesn’t make a lot of sense to keep running an informational resource for a hobby that I’m no longer actively involved in, or at the very least, have it so closely tied with my personal site.

So with that in mind: if there are Bemani community folks out there who want to pick up the pieces and get the thing running somewhere else, please reach out. I want to give it a good home, as I know people have poured nearly 10 years of care and feeding into the content. It’s more than a little devastating to know I can’t give it that any more.

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Endured

Some Thoughts On DrupalCon Portland

It was somewhat funny to attend my first DrupalCon this week, given my personal trajectory of CMS systems over the years. For those that haven’t been with me since the very beginning: after cobbling together my own rudimentary CMS in 2000, I switched to Drupal for a good 18 months. An attempt to upgrade to the bleeding edge around 2003 nuked all my data, and in a fit of rage I switched to MovableType. A later fit of rage would take me from MT to WordPress. At the office, we’re embarking on a big transition to Drupal – so this as a training event made sense, even if I’m over a decade removed from my personal experience with it.

My conferencing experience has generally been in one of two buckets: Apple (I’ve attended 5 WWDC events over my time at WCMC) and OReilly (Web 2.0 and the retrospectively hilarious ETech Conference). But an open-source conference was something new, and so I wasn’t sure what to expect – although my personal stereotypes and biases towards any given nerd software bubble started to come together.

A few scattered thoughts:

The Drupal community, happily, is more diverse than I expected. Women were well represented – not a majority, but a constant presence. There was a wide range of ages and nationalities. There were thankfully few neckbeards or fedora hats.

As someone who is far removed from his engineering days, I was thankful that the tracks are broad and diverse. Standouts were Relly Annett-Baker on content strategy, the NBC Universal team on “internal open source”, and all three of the keynotes – which strikes me as a rare thing to have three keynote speakers that all knock it out of the park. There are direct lessons that I’m taking away that will make a difference to our community as we move forward with Drupal.

There is, however, an odd tension in the community around Acquia, a consulting/hosting/development company that seems to be partnered and competing with every other vendor at the show. We spoke at length with Acquia during our planning for Drupal at WCMC, and it’s interesting to see the dance from vendors who both have to compete in their space and sometimes rely on them for business. “Mafia-esqe” is how one person described it to me.

While I really enjoyed the content of DrupalCon, the venue (the Oregon Convention Center) was ill equipped for a modern conference. Flaky wifi, bad cell coverage, and a complete lack of power outlets meant I spent an larger amount of time swearing and worrying about power management than I should have.

One technology shout-out: GroupMe is a life saver when you’re traveling with a team to a conference. We had a total of 7 people from my office at the conference, and for coordinating meals / session seating / late night outings, it was perfect. We already use it in the office for some level of emergency coordination, but as a non-emergency tool it was beautiful. Highly recommended.

The conference was in Portland, giving me cause to visit Stumptown for the fourth time in under two years. Removed from my usual downtown hotel, being stuck near the convention center gave me more cause to explore by bus and MAX, and I finally ticked off most everything that was left on my Portland todo list. Visits were finally made to Pok Pok (that drinking vinegar! those wings!) and Screen Door (that fried chicken! that cake!), to Bunk Sandwiches (that cubano!) and Voodoo Donuts (that Portland Cream!). Salt and Straw (that ice cream!) ended up getting my business twice. As I joked on Twitter yesterday – Portland is why I’m fat. (Bring on THE WEEK OF SALAD AND WORKOUTS(tm).)

Having now done Portland to excess, I’ve put together a [Foursquare list](https://foursquare.com/remy/list/dans-portland) of all the places I’ve been and loved. It’s surprisingly complete: hotels, coffee shops, upscale restaurants, quick eats, bars, and green spaces all made it in. (It is actually be longer than my similarly themed NYC list.)

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Endured

Out Of Sorts

One of the things I’ve always loved about New York City is the balancing act between the routine and the unexpected. The smooth action of swiping a Metrocard, the jingle of the door at your local bodega, the timing of the lights at a familiar intersection – these mundane acts get balanced against the extraordinary circumstances and events that pop up somewhat regularly in the life of a New Yorker.

It is a balance, though – and too much of either can bring away at your sense of being. And for the last month, my personal scales have basically been knocked over, with uncommon circumstances eliminating much of the routine from my life for a solid month.

Hurricane Sandy came and went at the end of October – a stronger and more noticeable storm than Irene last year. Having lost power and water and being told it was going to be a week before there would be restoration, we nearly fled the area for shelter with Katie’s parents. But our instincts to give it one final night before fleeing turned out to be wise, as the power snapped back on at 3 AM, sparring us from trying to uproot on short notice.

While our building was spared, our neighborhood was not, with many of our friends being out a week. Worse, the PATH train – so vital to getting into and out of Manhattan – remained closed with no word for a solid week. When service was finally restored, the three stations I need service to were not on the list. While walking to a station with service is a tolerable hassle, a 10PM service termination has made regular evenings out impossible.

As the train started to get back into service, the Red Bulls post-season ended unceremoniously, giving up a goal with 5 minutes left to their biggest rival. This was not so much of a surprise – the team has fallen out of the playoffs at this point nearly every year. But having my well worked routine of sports journalism end abruptly was just one more pain point in a month that was already going south.

And then came the sickness. Two weeks to the day after the storm hit, I came down with a dry, painful cough that seemed like it would be easily shaken. It would not, of course, and I spent the majority of the week in bed, coughing every few minutes. In the second week it transformed into muscle aches and a night cough which deprived Katie of what little sleep she could get.

Monday will mark four weeks from the day Sandy hit, and it only now feels like the balance is being restored. The sickness is mostly cleared, enough that karaoke last night didn’t kill me. The PATH just announced our stations are opening on weekdays again, which is a start.

The routine is coming back, just in time for some big crazy events to keep life interesting. I can’t tell you how good it feels to have my regular life back.