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10 Years

Photo by Rob J. Brooks, reused under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

My blog is ten years old today. (Today also roughly marks me having been online for half my life.) I have a lot of navelgazing to do in the body of this post, but to sum it up – if you’re reading this, thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

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Introducing: Couplandish

There are thirty-four days until the US release of Douglas Coupland‘s latest novel, Generation A.

One of my greatest pleasures is finding intersections in aspects of my life. Before he departed the NYC area, it became apparent that my (then-)coworker Zach Szukala shared a love of Coupland’s books, and a particular love for the large-type Helvetica (always Helvetica!) aphorisms they would contain. His first novel, Generation X, embedded these every few pages in the margins, with pearls of wisdom like “YOU MUST CHOOSE BETWEEN PAIN OR DRUDGERY”. His recent attempt to recapture the lightning-in-a-bottle that Microserfs had, J-Pod, featured page after page of sentence in this style that bordered on hypnotic, if not subliminal.

After enough exposure to these books, things throughout your life begin to look…Couplandish. Spotting one of these bits can be difficult to the untrained senses: it’s a certain ratio of detachment, nostalgia, history, helplessness, and wordplay. In time, they begin to jump out at you from signs and announcements on loudspeakers.

For months, Zach and I would jokingly speak Couplandish – inventing (sometimes cribbing) phrases and snippets that we felt wouldn’t feel out of place in one of these novels we loved so much. Back in June, we started writing them down. A small amount of programming provided mid-90’s web color clashes against random large-type Helvetica (always Helvetica!) selections from the library, and Couplandish was born as a Web 1.0 application.

I realize single-serving sites are out of style now, but if you’ve ever read a Douglas Coupland book, I hope this will give you a smile.
(This is the second of two side projects that I had intended to announce. A third is now in development.)

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Reflected

Cloudy Downtime Music

I’ve been informed by the vengeful gods of Victoly LLC, my beloved hosting company, that we are joining the future and moving to a new colo host that will thrust my websites high into the atmosphere and place my web applications into the cloud.

I mention this not because it’s particularly interesting, but because it will require a coordinated downtime across all five of my web offerings.

Luckily for you, there’s plenty of groundwork to be done first. I’ll provide further details when the downtime draws nearer.