cdcstudios.com | portfolio v8.1

It’s Christmas time and so also my birthday. It’s been a wild fun 32 years and if the last week is any idea, being a parent is the best present I could have gotten. I’ve got a almost week old son and couldn’t have asked for a better gift. In some ways he’s like a puppy (cute, vulnerable and badly in need of potty training) but really he’s the absolute cutest most adorable little guy I’ve ever seen (those of you not yet parents will totally agree with me when you get the chance to have a wee one of your own).

Anyhow to all of you, Merry Christmas, Happy Hogswatch and a very happy holidays. I’m giving myself the greatest gift to match the most amazing gift Zoe and I were given: Sleep. Everything material just doesn’t have any real draw to either of us so we’re instead going to socialize by keeping our eyes closed and continue changing diapers (why is it no one ever mentions how great that is?)

Sure the next 2-3 years will be messy but at the same time it also means you get the joy of seeing something so little grow eventually into a toddler then a kid and then an adult. Wow the next 18 years are going to be quite a ride. Somehow I don’t think my halcyon years of happy insanity will compare to almost every waking moment from here on out.

Peace be with all of you and yours and if I don’t have time to post between now and then (he fills a LOT of diapers lol) Happy New Year as well!!

So in honor of my move to Everett, my engagement to the greatest girl in the world and all other happy occasions I’ve decided to migrate this site away from the evil beasties at 1and1 (it was a good run guys but your control panel is a nasty behemoth of inefficiency and bad organization). I don’t expect to encounter too many problems but there may be an outage or two while I try and find my “absolute path’s I changed in the wordpress config to make everything work right on 1and1″ commentlist note. If that turns up (lost during the move) then I should be able to have everything working in no time flat. If for some reason I can’t I get to have the new site up a day or two while I hunt for changes in the umpteen trillion files and fix them. Yay!

This really reinforces the notion that keeping a online set of changes neatly organized is something I need to spend more time working on. Of course this is something I should have done but as they say hindsight is 20/20 and foresight is occasionally (in my case) horribly myopic.

Oh well add that to my list of belated new year’s resolutions.

In honor of my engagement here’s a promo code you can all use if you decide to sign up over at Dreamhost.

promocode: cdczoe

Enjoy and have some fun with a great host with a decent sense of humor, I’m off to spend the weekend spending more time with Zoe, eating some Sushi, going to Gasworks Park in Seattle and then checking out the Cascades drumcorps camp.

To all of you on the net, the very merriest wishes. As I sit next to the Christmas tree at my parent’s house in San Jose I’m quite thankful for what I have, the friends, the health I’m enjoying and every great thing in my life right now. It’s one thing to enjoy the hustle and bustle of the holidays and to take for granted the friends, family and comfort we have. I just hope that everyone remembers the people who don’t have that much to be thankful for and that you can give them the care and compassion they all deserve.

I don’t want to get too preachy but as the song goes “God forbid you ever had to walk a mile in his shoes ‘Cause then you really might know what it’s like to sing the blues”.
Hope everyone is snug and happy and enjoying themselves.

Peace in the New Year to you all

So I finally took the time to update a few things in the backend of the site as well as fix some stuff in the front end. My motivation came after I offered to buy a Flickr Pro account for whichever Cascade posts the best comment to one of my photos. I decided it would probably be good to finally fix the last few css issues I wanted to change.

Once that was done I decided to go ahead and add in the new “recent pics” section to the sidebar and then change up the order a bit. That turned into wanting to make the Meta list be a bit more verbose in terms of cutesy little icons I felt like making. Which in turn led to me adding in the Ultimate Tag Warrior plugin. It’s still a bit dodgy but I’ll soon have a related posts function added in and the archives page tag cloud and the flickr tag cloud will be integrated into the archives page allowing searching any file, story, or content on the site. That brings to a near close everything I plan on changing markupwise in the short term future.

Next week/month I’ll be optimizing the theme files in preparation to add in the stylesheet swapper as well as to throw in a simple header swap before really knuckling down on that aforementioned (many moons ago; the very first post here in fact) ‘Sonata’ theme. I’ve got a ton of ideas but no spare time to work on them. Regardless, expect to see a lot more in the way of integration, optimization and beautification all while keeping everything functional and most importantly, usable.

I leave tomorrow for the holidays for a week but lots of new stuff in the New Year, Happy Holidays to you all and see you post-Christmas most likely.