cdcstudios.com | portfolio v8.1

So far so good. We’re doing an alright job of adjusting to life with 2 boys. Many of you are probably thinking “pshaw, how hard can two boys be”. To you I say, you’re either not parents or else you’ve forgotten the difficulties of mixing newborns with big boys:

• Diaper changes with a newborn can quickly turn into a chain reaction (you’re midway through the change when they poop again).
• 15 month old boys demand far greater attention because they are constantly trying to give hugs, toys and food to the newborn.
• Sleep schedules being completely alien to anything remotely normal.

Due to our own bad planning (with the greatest of intentions of course) I am now sleeping on the queen size bed in our oldest’s room (still really not used to saying “our oldest”), while the wife is sleeping in the big comfy king in our room. It wasn’t the original plan but it tends to keep us both a little more on the sane side. I do have to say that it’s nice going to bed before 10pm again. I’d forgotten how well rested you can feel even when you wake up at 8am on a Sunday.

Next weekend ought to be interesting since we’re taking the boys to the tricities for a week (the wife will be staying there too) so I can clean the house, get the car fixed (there was some damage to it Thursday when I had to choose between hitting a teen or a wall, obviously I picked the wall) and then get some work done on a few projects I have in my head like:

• Portlanddreams.com – Yeah it’s high time I got the work I have completed uploaded and prepped for the rest of the dev team to finish up in time for the rolling beta in 2 weeks.
• The tech tutorial/widget/plugin sharing site I have yet to name – I don’t want to spoil things with this one yet but suffice to say I think it’ll be fun.
• WP-Ubercomments – The widget I told Rick Turoczy I’d write for him
• Finally migrate from my aging unstable p4 to the shiny quad core sitting gathering dust in my living room
• Rearrange some things and clean up my workspace at home to provide a better more productive environment
• Continue tweaking this site as well as getting a little bit of work done on the new theme I’m considering deploying

Oh sorry for not posting new pictures. Some asshat stole my Mother In Law’s camera before she had a chance to get the pictures uploaded. There will be a bunch coming soon.

Sometime in the next two weeks I’ll also have posts up on:

• Part two of my post on Thunderbird
• A review and getting started guide for Tiny Tiny RSS
• A huge collection of sprays for Team Fortress 2 (and other Steam games)

In closing I’d just like to say congrats to Demonoid.com to their reopening as a torrent site. A lot of us missed you guys. Also congrats to Dawn Foster for launching Portland is Awesome!

Welcome to a tiny painful jaunt through the modern corporate credit rating easy system of NO! Hyperbole and general humor aside AT&T has some intelligent folks behind the scenes but with the exception of the sales people who aren’t management I haven’t dealt with them yet.

So 8 years ago I had service through AT&T, my contract was almost up and I was about to start a job working for Sprint. One of my last deeds as a “loyal” AT&T wireless customer was to refer my parents. At the time they were offering $50 per line for referral activations. This would have brought my account down to the point to pay off the remainder of my contract would have been under $50 nice right? Well too bad for me since AT&T never actually gave me the referral bonus. I was taught by my wise and cynical mother when it comes to corporations to NEVER throw money at a problem so I told AT&T until they fixed the issue I wasn’t paying them anymore or using the service either. Well the kind folks at AT&T customer service said no problem it would only take a few days to resolve the issue.

Let’s fast forward now to last July when I bought my iPhone. I was as excited and giddy as a young schoolgirl (pay attention and get the thoughts of those plaid skirts out of your head) as I plugged my iPhone into my Macbook Pro and awaited the iTunes activation. I entered in my SSN and omg! declined. What the hell I thought and called AT&T to find out why. Apparently I owed them over $400.00 for some reason. Wanting to learn more I got a copy of my credit report and discovered not one but two separate (yet identical) debts on my credit report. It seems that AT&T charged me a full $300.00 disconnection fee plus money owed with interest.

At this point I called AT&T back and asked them to look into it (I also notified the credit bureau of the double listing and they said it was verified that I owed both companies? (wth??)). Hilariously enough I was told that the records from that far back probably don’t exist so there is no way to honestly resolve the issue with full information.

Fast forward to this year when I tried to move from a gophone account with my iPhone (yeah I had to get a pay as you go plan which is really code for “gouge the people with bad credit plan which doesn’t actually improve their credit while being gouged” which is a mouthful and makes perfect sense as to why they shortened it), anyways I wanted to add Zoe (my wife) to my plan and make it a contracted family plan (which means her buying a phone and them earning more money off of us both on a contract since I bought my iPhone at an Apple store.

DECLINED! (or we could pay $400 per line deposit). The gentleman I spoke to at the AT&T store said no problem we can get the deposit waived. This sounded excellent. So thus began the dreaded 6 hours at the store. Everyone there was fairly helpful except the asst. manager on duty refused 2 hours worth of requests for a chair for the aforementioned wife (who is 7 months pregnant).

This same assistant manager also made a habit of frequently interrupting and even better ignoring politely worded questions. Amazingly (especially to the 5 or 6 customers who saw my treatment) I managed to keep a clear calm head until the bitter end when I did drop a harsh word the last time he interrupted me. I was trying to ask for his manager’s number as well as the district manager’s number to complain about him and he interrupted to tell me “he was done helping me”. I said continued interruption of a paying customer who wants to give the company more money is a really douchebag thing to do. At this point the elderly security guard told my wife and I to leave since we were hurting the feelings of the staff. At this point 2 of the staff members volunteered to go on record that my family was ill treated by the asst. manager.

Fast forward to me calling customer service the next day to make a complaint. The customer service rep took my complaint and said that behavior wasn’t tolerated and then offered to call another store saying “it’s an easy situation to override a deposit and give a waiver”. I said sure and he contacted the downtown Portland branch. The salesperson and he talked for about 5 minutes and then I was warm transferred to the salesperson and he got my email, mobile number and name and said he’d get back to me within 3 days. Excellent I thought finally some resolution.

3 days later I received an email from this salesperson letting me know that the PacNW operations dept said no. At the bottom of the email (which also contained the email to and from the operations center I noticed:

• My full legal name
• My mobile number
• My home address
• My internal customer id number
• MY SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER

I immediately called the store and asked for a manager was told “none were on duty” and so called customer service who said that there was no way to take a complaint about email.

So I searched the consumerist.org website until I found the CEO’s office and called. The person who answered the phone put my call through to an executive care specialist who could barely speak english (no accent just not that coherent in his speech patterns) who told me “yes that’s against policy but there’s not anything we can do besides say we’re sorry”. Sorry? I’d like to buy a home soon and with the possibility that my SSN was sent in clear text and to who knows how many departments and I have no way of knowing who has my SSN now? For the record I gave the sales guy my email over the phone with no one ever verifying my identity. So apparently you can get SSN’s from AT&T by simply social engineering them now. Hooray for security.

To think this all started with my simpleminded idea that I’d be able to sign up to give more money to the corporation. It’s sad that AT&T is the only company in the US able to offer the iPhone. The worst part is I paid full price for the iPhone. Not subsidized by Apple or ATT like most other phones are. If AT&T had paid for part of the phone then I’d see it from their side but asking me to make a deposit almost equal to the cost of the phone is ludicrous.

I’m not a greedy person I just want to be able to talk to my wife regularly without having to pay a ton for the privilege. At this point however I do have some specific terms that AT&T can fulfill to keep me as a customer and to make right on a horrible run of bad customer service. I just want the plan I originally wanted, no contract, 6 months free (for the 48 hours plus invested that seems fair) and for risking my SSN an upgrade to a 16gb iPhone. All told it’s vastly less then the courts have awarded other people who’s SSNs have been released by corporations.

I was just featured on Portland On Fire! For those not in the know, Portland on Fire is a site started January 1st that each day showcases a quick profile of a Portlander. Totally free and refreshingly open. There’s quite a few awesome people on there already (especially me…erm yeah). Anyhow if you’re a Portlander you should head over and register to participate.

The man behind the site is Raven Zachary, who I just met at my first ever barcamp meetup. I’d always meant to get “into” the whole being proactive about how I feel about technology and the entire FOSS movement but never had the right mix of desire to do so and actual availability. Overall I’m totally thrilled I got to go and am really looking forward to far more interaction with the Portland Techie community. This city is so friendly and culturally diverse and the tech community here is phenomenal so it’s an amazing mix to me.

In other news you may have noticed that the site is back to looking like it did. Well this is hopefully only temporary since I just noticed all of my plugin posts have gone poof (those will be coming back shortly) due to a database issue. I’m also experiencing a few problems with a rogue htaccess script setting a few pages to show directory structure (not that I can actually find the damn htaccess. I wiped all of them by hand which makes me think the issue lies with something on the server. If only there was a resultant set of htaccess policies tool I could use.

Well I’ll get going now but this has been a great week and will hopefully keep going to make a great year :D

Oh one last thing my son is apparently a Sithlord. Don’t believe me? Here’s proof:

So here I am in the dawning of yet another new chapter in my life. Once again cutting loose the bonds of employment in a small town a million miles from where my heart lies. While those words may draw you towards a conclusion it’s merely an overly flowery way of saying I’m returning to the land of my roots (not Ireland, but maybe eventually). No in my overly rambling wordy way I’m heading back to Portland. The land of roses, the city of bridges that made me who I am today.

While I’m nowhere close to perfect I think that the heady combination of 1990′s life, a few certain people (more on the “key individuals” later in this post) and a healthy embracing of the positive side of the legendary Chinese proverb “May you have an interesting life“) I came out pretty good. Although I tend to think a lifetime veracity for erring on the side of “oops that probably wasn’t the best thing I could have done” decision making coupled with a surprisingly strong sense of inner reflection and a moderate amount of regret is really the nuts and bolts at the heart of the overall “me-ness” that is who I am today. My only regret is that the number of pictures I have of these people being a part of my life is around 3 or 4 pics. I wish I had more than a heartful of memories for every one of them.

My priorities in life are currently being the best dad I can be no matter what, getting a better paying job and trying to be a good husband.

So now that we’re all caught up on my life let’s talk about a few of the folks who shaped me into me (not including parents, just people who chose to be my friend or teacher or more. These are the people that really drove me to be a better person inside and outside). I’m going to (out of respect to my friends leave this as opaque as I can via vague statements and using first initial only).

• A:

  Ok this one I’ll cheat and reveal who it is. Alexandr, spud, and the best word of all Son. I love you more every day. You make my heart swell with pride just thinking about you, your smile and hell half the time I talk, think or even look at you I tear up. You are the most amazing person the whole world has ever seen. Thank you so much for being my son. You’re the greatest.

• J:

  Thanks a million for everything in the past present and future. Whether it was roadtripping, oddball experiences or the occasional petty crime we always faced things with humor and above all irreverence. Who says you have to keep everything serious. Life is short.

• K:

  You taught me to recognize my mistakes but due to my inherent stubborn streak I waited far too long and at the time was too distracted to tell you what I thought of one of your choices.

• K2:

  You’ve been there through thick and thin and thick and thin. Occasionally giving me advice and occasionally taking advice. No matter what screwed up thing I did (your exg/f’s birthday party is one example..sorry) you were always there for me.

• L:

  Not really sure where to start with this one. I remember talking with W and J down at Pioneer Square on a warm May morning when I looked down the road and a football field away striding towards us walked the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. For those that know me I’m a very chatty person (although my writing style is fairly close to the way I talk) and I was struck totally silent by the person I saw. I’d say there was music and dancing and Angels playing from the Heavens but I didn’t and would not have noticed any of it, so struck was I by you. Turns out you and W knew each other and thereafter followed my getting to know you and vice versa. Over the next few years off and on you came in and out of my life and all that time I knew on some deeply rooted visceral level that I had more powerful feelings than I’d ever had for anyone then and now. It’s odd saying it finally but feels much better having gotten it out.

  To be honest I’ve always been the kind of person that will do what I can to make people happy even going so far as to stay in a relationship well after the expiration date. I don’t like hurting people and have had trouble in the past with lying and/or cheating. I know that was an immaturity I had and on some level couldn’t admit to myself or to you how much meeting you impacted me. By the time I finally realized it, it was too late.

  The really amusing part about this is that anytime I’ve destroyed a relationship (of which there have been far too many) I always wondered why. All of my friends and I do mean all of my friends (and even my mom oddly enough since I’d never admitted to her how I felt about you) would always say “oh is it so and so” and I never made the connection (yeah so I’m smart in the science and technical aspects but suck at the love). Oddly enough in my messed up life amongst the memories of you I know that the only truly, honest and noble selfless thing I’ve ever done in my life was for you. I don’t know if I ever told you the story or not but let’s just say that it was easily the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life.

  Suffice it to say I’m in a place now where if everything had gone “perfectly” and “according to some ineffable plan” then I’d be able to tell you now how I feel and the angels would play from the Heavens and the sun would shine and life would be fine if we all si…er I’m digressing and tangenting all over the place here. anyhow if there was some sort of cosmic purpose to life it would mean something how I feel about you. But due to those life choices (and I’m not saying they didn’t work out well enough) I can’t.

  At least I’m cognizant of the way I felt/feel and am truly being honest about it. There is so much more I can’t really put into words right now. Also if any of you know me then you obviously already know exactly who this person is and some of you probably think I’m an issue laden idiot that should have gotten over this years ago. I’ve tried to bury it to no good effect. I finally after far too many years really understand myself, life and all importantly my heart.

• Zoe:

  (Ok cheating again on this one)You rock. I met you at the end of a very dark period of my life and you accepted me for me. While we both don’t come without baggage you have shared your heart, given me faith and responsibility in whole new ways and that’s amazing to see. I get to share the joy of parenting with you and also this grand adventure of life. While it may seem like I don’t care about you enough in light of the person listed previously to you. I do love you and while some people might have issue competing with them, I’m with you now and will be as long as you’ll have me. Thank you so much for in many ways saving my life (not the breathing side of life but the joyous noise inducing fun called life! I started to live again when I met you and in some ways all of this gushing forth of wordiness I’m doing with this post is due in no small part to you.

Alrighty that was a fun romp and is by no means a full listing of every last person who impacted me. I’ve got enough folks left to get at least 2 more posts out and I will. Plus the places and times that affected me most are yet to come. In closing I’d like to finish off with a few lines from a poem I read today that is both beautiful and relevant to anyone out there with a wife, a friend, a girlfriend, a lover or someone that one moment or a string of moments were shared, embraced and experienced in ways both powerful and true and firmly rooted in the soul now and forever.

But to see her was to love her,
Love but her, and love forever.
Had we never lov’d sae kindly,
Had we never lov’d sae blindly,
Never met–or never parted–
We had ne’er been brokenhearted.

For Nature made her what she is,
And never made another.

Robert Burns, from Ae Fond Kiss

*dedicated to the person who first introduced me to real true love at a time I was immature and too cowardly to tell her how I felt and now these 13 years later when I finally can admit it to myself, it is all but too late. Happy Birthday and thanks for teaching me to play piano a little bit.

This hits close to home and really pisses me off. My sister Ariel used to be a grant writer for Freegeek and there is no end to the amount of good they do in the area.

Free Geek, Portland’s groovy technology non-profit, sustained its most major break in to date earlier this week. The majority of the items stolen were laptops, a few hard drives, and LCD screens. While their laptop program is becoming a major source of income for them, it also is a great source of needed hardware for local non-profits. This income is now gone, and local do-gooders will have to go without their free source of laptops for a few months.

So they’re making a call out to the community to help stop these thieves and prevent this from happening again. If you’re offered a laptop with Ubuntu Linux installed on it in the next couple months, give Freegeek a call. (503)232-9350

Used LCD screens, while harder to pin down as originating at Free Geek, might raise an eyebrow as well.

For more info write:

info@freegeek.org

So Zoe had been getting frustrated with the inability to use plugins on wordpress.com and asked me to set her up a blog here locally. We went through 20 or 30 themes before finding a few she liked. Finding something with the right mixture of clean layout and good color scheme is far easier to figure out with a client then it is with a significant other. Clients occasionally will trust the opinion of the expert. Significant other’s though, want it their way or there will be difficulties.

Anyways I digress. Using the huge number of themes auto installed by Dreamhost‘s One-click Install as a starting point we scoured a few WordPress theme sites until we could decide on the right style.

I’d taken the liberty of making up a new banner for her myspace profile that was a much smaller version of what we wanted for the header image and also underscored our relocation to the greener side of the mountains. This is a much happier place for us both even with the cold and rain Portland’s had the last week and I think the new look shows it:

Once that was finished it let us pick a theme called ‘Fast-Track‘ then changed enough of it to suit her green fixations as well as make a few adjustments so it plays nice with the plugins she needed. After that I exported her WordPress.com posts/comments etc and popped them into the site automagically created by Dreamhost. Happiness in just under 4 hours.

Here’s the link to check it out:Zoe’s Rants & Randomness

All in all it was a pleasant way to spend the evening. Let us know what you think.

So it’s been quite a while since I’ve made/posted any new wallpapers. Now that I’m back in Portland I’m going to try and work on fixing that by throwing up a wallpaper every few weeks.

This wallpaper is just a quicky I threw together after watching “Drugs are Like that” on archive.org. Very enjoyable and surprisingly hilarious film that is chock full of stuff I’m tempted to have fun with in a myriad number of different projects. This desktop is based on a screencap from about halfway into the video.

I’ve got 4-5 really old wallpapers I’m in the midst of cleaning up to add on the site, but those will have to wait awhile since I’m getting ready to teardown/rebuild/redesign the entire site. More on that later in the month though. Speaking of which I just now really realized this version of the site is a little over a year old. Hooray for wordpress, blogging and php!

Click here for this wallpaper (or any of the others I’ve made)