Posts tagged life
Posts tagged life
Wow, it’s been almost a year since I’ve updated my blog. I wish I could say that it was due to me not having anything to say, but that wouldn’t be true. Sometimes life decides to shake things up a bit, and that’s exactly what happened to me last May. As a result of this shake-up I was forced to alter my priorities quite a bit so that I could keep a proper life balance. During the next few months I learned an awful lot about previously unknown areas of life, as well as myself.
Every year during the first week of December I look back at my goals for the year and see how I did. I also start looking toward the year ahead and decide on what I’d like to accomplish. What I found this time around was that I hadn’t accomplished anything that I had set out to do during the year. This really bothered me, and at first I wrote it off to the rough year. After thinking about it a bit more though I realized something—I had incorrectly altered my priorities back in May. I had sacrificed a lot of little things that I really enjoyed (blogging, working on side-projects, personal time, etc.) in order to get my life back in balance, instead of just cutting the amount of time I was spending at work. But why?
For the longest time I’ve been a border-line workaholic. It was not uncommon for me to work eight to ten hours a day, seven days a week. In years past though, I did this because I really loved my job, and even though I worked a lot, I was still able to find time for all the other fun things in life. Unfortunately my work situation had changed to where I was no longer having fun, and I was also unable to scale back due to sheer number of responsibilities that I had accumulated over the years. I decided that a change was in order.
After being with this company for almost six years, I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried about leaving. My fears were soon put to rest though, after my search began. For some reason things really fell perfectly in place and I just knew I had made the right decision. Within a day I had an interview scheduled, and within ten days I had completed two interviews and accepted a position with one of the best companies to work for in Denver. The really beautiful thing was that I was going to be working full-time with Ruby.
So, how has my life improved? Well, for starters I’ve only been working eight hours a day, and I’ve had six free weekends in a row to do whatever I wanted. I’ve taken the last six weeks to decompress and enjoy life more, and now I’m really looking forward to completing all of my goals from last year as well a couple new ones for this year. In the short-term expect a refresh of all of my existing projects as well as a transition of the code bases to GitHub. I’ll also probably move my blog off of my existing setup (which is still hosted on my personal server sitting in my old company’s rack) to something that is hardware independent and better fits my blogging style. I’ve been using Tumblr for the past couple months, and I’m quite liking it.
2008, here I come!
I wanted to post a quick note to let people know that a port of the Scribbish theme for Mephisto has been posted. I’m currently using a personalized version of the theme on my site, and I may be a bit biased here, but I think it’s one of the better themes currently available.
The release of this port began a while ago when I first considered moving my site from Typo to Mephisto. I didn’t really want to lose the look that I had recently switched to, so I set out looking into what all would be involved in porting the theme. It took me a little time to learn the ins and outs of the Liquid syntax (that and a few updates to Mephisto’s Liquid API helped make the theme even better), but after re-launching my site a couple weeks ago I thought it would be nice if the theme was available for all Mephisto users. I contacted Jeff and asked him if he was interested in posting the port on his site. He was more that willing to oblige, and quickly setup a SVN branch for me to hack on. After a few uploads and some refinements by him, we had something we consider ready for release.
You can learn more about Scribbish from the product page, or download the zip file and upload it to your Mephisto install.
If you’re reading this article, then it means the DNS entries have successfully propigated through the Interwebs and you are pointed at my new home. For the last two months I’ve been working to move my domain away from TextDrive’s shared hosting service to something that I actually own and maintain. For those of you that might be interested, here are the geeky details:
There will undoubtedly be some old links that are broken, but the new redirection support in Mephisto will account for at least 90% of them. If you do find an old link that’s broken, please send an email to delynn [at] gmail.com and let me know about them. I’m still in the process of moving my code to a new permanent home, so if you are looking for ActsAsDropdown or Userstamp please be patient. I’ll be posting updates about the future and locations of those projects shortly.
Update: The repository urls have been updated on the project pages. See http://delynnberry.com/2006/10/27/project-repositories for more information on the changes that were made.
It’s a sad thing when it’s been so long since your last post that even NetNewsWire thinks you’ve fallen off the face of the blogosphere.
Well, I just wanted to post something here to let the 5 of you that actually do read this blog know that I am still alive. Believe it or not, I’ve actually been doing a lot of work behind the scenes upgrading my site and server situation, as well as some of my code projects.
With this post I’m actually making one these change active. I recently signed up for a FeedBurner account, so I highly recommend that everyone switch to using their url instead of the generic Typo feed urls. For those wanting to just do a copy and paste via their feed reader the new url is: http://feeds.feedburner.com/delynnberry.
In the coming days I hope to finish with the other updates and get them live. Sorry again for being out of communication for so long.
I gave my presentation last night to the DeRailed group. There were fifteen or so people who attended and I thought the meeting went really well. I’ve gone ahead and posted my presentation for your viewing pleasure.
Next month should be another good meeting, so be sure to attend. Now we just have to hope we won’t get bumped!
This morning I opened up my GMail account and was greated by an email notifying me that I was one of the first 10,000 contestants to complete all 24 of the quest’s puzzles, and I was now registered for a chance to participate in the final challenge.
I started the quest on the first day it was available, and have had a really fun time with all the different puzzles. I’ve never had any realistic aspirations of winning the grand prize, but I most certainly did want to be one of the final 10,000. Making the final challenge means that I get to see this thing all the way to the end, and who knows, if I pool all my resources, I will probably have a realistic chance at the grand prize too!
I’ll be sure to update this blog with the details of the final challenge as I get them. Right now, I’m waiting for the email notification letting me know that my replica cryptex has shipped.
I’ll be doing a presentation next Monday at the monthly DeRailed meetup. The topic of my presentation will be AJAX and RJS support in Rails.
Justin Mecham will also be giving a presentation on Rails deployment using Capistrano (which I’m extremely interested in since I haven’t gotten the chance to use it yet).
Last month there were about 20 people who attended. It’s a pretty diverse group, with Rails skills ranging from beginner to advanced (along with PHP and Java developers). If you are looking to meet great people who are interested in web development, this is an excellent place to find them. So, if you are near the downtown Tattered Cover on Monday around 6:30, stop by and say hello.
Thanks to a del.icio.us post by Ben I became familiar with an old Typo theme called Scribbish. After seeing it, I quickly downloaded the theme and installed on my weblog.
I don’t really know how I missed this theme from the Typogarden theme contest, but man is it nice! I made a couple of minor changes (like moving the sidebar to the right), but I really like how must faster the whole site feels. I’ll probably be changing a few other things a bit later, but for now I’m happy.
Over the course of this past year I have come to the realization that if I really want to accomplish some of the professional goals I have for myself I need to do a better job expanding my social network and make my name more visible in the social circles that will help me reach my goals. With the new year approaching, I have created a list of items that I need to focus on to ensure that at the end of 2006 I feel like I have improved myself.
The first big item on my list is to get a personal website that will allow me to post my thoughts and comments on life and my industry as well as host my portfolio and personal projects. I have started a weblog several times in the past, but have never kept it up for more than a couple of months. This time, however, I am determined to keep it going. Weblogs are all the rage these days aren’t they? The fact that Josh has a blog should be enough social peer pressure to ensure that I keep it up!
So, in the next couple of days, be on the lookout for some end of the year posts as well as some introductions of projects that I have been working on recently in anticipation of this new personal promotion push.
