My Apprenticeship - Tuesday, July 27, 2004

This summer I'm revisiting my short apprenticeship at Object Mentor. I'll be posting commentary on all my posts from the summer of 2004 exactly 5 years later to the day.

Tuesday 7-27-04

Today I worked on cleaning up Word Press so that it looked nicer and behaved better. Alex King was nice enough to hold a contest for the best Word Press skins and publish the results here:

www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/wordpress/styles.php

For now, 'But Uncle Bob,' is using the 'Dark Fire' skin. I also spent a fair amount of the day figuring out the various features of the program so that I can teach Micah when he comes back. Once you get it working (and, if the server has already been set up for you, that is not too hard) WP is a nifty little program. Tomorrow I think I'm going to wipe the Linux box, reinstall the OS, and put WP back up because the first install was so crazy that I'm not completely sure I can repeat it without wasting a whole bunch of Micah's time (Micah's off in Philadelphia this week coaching some company called Primavera) .

Somewhere in the middle of all this, it has occurred to me that there is a fair amount of irony involved in blogging about trying to set up blogging software. But the bigger question is: now that I know how to get WP up and running will this blog become a Word Press blog?

Probably not.

Not that I hate the program, but I'm not interested in its advantages. Right now I type my post in MS Word, then do a little cutting and pasting via TextPad, and upload with an FTP or Web-based file manager. Upgrading to Word Press would allow people to post comments, or let me set up a list of users who are allowed to post, but I don't much care about that. If somebody wants to comment they can email me. Also, I'm not sure about how long this blog will last after August 18th (the last day of XPAU and my last official day with OM). After that I'll either have found a new job in software development (Interested in hiring me? Send an email and we'll talk.) or I'll be back teaching physics to teenagers.

David's Advanced Object Oriented Design class is going well this week -- one of his students speaks Portuguese and so does David! What are the odds? It's a worldly class, other class members are from Italy and India. There was a little trouble the first day when they turned up their noses at the complementary Crispy Cream donuts. One student even when so far as to pejoratively call Crispy Cream's 'So very American.' Look, you can take shots at our foreign policy, but insulting our donuts is asking for trouble.

Hostilities, thankfully, were avoided.

What? Still talking about WordPress? Boring.

It's funny that I'm talking about entering the blogging world while a fair amount of my colleges have abandoned serious blogging for Twitter. In my quest to be continually 2 years behind the times I'll be announcing my Twitter mash-up website soon. Via stone tablet.

But seriously folks, I am indeed on the Twitter where I am known as jakescruggs. I recently spent a bunch of time tweeting about the movie 'Bolt.' Seemed like a good idea at the time.

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