Items of note for May 2011

We’re in San Francisco! Until mid–July. Sort of a mini–assignment for Lisa at her employer down in Mountain View. We’re living just around the corner from Moscone Convention Center at a complex on Folsom at Third. If you’re in the area drop me a line or @epc me on twitter.

To get here I drove cross–country from the 27th of April until the 7th of May, stopping in Erie, PA, Denham, IN, Chicago, IL, Omaha, NE, Cheyenne, WY, Salt Lake City, UT and finally Reno, NV. Absolutely nothing of interest happened on the drive except for the time I was pulled over near Brooklyn, Iowa (seriously). Not for speeding. Not for driving erratically. No, literally, because the officer could not clearly read the New York on my plates. He claimed that the state was obscured. I will concede that perhaps, just perhaps, the top eighth of an inch of the letters is partially obscured. But seriously, I think he just pulled me over because I had New York State plates on the car. Once he saw I was a schlumpy 40 something guy driving two dogs his entire demeanor, uh, relaxed. As though he were expecting someone else.

I’m heading to Broomfield, CO later this morning for the third Glue Conference. Believe it or not, it’s a nice little technology conference, tightly packed into two days. I feel that shorter conferences are better, no you don’t get to cover everything under the sun like SXSW, but you also get to actually learn something aside from the layout of a gigantic conference center.

This blog, website, whatever it is or was, is pretty much dead.

I’ve mostly lost interest in writing long–form online. No particularly specific reason though the feedback I’ve gotten over the years has certainly played a role. See, when I had comments enabled on this site I mostly got spam comments for Viagra or phentermine or Lucky Louie’s Discount House of Cars, very rarely did I get a comment of any actual content on a posting. But, what I did get was a lot of offline comments, sometimes months later, frequently about something I’d already forgotten that I’d written. And, I don’t know, that sort of crossed some sort of line for me.

Basically, I got tired of sharing one–way.

I don’t particularly care if someone reads this for example, but if you’re going to make a comment send me an email or @ me on twitter or comment here (granted: comments are permanently disabled at this point).

Another reason this blog is dead is…the software (Movable Type) is horribly broken, I can’t even rebuild the site entries older than about a year. At some point the templating software I use (Smarty) disappeared, so a number of pages spit back PHP errors. And…I mostly don’t care. I’ll fix it at some point, if only to strip out the Google AdSense ads, but for now it’s pretty much broken as designed.

I am writing a very…little…bit at epcostello.com using tumblr. I’m not in love with tumblr and think eventually I’ll revert to running something on my own site again, but it has the advantage of 1) working and 2) easily replaceable templates and 3) links to various social media tools.