February 06th, 2007
Come March 9th I’ll be on my way to Austin to partake in a few days of nerd revelry at South By Southwest. The main reason I’m going to to hang out with the guys from pMachine, (I’m a card-carrying member of Team Festering Carbuncle), but I’d love to meet as many people as I can.
If you’ll be heading down (I know Matt’s going to be there) then drop me a note so I can keep an eye out for you.
Continue reading “Going to SxSW 2007”. Posted in
Noteworthy, Personal with 5 comments 
January 25th, 2007
Well, its out in the open now! I'm moonlighting at pMachine. I'm like a real-life Bruce Willis... er... wait. My title is Senior Technical Support Specialist, which is really just a long way of saying that I'm going to work my butt off to keep ExpressionEngine as awesome as it already is. I join an amazing team of dedicated, smart, and hardworking people. Its an honour to count myself among them.
ExpressionEngine is the content management system that CodeIgniter is abstracted from. Its flat out awesome (but now I'm paid to say that ;))
Continue reading “Moonlighting for ExpressionEngine”. Posted in
ExpressionEngine, Noteworthy, Personal with 10 comments
January 22nd, 2007
Hmm… It seems some [censored!!!] thoughtless individual has decided to send their email entitled “placid dissident” to several hundred thousand of my closest friends. This is the second time I’ve been joe jobbed in a year. Lucky me.
Anyone who knows me knows that I’d be much more creative though. For example, the email said xvhehqjetpi yhmsc ombrnyw nypeki ijysf qwdyeq
. C’mon really? Honestly?!? At least steal a quote from today’s headlines or a passage out of some Gutenberg text or something like most of the “cool” spammers today. Goodness. And also, what’s with the attachment? “traffic light.png”. There’s a space in that name! Years of linux and web development have scared all the spaces out of my filenames long ago. And the piece de resistance?… they forged an Outlook Express sender header.
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2900.3028
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.3028
I think the funniest thing so far (even funnier then 2 dozen bounce messages) has been the 1 person who kindly took the time to write me back.
Victor, thanks. Your single sentence (take me off your list as***le
) is like poetry to me. You’re good people - and I’ll be sure to take you off my list right away.
Continue reading “I’ve been joe jobbed again”. Posted in
Noteworthy, Personal with 2 comments
January 01st, 2007
Happy new year to everyone! I’m testing out a new feature to the blog that lets me say when posts should become visible (I hadn’t bothered building that into this until now). I hope you’re looking forward to an exciting 2007!
Continue reading “Happy New Year!”. Posted in
Noteworthy, Personal with 3 comments
December 22nd, 2006
Ack, that scoundrel Matt has tagged me with the five things meme. Make me do more work will he!
- I'm an enviro-nerd. My degree is in Environmental Studies, I own a hybrid car, we compost nearly everything that will rot (ew, that didn't sound good) and secretly I get joy from only putting out a few wraps of plastic every other week. Also, it gives me an excuse to just keep re-using the same jokes over and over... I'm really just "recycling".
- I was spit on once by the singer Jewel during a yodel. Seriously, it was before she had gotten her first album out, and she was playing at a local beer pub in Toronto, "C'est What". Not typically my style of music, but she was great. One of the things she did was a song that involved her yodeling, and right in the middle of it, a big spit flys out and lands on my leg. There were only a few dozen people in the place... she stops the performance, says "I'm so sorry", then picks up her guitar and keeps going!
- I'm a cat person. You know dog-people and cat-people? I don't dislike dogs, I just like cats. C'mon, its hard not to respect any animal that arrogant.
- I'm 1 course away from finally getting my Master's of Education. I'm honestly sick of it. A good friend told me getting a post-grad degree while running a business would be a "triumph of tenacity over reason". He was right.
- I've only ever had 1 bottle of "Bud" in my life. Budweiser is among the nastiest stuff I've ever tasted. That said, I'm a self-admitted beer connoisseur snob. I'm hoping my wife gets a keg of St. Ambrose Blond for christmas as a "joint gift"... of course if she does we probably won't make it to New Years.
I'm tagging a few of the commenters on my blog! Yannick, James, John, Scott, and I'm using this opportunity to kick Ankur's butt to get a site up already.
Continue reading “Tagged by Matt with Five Things”. Posted in
Personal with 6 comments
November 30th, 2006
Let me reveal the Derek Allard Action Figure™ to the world! Yup, that's right, an action figure! Kung-fu grip and everything. Well, not really kung-fu grip. I guess that'll be kind of obvious when you look at the pictures below. Jennifer Dungan is a former student of mine who now earns her living as a freelance web designer/developer. Despite being busy coding up actionscript wizardry, she finds time for her hobbies. Now some people (not me I swear!) would say that this is an unusual hobby... but its hard not to admire the talent, skill and patience that goes into a project like this.
Check out the images to see what I mean! But first, let's get one thing absolutely clear... this is a Derek action figure, not a doll!
Continue reading “Derek Action Figure”. Posted in
Education, Personal with 14 comments
November 27th, 2006
Over the last little while, I've documented how this site is changing. I thought I had arrived at a pretty stable look, but if you are a keen observer, you may notice that the the hanging robot on the side of my site has changed. How do you start a blog post about a robotic chimp that's hanging out on your site? It's hard, but I wanted to chronicle the evolution of the hanging robot, and see if I couldn't find him a name.
This story starts with an innocent email from a good friend and colleague (and skilled artist), Cliff. He wrote ...love the new look, but hate that hanging robot on the side
.
Continue reading “Evolution of an Evil Robotic Chimp”. Posted in
Noteworthy, Personal with 5 comments
November 05th, 2006
Seriously. Recently I’ve had the "pleasure" of working with some pretty messed up projects. Basically, I've been called in to put out a fire caused by some work that another "web designer" had done. Here’s a newsflash, websites are not just single high-resolution jpegs inserted between <html> tags.
Continue reading “If all you know is Photoshop, you are NOT a web designer”. Posted in
Personal with 3 comments
October 24th, 2006
function cure_cancer()
{
$this->load->folding('code_igniter');
}
I’ve started a folding team for Code Igniter, and put up a quick team page.
Continue reading “Folding for Code Igniter”. Posted in
CodeIgniter, Personal with no comments
October 23rd, 2006
Those of you who know me know that I spend a lot of time teaching. I've even won a few pretty nice teaching awards for it (other award was at Seneca College). So I was very surprised to hear what my students really thought of me�
Now I have a complex!
Continue reading “Unusual fortune cookie”. Posted in
Education, Personal with no comments
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