Archives for July 2009
the why phone
28 July 2009 | Uncategorized | No Responses
My contract with T-mobile finally ended its two-year run last month. I was really debating what my next phone purchase would be and ultimately ended up going with the iPhone. I know, big surprise here. I first contemplated getting a “smart phone” at all, and just roll with one of those freebies. In this case I would never have to worry about breaking the thing or losing it. Then the idea of not having a smart phone for the next two years would put me way behind in the technology world, I thought what the hell.
Then the decision came down to which phone to get. As far as I’m concerned, a BlackBerry is out of the question. I’m not paying an extra ten buck a month for special coverage and the interface sucks. So it was then down to the Palm Pre, the T-mobile G1, and the iPhone. To make a long story short, I ended up going with the iPhone. I got video, a camera, an ipod and a phone in my pocket now.
The video isn’t bad. I suppose I don’t really have anything to compare it too. I was actually going to purchase a Flip at one point in time, but that’n not necessary now.
The camera works pretty well. I’m no photographer, but it seems you need to have good light and hold the camera steady. If you do that, it takes good pictures. Here is one of Dave in which Steve said he looks mentally handicap. What do you think?
All in all, I think I made a good decision. My only complaint is the service that comes along with it. I don’t have 3G service in Kalamazoo, so that’s fairly pointless. I have also heard horror stories about At&T. I don’t know why that company can’t get its act together. And finally, I think it totally sucks that you can’t get insurance on the phone. Only Apple Care. In which I still need to buy another phone at $200 if I want to replace it. The contract for re-upping is a whole other ball of fun. I won’t get into now.
Nothing’s perfect I guess. All I know is that as lame as it looks, I am totally addicted to fligh control.
branding, uhhh right
22 July 2009 | Uncategorized | No Responses
So the idea of officially changing the domain name of this site has been thrown around in my head for the last few months. I own joefearnley.com and was thinking about making some sort of personal site (landing page if you will) that directs the user to my different locations on the internet. Social networks, blog, resume, etc… But I wanted to keep it as simple as possible. So for now, I will keep my blog here and you can see what I’m all about on my about page. That’s what they’re there for, right?
My original idea was to purchase a domain like jf.com or jf.org. Yeah, still trying to keep it simple. The one reason I never wanted to use joefearnley.com was because no one could ever spell my last name correctly. Its not that complicated, but you’d be surprised what runs through some people’s minds. So long story short, I ended up going with joef.org. I think it had a good branding, but what the hell do I know? I went to a conference once and the guy giving a talk on personal branding’s name was jeff blankenschmidt (or something to that effect). I think if people can remember amazon, they can remember fearnley.
So I finally made up my mind and joef.org is out and joefearnley.com is in. But I had the problem with permalinks on the internet. I’m sure there’s not many, but maybe a few on myspace and twitter. Being that I am, for the most part, a retard when it comes to regex and I didn’t want to take the time to see what my mod_rewrite options were on blue host. I figured writing a php script would take a couple of minutes. And it did.
So here is my first php tech tip (with syntax highlighting included thanks to this guy). Put this in your index.php file and if you had the same permalink structure as your last wordpress blog, you should be good to go:
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 | <?php $jf_url = "http://joefearnley.com"; header("location: " . $jf_url . $_SERVER["REQUEST_URI"]); exit(); ?> |
sunday social #41 – northern michigan 2.0
15 July 2009 | Uncategorized | No Responses
So this past weekend we made another trek up to Bear Lake for a long weekend of fun, sun, and maybe a parade. This weekend was quite unique because it was Bear Lake Days which is apparently their equivalent of Muskegon’s summer celebration. According to Adam they don’t light off fireworks on the forth of July and save them for saturday of Bear Lake Days. Unfortunately, after a long day of boozing it up on the boat, my partners in crime were busy taking naps and we missed half of the parade. But I didn’t walk away empty handed. I scored enough candy to make, if eaten, a grown man sick. Being at the end of the parade was the keep to making this all happen. Then fireworks ensued at dusk.
On Friday night, before heading up north, we attended a wedding. Rachel’s cousin got married. No alcohol was served and they had line dancing as the main event. These two factors combined with Rachel being completely uncomfortable at all family gatherings made the whole thing boring as shit. Yet to see two people in love and so happy on a day like that somewhat made up for it. Her other cousin is getting married in two weekends. This will include a new set of characters that will ultimately make for a great time. I plan on live blogging that one.
So the weekend winded down with the last night heading out to Rosie’s for pizza. They had a jukebox, so we of course rocked it. Did you know the mainstream jukeboxes now have Bruce Springsteen on tap? He must of worked something out with the records label because this was a first. And I know everyone’s going to be all “Dude, they have Bruce on the jukebox!” and I will have to tell them no they do not. At least at the bars I frequent. Well, until now. So we got that going for us, which is nice.
death of the tag cloud
9 July 2009 | Uncategorized | No Responses
I recently have been changing a few things with the design of this site. Not much, added a real footer, increased the font size and updated (and still updating) the pages. I also cleaned up the plugins section, removing the ones I no longer use. I gave prototype the boot and moved all of the javascript to jQuery. Finally, I officially named the theme and created a repository for it.
When attempting to update the archive page (which still certainly needs work), I realized how silly the tag cloud on here is is. When I first saw these things starting to pop up on the internet, I didn’t completely understand the idea of tagging. When I finally grasped the concept, the tag cloud seemed like a neat idea. Basically just a visualization of the categories on your blog. Five years later (and I’ve only had one for a couple of years) when they all begin to look the same, its just not as appealing. I suppose on a site that no one reads and unable to think of a creative way of making one, it certainly shouldn’t be there.
So when I realized I haven’t tagged any blog entries in the last six months, I decided to give it the axe. Maybe next time big guy.
sunday social #40 – another year down
5 July 2009 | sunday social | No Responses
This past thursday I turned 27 years old. Part of me feels like life is flying right by. Other parts of me still feel like I’m only 18. There is never a good time not to party, just ask Andrew WK.
I don’t have big plans for the day. I’ve got a week until the first cabin run of the year and I got some python to write. The grass is already watered. I think I’m going to baste in the sun for a couple to get some color into my white ass. I’ve got a forty on ice. Lets just hope no ear wigs crawl up my ass.
Happy birthday america!
muzz, emil muzz
3 July 2009 | Uncategorized | No Responses
One of my favorite movies of all time is 1987′s Dragnet. Now for you movie elitist dick wads out there it’s guaranteed to not be in your top 500. I’m fine with that. My other favorite movie of all time is Airheads, so you see where my level of sophistication lies when it comes to film.
Moving on.
So what makes Dragnet a great movie is, well, all aspects of it. You have a classic TV series, the 1980s, Tom Hanks, Dan Akroyd, drugs, the brown derby, Jack O’Halloran, good cop/bad cop, and the LAPD. What does all of this mean? Well, not much unless your name is Joe Fearnley.
I came across this video the other day and damn near fell out of my chair. Partly because of laughter and partly because of how ridiculous this is. It reminded me of that microsoft office promotional video from the early nighties where the white scientist guy raps. Its like everyone wanted to get in on the action. Even goldie hawn.
gaslight fanboy
1 July 2009 | music, rock show | No Responses
Even though the boss kind of didn’t know the words to the song, this is pretty goddamn cool. Well, to me, at least.