New Year's Resolutions

A couple of years ago I made a resolution to maintain a healthier lifestyle and live more in the present instead of living for the future. The past year, instead of making any new resolutions I soft of adopted the ones from the year before and made them mantras for my life.

And how did that turn out?

I do think I lead a healthier life than years past. To be honest, college wasn't a very healthy time for me. College parties, late night cram sessions, and a terrible diet really took a toll on my body. In contrast, I have put several thousand miles on my bike each year, go for a surf when I can, and rarely drink alcohol.

For me, the difference has not been made by simply a change in attitude, but by setting distinct goals.

Two years ago, there were two significant events that triggered this change in lifestyle. I was in Alabama spending my new year's at a climbing haven and was also in the early stages of training for AIDS LifeCycle 6, a bicycle ride from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Being in Alabama on a trip that revolved around climbing, I realized something really important. By basing a trip around an activity, I was naturally inclined to live healthier the weeks or months leading up to the trip.

With AIDS LifeCycle 6, a trip that would demand even more physically (560 miles over 7 days), I was able to resist the temptation of late nights at the bars. Although I would still meet up with friends at bars on occasion, knowing that I was constantly in training gave me the will power to order cranberry juice instead of beer.

So with that change in place, what's the resolution for this year?

I've been reading some blogs in search of inspiration and really liked this post. I'm going to shoot for simplicity and focus. I find that 'clutter' from things piling up physically around my house to mentally in my thoughts causes a lot of distraction. I'd like to start breaking things down to the bare minimum.

And I am also learning that it is good practice to have a new year's resolution for your blog as well. Sometimes I feel that my blog can be anything and everything depending on the particular day and would like to simplify and focus my blog as well. For me, the blogs I enjoy reading the most are the ones that are consistent with their topics and motivate me to 'do'. Some topics that I am interested in and would like to write about are small business, web technology, and practical ways to staying in shape. So keep posted!

Velomobile

This past semester I have been taking a course in entrepreneurship at the city college and tonight I give my final presentation. The main task we have been working on all semester has been to pick a business idea and turn it into a viable business plan. The presentation is supposed to mimic what we would tell investors or lenders.

Starting the class I had a whole list of ideas. The ideas ranged from importing custom suits from China to launching a video surveillance forum to manufacturing a modified recumbent bicycle. Each idea was sparked by conversations I've had in the past with family and friends, so in essence each business plan already had a partner in place.

The idea I ultimately chose to nurture was a vehicle designed by a good friend of mine, David Parrott. David is an industrial designer with a pretty killer track record. He has worked for some very respectable companies and is sort of a Dr. Frankenstein if you will. Not only does he come up with some brilliant ideas, but he's the type to really dive into an idea and make it a reality. His resume says, "fabrication in ALL materials," and he really means it.

The proposed business is manufacturing velomobiles. A velomobile is a combination of a recumbent bicycle, an aerodynamic shell (fairing), and a motor. The idea is not completely new, as they are gaining popularity in Europe, but it is something that isn't hugely popular in the US...yet.

David's design can be seen by visiting his site and viewing the 'Capstone' project in his portfolio.

David is currently taking graduate courses and working on his design for his thesis, so the timeline for this project is a little ways out. In the meantime, we will be working on refining the business plan and plan to field test his designs in March by riding from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco.

So look out for us on the road and for velomobiles in your neigborhood!

Two Left Feet

...well more like two right sleeves.

Tonight I was out and about. I had plans with my girlfriend, Kate, to go to a holiday/birthday party. I put on a nice shirt, some jeans, and sneakers and was off.

When I say nice shirt, I mean something with a collar. This particular shirt I bought at Ross. And I'm sure it said 'irregular' or something to that nature, but I'm usually one to ignore the little details.

As it turns out, I noticed something strangely odd about my shirt. Looking at my right sleeve, then my left, and then my right again; something seemed a bit out of place. Staring for a few more moments, I noticed that I had two right sleeves. Yes, that's right! Two right sleeves!

Guess there was something irregular about that shirt. The funny thing though is that I've had the shirt for months and have never noticed. And what's more, it probably won't stop me from wearing it again.

Falling Down the Rabbit Hole

For quite some time now, I have been following all the hype of application frameworks. The analogy is that if a programming language were clay, an application framework would be the tools needed to mold that clay into something beautiful. Of course you could make something beautiful with your bare hands alone, but the tools aim to help speed the process.

From what I have been gathering, Ruby on Rails is the framework of frameworks. For a proper introduction, visit the official site. Ruby is a scripting language that was largely influenced by Perl. I have read that the name Ruby comes from the birth stone of July as Perl (Pearl) is the birth stone of June. No one seems to claim they know for sure, but it is a popular theory. Ruby has been around for some ten years, but it wasn't until about three years ago with the release of Ruby on Rails that the movement behind Ruby really gained momentum.

When I first saw Ruby, I was a bit confused to be honest. In retrospect, when I saw my first programming language, I was a bit confused. Ruby appears to be a very elegant language. It is purely object oriented, which I won't discuss now, and can almost be read like a sentence.

The Rails aspect, is even more intriguing. The framework has loads of features built right into it, making development as easy as typing in a few commands and filling in the blanks. But what I think is the most fascinating thing about Rails is it's dominance. I don't think the Ruby programming language was even in the top ten programming languages until Ruby on Rails came along. Additionally, it is THE framework for Ruby and has inspired a handful of frameworks in other languages.

Speaking frameworks in other languages, I have investigated a few PHP frameworks. I was hoping to get similar functionality of Ruby on Rails, but still be able to code in PHP (which I feel more comfortable in). A couple that share similarities to Ruby on Rails and are fairly easy to get up and running are CakePHP and Code Igniter. But still, they have a long ways to go to catch Ruby on Rails.

This leaves me with an interesting scenario. Do I dig deeper into Ruby so I can learn more Rails or do I try to navigate through all the documentation for a PHP framework and lose some of the cool features of Rails? I've scoured internet forums for answers and there are people on both sides of the fence. Not an easy decision if you ask me.

California Bonzing

Just wanted to shout out on behalf of California Bonzing. A friend of mine and ex-roomie, Austin, is a videographer and puts together clips of skateboarding and scenic California backdrops. His style is quite a bit different than your typical skate video. The analogy would go something like this.

California Bonzing's style to skateboard culture is like longboarding to surfing. It's about the style. It's about the lifestyle.

So check it out already!

California Bonzing video!

Oh, by the way...recognize the voice? Does anyone sense a career in voice overs?

Scrub it with AJAX

AJAX = Asynchronous Javascript and XML

Not sure if that means anything to you. Have you ever been to a web site, clicked something, and lo and behold the something magically changed right before your eyes? That magic is AJAX (or Flash depending on the site).

I won't get into the technicalities in this post, but rather point you in the direction of some resources I found useful.

Scriptaculous
This is probably the most popular AJAX/Javascript library right now. I'm making this assumption based on the number of people that have bookmarked the site on Del.icio.us. At this moment, there are 26,125 other people who have this site bookmarked. The closest AJAX library (in my bookmarks) is jQuery with 12,476.

Scriptaculous is built on another popular library, Prototype and has a strong following, I believe, because it is native in Ruby on Rails.

It's fairly straight forward to implement. The Scriptaculous site has a bunch of docs and demos on their site, but I'm a really big fan of video tutorials. If you're looking for an easy introduction to AJAX, check out this link.

After watching the video, I found it pretty straight forward to integrate AJAX into my blog

Thanks again!

Count your chips and cache them in!

I was pleasantly surprised to find out that caching wasn't super difficult to implement. I found this article on caching and knew that sooner or later I would have to implement it into my blog page.

What is caching?

To put it simply, caching makes websites perform faster and there are two ways (that I know of) that caching works.

Method 1. This is the caching that most people think of when they think of caching. Our internet browsers will save little snippets of web pages to be used if we return to a page. Because retrieving information from the internet is a lot slower than retrieving information from our hard drive or RAM, saving information locally will speed up sites we often visit.

Method 2. This is the method that I used for speeding up my site. The blog page of my site retrieves information from my Blogger account and then dynamically creates the HTML to be displayed. In plain English, my site was a greedy pig. If two people were to visit the same page, the server could not remember that a page had already been visited, thus it would recreate the page from scratch.

The solution. Caching, obviously. Now the second person that visits the page has the convenience of visiting a page that has already been generated and is less of a wait.

The savings. I was surprised how much time maybe 20 lines of code or so saved. It was taking some pages *gasp* almost 10 seconds to render. After the page has been cached, it's fractions of hundreths of seconds.

Now on to the fun stuff. Look out AJAX!!!

If your page is greedy and you're using PHP, I'd suggest taking a gander at the article.

Poor Scooty!

Hopefully you'll get a kick out of this one...

Last week I lost the only key to my scooter. For those of you that don't know my scooter, it's a beat up black 2001 Vespa with a red heart spray painted on the side. Her name is Weezy and she was the way she is when I bought her used about six months ago.

So the story goes...

Last week after class, I lost the key. And I know for sure it's in the house somewhere. I know this because I rode my scooter home and couldn't find the key before leaving the next day.

So it's been driving me crazy. If I would have lost it while I was out, I would have already come to peace with the key being gone, but since I know it's somewhere in the house I find myself as sort of a obsessive compulsive when doing anything at home.

I sorted through the trash before throwing it out. I shook all of my shoes thinking maybe it had fallen into one. I did a thorough cleaning of my room twice with no luck. I even pulled the washer out of the closet thinking maybe it had fallen through the cracks. Seriously, who pulls their washer out?

I may soon come to the fact that I just need to replace the key and all of the locks, but I know that once I do, that damn key will show up.

XHTML

XHTML = XML + HTML

Today I made my site XHTML compliant using this great validator tool from the World Wide Web Consortium. They're the reason why you can view and use the same site in Windows, Apple, Linux, etc. They call this interoperability, or the ability of a site or program to be cross compatible. This is why web applications have such a bright future.

Because of these standards, developers can focus more of their time on application features as opposed to compatibility with multiple systems. For example, GMail works on pretty much anything. Outlook, doesn't. And I imagine plenty of resources go into the development of Outlook, but since a lot of Microsoft's technology is proprietary as opposed to open source I imagine it's very difficult to create platforms that support their software. (If that's at all what Microsoft wants.)

Of course this really alters the business model, but that can be a topic of a totally different post.

So what does my site being XHTML complaint have to do with anything?

Nothing really. Someone could probably mine the data from my site, and I do get put a cool badge at the bottom of my page!

** Some of my blog pages are not XHTML compliant. This is because I am getting my content from a different site that isn't XHTML complaint. I'll probably get around to writing a script to fix that, but that opens a whole can of worms. I'll probably need to start thinking about caching my pages at some point as the page is slow enough already with all of the data transfer from Blogger to my site.

Flickr Rocks!

Come take a look at my pictures. I've had all these pictures over the years stored on my hard drive and am finally getting around to posting them on flickr. What's really cool about flickr (for the few of you that haven't used it yet) is that it behaves like a program, but is actually a website. This is a lot of the drive behind the Web2.0 movement. You may have heard of things like "web applications" and "software as a service." This is a great example of what that is.

So check out my photos already!

My gallery on my webpage.
My gallery on flickr.

It has definitely been a stroll down memory lane. Some of these pictures I haven't looked at in ages. And they brought a smile to my face.

IE Rant

So I was designing my site in Firefox and on Ubuntu thinking the beautiful things I was creating were universal. Then after hours of design, I went to have dinner with my parents and I was excited to show off my progress...and it looked like crap.

My mom runs Windows XP in 800x600 resolution and at 8-bits of color. It was almost like going back in time to Windows 98, but it really made me realize that I need to consider all configurations when designing my site. Especially since the majority of people surfing the net still use IE.

Things that were supposed to be transparent weren't. Menus were lost. Divs didn't line up. It was a disaster.

So I went home and booted up my old Windows machine (guess it's still good for something). I quickly looked up some fixes, applied them, and used my Windows machine to verify.

I guess the moral of the story is: hang on to your Windows machine...at least until everyone else wises up. :)

I love paisley!

I decided a while back that my site design sucked. I finally had some time where I could really get into the nuts and bolts of my site design. So I had a go.

I really wanted the site to look like a piece of paper on a backdrop, desk, wallpaper, etc. And I also wanted it to have a sort of drop shadow effect to give it an element of depth.

Played around with a few backdrops, but ultimately I decided upon paisley. I love paisley.

Check it out at www.seanchon.com!

Ubuntu 7.10

Ubuntu 7.10 "GustyGibbon" is coming out in a day. Do yourself a favor and download a copy and give it a try. I've been running Windows for I don't know how many years and have tried different flavors of Linux with no real success. I've made a living for several years selling and administering Windows based computers and networks and have always wondered why I'm being paid to essentially fight fires. There has to be a better way.

I downloaded the previous version of Ubuntu Linux (7.04 FeistyFawn) and haven't gone back. It is a pretty straight forward process and you can even run Ubuntu from the CD without installing it. You'll need download an ".iso" and burn it to a CD. If you aren't familiar with ISOs, check out this link.

On a side note:

You may be wondering why it's gone from 7.04 to 7.10. Ubuntu releases new versions every six months. So 7.04 is from April 2007 and appropriately 7.10 will be released in October of 2007 and so on.

If and when you decide to switch, you'll need to make a backup of all the data you want to keep and do an assessment of what you'll be missing. As nice as Ubuntu is, it's not Microsoft. I'm not saying that Microsoft is better. I'm just pointing out that you probably won't be able to bring your Microsoft dependencies with you. Quickbooks is one thing that stands out. There is a lot of comparable (free) software in Ubuntu, but honestly some of it comes with a learning curve. Hopefully, you can get past this in your pursuit of OS Nirvana.

Just out of curiosity, I'd like to know what your company uses at work in terms of technology. I ran my last company almost purely on open source software and think it could work for a lot of other businesses. Hmmm...

Up All Night

Honestly, working on this website is like opening Pandora's Box.

I think I finally have the blog to a point where it's not terribly plain. I opted against using an RSS reader to populate the posts as it's very linear, and instead decided to write my own navigational functions using the Zend/Google PHP API to give it the feel of blogging software that is currently available. I'm embarrassed to say how much time I spent on that page as it is not obvious what lies beneath the page, but I am proud of the work in progress.

Also, I have been learning about cookies and thought it would be fun to give my website an alternate theme. So it has been implemented. There might be a bug or two here or there, so if the site behaves funny for you, please let me know. If you go to my site (www.seanchon.com), you'll notice an option on the top left of your screen. There are two themes right now. I might try to incorporate some more, but it's kind of a pain in the ass honestly, as you need to compare multiple stylesheets to avoid conflicts.

Anyway, it's late. I should be sleeping, but I got carried away.

Oh, and please give me feedback about how the page looks too. I am using Firefox on Ubuntu...so I don't represent the average web surfer.

Thanks!

Blog page updated.

Not sure if there's anyone out there still reading this...

I am posting partially to test my blog integration at www.seanchon.com, so don't mind the post if it's a bit boring.

I've optimized it a bit to run faster. It is still a little slow, but I think that is because it is pulling live data from Blogger (Google). I am pretty excited with its progress as this is the first time I've worked with the Google API. Thus far it mainly retrieves and rearranges data, but I am now working on getting comments to display on my site as well as being able to post from my site in addition to the Blogger site.

Oh...and life outside of programming. There really isn't one...for now. :)

My Life in Progress

So...I haven't given much of an update since I returned from Alaska.

Things have been going really well so far. I'm enrolled in a few classes: two web programming courses (PHP and Ruby on Rails), an entrepreneurship course, and a couple real estate courses.

Web Programming:

The PHP course I have been taking for about a month now and I am really enjoying it. In contrast to what I learned in my programming course at UC Davis, these classes are a lot more fun, because I can see all the progress I am making in an internet browser.

I am really into the progression of the internet and how sites are becoming more interactive with the users and with other sites. A popular example of this is Housing Maps. Housing Maps is what they call a "mashup," because it is a combination of data pulled from Craigslist and the Google Maps application. I am currently adding some Google functionality into my personal website and will post again when I finish all the integrations.

I will also be starting a Ruby on Rails course at the end of the month. Ruby on Rails is a framework, which essentially is a structure that speeds the development of an application. It is very popular in the Web2.0 community and was written by 37Signals to serve as a framework for their popular project productivity suite. I would check it out if you are looking for ways to organize your projects.

Entrepreneurship:

I'm also enrolled in a course titled "Owning and Operating a Small Business." I think this is something I could have used before running my previous business, but it's better late than never. The course essentially leads us through the steps necessary to evaluate business opportunities. I am planning on writing a business plan (our course project) on a commuter vehicle concept developed by my friend David Parrott. It's a motor assisted recumbent bicycle that is fully environmentally enclosed (and environment friendly too). I will update with progress and would love to hear any feedback, as other opinions are really beneficial when evaluating business options.

Real Estate:

I decided to get my real estate license. I took the test about a week and a half ago (fingers crossed). I wouldn't say it's a complete passion of mine, but my mom is an established Realtor in San Francisco and we have some collaboration ideas in mind. There is a lot of speculation that the California market is cooling down, but we may have identified a niche within the cooling market. More on that later.

As I develop my personal websites, I will start to blog more actively. I plan to keep a separate blog of my personal life and another that will document my learning process of web technologies in hopes of helping others learn. When that fabricates (hopefully soon) I will post those locations. They are in progress though. ;)

Back again.

It's official. I'm back and the Alaska chapter has concluded. It was a little quicker than anticipated. There was a week of fishing left, but I wanted to get back to the city to take some classes.

I have been putting more pictures on my flickr page, as internet connection is a lot better here. So check them out!

Here is a picture of the Aleutian Belle, my home while in Alaska.

I will be taking some programming courses (PHP and Ruby on Rails) and a course on owning and operating a small business. I will be playing the part of a student for a little while and will try to catch up on surfing, cycling, climbing, and other activities that I live for.

Thanks for stopping in and I hope to see you soon.

Mustaches

Okay. I made a promise to grow a mustache. Here is some documented proof. I also got a couple of Ivanoffs to grow mustaches as well. A man is not beautiful until he grows one.

Pounds and Pounds of Humpies

So we didn't quite hit the 1,000,000 mark, but we did end up catching more fish. Expected, right? We did a little over 400,000 pounds of pink salmon (humpies) and although the boat will be out for another week or so, I decided to get off a little early to play tourist. Plus, I was going a bit mad being cooped up on the boat. Kind of expected as well.

In all honesty, fishing is tough. I will admit it. And it's not necessarily the physical aspect of it either. I was pretty sore just about every day from back aches to banging my head/knee/elbow on just about everything available to stiff shoulders from sleeping funny to feeling nauseous from the constant rocking. But beyond that, it is really the day-in-day-out aspect that really grinds at you. There's only so many places you can go on a boat, and regardless of how well you get along with people, being on a boat that long will bring out the worst in you. Trust me.

So on the topic of tough days, I went overboard a little over a week ago. In just about the worst way too. In fishing, line (which is more like rope) is strewn everywhere on the deck and when it's on its way out of the boat, you want to keep hands/arms/feet/etc. away from the bite. The bite is any loop that is connected to an outgoing line. That's probably the first golden rule of fishing...if there were such a thing. Well, in this case, my right leg got caught in the bite and the other end of the line was connected to the skiff (a small boat designed to be slow and powerful). There are stories of people getting legs broken and worse, being dragged to the bottom of the ocean, but I was fortunate enough to get away with a bruise and a story.

As I'm writing this, my pictures are uploading to my flikr page. Here's a little taste of the action (me with a couple of king salmons). Beauties!

Another highlight of our trip was a flair opener a couple days ago. Most years, a hatchery will allow boats to fish near its grounds. The benefit of this is that you know for sure that there are fish in the water. However, there is a window of time that you can fish and a lot of boats to compete with and you can't start until they fire the flair, thus the flair opener. Essentially, it's the craziest day of the year and all fishing etiquette goes out the window. Some boats caught up to 170,000 pounds that day and others banged around and got near nothing. Let's just say that our day was an experience.

And here's a picture of a jumping fish from the flair opener. Exciting!

I will be making my way to San Francisco during the next week with a stay in Seattle for a few days. If you're in the Seattle area, let me know. I'd love to connect. And in terms of San Francisco, I have no concrete plans. I will need to unwind for a bit, then get serious again about life...I guess.

There's more I will add about this trip, but I need to sleep. Honestly. For a long time.

I smell bad

After fishing days on end and not showering, what do you expect? But the beard is starting to grow in thick and looking around me, most other people here have thick facial hair and a sort of natural scent. I guess I'm just acclimitizing.

I have been taking pictures and was planning on posting some proof that I am actually in Alaska, but as internet connection is seldom and often shaky, a post is the best I can do for now. I do have some really good pictures I'd like to share and will get them up as soon as I can.

We just got back in from a six day session and will probably spend a day or so in town to regroup. The total salmon count is almost at 100,000 pounds. Not terribly exciting from historical standards, but it's making a living and there's still hope for a big run of salmon to come through. That's what everyone's hoping for at least.

It's been pretty tough up to this point, but it's slowly getting easier. I still have over a month of fishing left, but I imagine it'll start flying by pretty soon. Which I guess is both good and bad.

Hope all's well in your corner of the world.

You, Me, and Humpy

I was warned that I would be sea sick for the first few days. I didn't expect I would get sea sick on the dock. Luckily, I was able to get over it in a couple of days. Now I can say that I'm an Alaskan commercial fisherman, or a greenhorn as they refer to the newbies.

Kodiak is beautiful and fishing is a combination of down time and intense work. It's taken me a little while to get the hang of my role on the boat, but slowly I'm picking up the techniques as well as the fisherman lingo. Stacking leads on the starboard side was definitely something I hadn't done until now.

Oh, you're probably wondering about humpies. We're fishing pink salmon, and as they make their way from salt water to fresh water to the spawning grounds, their faces change and the get a big hump on their back. Thus, humpies. Fishing humpies is all about the numbers as there are a lot of them coming though, but the quality of the meat isn't the greatest. We've gone out for a couple of days of fishing and have caught about 18,000 pounds so far. We're shooting for about 1,000,000 pounds, so we have a lot of work left. Hopefully it'll start to pick up pretty soon and we'll be well on our way.

That's it for now. Battling a bad internet connection here at the dock, but I'll be sure to put some stories up soon as the fishing progresses.

Oh, and due to all the votes, I'll be growing a mustache. I was thinking of the bell bottom mustache, but if you have any other suggestions, let me know. It'll be mustache 2.0.

My first Polar Bear Encounter

Yes. Only a day into my Alaskan experience and I've already had an encounter. Look at those teeth. Imagine how I felt.

On the Topic of Books

So, tomorrow's the big day. My room is a complete mess. My bags are almost packed and everything I won't need for the next couple of months is neatly packed away into the garage. However, there are always those things that don't seem to belong anywhere and slowly emerge as everything else is stuffed into its proper place. I can relate, so I lay awkwardly on the floor for a couple of minutes to sympathize.

I have mentioned my trip to anyone who cares to listen and have received nothing but encouragement. I have also received some suggested reading. 'The Alchemist' and 'On the Road' were the two suggestions. Ironically, I rarely read novels, but the last three I have read were 'On the Road,' 'The Alchemist,' and 'Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.' Maybe that's part of the reason why I can't seem to feel settled.

I guess I can relate to each of the stories. It's not that I know what I'm looking for when I feel the urge to pack up my bags and leave, but more that I imagine what I am looking for requires that I always be in motion. And sometimes traveling is merely contrasting what you already have with what the rest of the world has to offer.

As for the trip, I bought a one-way ticket and that's all I know. There is always the option to come back to San Francisco and pursue a career. There is the option to take some of the money I have saved and see more of the world. And there is the option to see if I can nurture one of my business ideas.

I would love to hear where you are at this point.

Kodiak, Alaska

So it looks like it's been quite some time since my last post. I've spent a little time dusting off my site and adding a few enhancements I have stumbled across at FeedBurner, a site for enhancing your blog functionality.

As for what I have been doing with my life lately...

I was invited to go fishing on the prestigious Aleutian Belle, a fishing vessel based in Kodiak, Alaska. It's something I have wanted to do for years and the timing, although not perfect, was as good as any. With less than a week's notice, I will be packing my bags, my apartment, and my life. I purchased a one-way ticket with the intention to be adventurous. I have no doubts that this will be an experience to remember.

I will be updating this blog as my trip progresses and I hope to see and hear from you along the way.