This is just a test of TextMate. Wordpress added support for tagging, so I don’t need any tag-related plugins anymore, but I had made some changes to TM to accommodate things of that nature, so this will probably fail. Or just not work. Who knows.

Hey, it worked. Can I get tags to work? Why, I can.

Hey everyone. I really did quit my job. My last day included a well-attended lunch at a Chinese buffet, which was nice except for it didn’t summarize in a tidy hour everything bitter and sweet about leaving a job of eight years. I thought of it kind of as a birthday party for a while - everyone is paying attention to you, and you’re sort of a celebrity, but it represents the end of something, too. In that way, it’s like a graduation party, except you’re the only one graduating, and you have to be very diplomatic about the very act of graduating - almost apologetic, because it’s impolite to be as happy as I was about leaving. In the end, it was kind of like attending my own funeral, except nobody spoke.

My new job is great. They weren’t exactly ready for me on that first Monday, so they told me to show up on Wednesday and get paid for the whole week anyway. I really am not expecting to get paid for bench time ever again, but it was a great way to transition to our new life.

This first assignment is a six-week thing, which is kind of a bummer, because these new guys are way cool and there’s a lot to work on. I could easily see spending six months there, but if you start thinking like that, then you’re talking six years and dealing with the recruiters to place you somewhere else, starting every interview with “I’ve been at my current job as long as I can remember, and…”

I actually wouldn’t at all mind 6 week assignments, but the end of this one is going to mean interviewing for another one, because I’m not a known commodity. (In a year or two, this cool place can call back and say “is Dan available?” and I’ll head right over.)

Anyway, that’s work. I’ll let you know when it’s over. You and I can have lunch.

Two or three stories related to having two days off: I listened to a ton of Kanye West’s “Can’t Tell Me Nothing” Official Mixtape, and for whatever reason, really dug it. If that makes me less “hard” in your eyes, the leak of the new Queens of the Stone Age is also crazy. That band inspires me.

There’s even new They Might Be Giants out, if you’re on iTunes, because it came out there six weeks before it’ll be in stores. They call that release schedule “experimental” but I think it’s just ridiculous. The CD will come with bonus material, which I suppose at one point was delivered as “B-sides” but is referred to in official emails as “favorites from the podcast”. Their podcast is excellent, by the way - I pretty much never listen to podcasts and they deliver the goods. The record is being described by enthusiastic iTunes reviewers as their best work in 15 years and a return to form in the full-band era. I did not come to that conclusion after three listens, but I didn’t really come to any conclusion.

But back to my two days off. I decided, since
a) I wasn’t going to really see anyone for two days, and
b) since I’d gone through four Rockstars a little faster than I’d wanted to, and
c) because my silly, nothing-to-worry-about, caffeine-makes-it-worse irregular heartbeat had my attention, and
d) I was going through a big-deal life-change anyway,

HEY! why not give up caffeine. I mentioned something about caffeine withdrawal around my grandma a year ago, complaining that it’s an unpleasant two weeks, but sometimes you have to do it, and she replied that it couldn’t be worse than two or three days, if that. It was two or three days, if that. The great thing is that I’m not fumbling around blind for Diet Coke (of all things) before I’ve taken a shower or put on a shirt. I never derived much pleasure from that ritual, I just knew I had to do it or I’d take something’s fucking head off. The flip-side of being out of the cycle at the moment is that I could snap at any time. So far, I haven’t.

Next post: games, maybe.

Hi everyone. I’ve got a perfectly good explanation for the past month. I really do.

I got fed up at my job and started looking at alternatives. It was the kind of “fed up” where you say to yourself “I really don’t have time for Warcraft, blogging, poker, or goofing off until I get to the bottom of this.” And so I did. I brushed up on my C#/.NET development skills and hit a couple interviews. I’m leaving my job at the end of this week.

The space you’re looking at now will soon overflow with tales of my new adventures, but for now it’s enough to understand that I’m going into consulting. Lots of new jobs over the next few years, fixing what’s broken, building what needs to be built, and moving on. It’s going to be a wonderful change for me and my family. With Christie staying home with the kids for a while, I’m free to make some changes.

We’ve also been going to the YMCA three times a week. It was the end of the Summer Fitness Challenge this week, and I’m happy to report that we did it. Flip-flops (and bonus t-shirts) are ours come Monday.

I’m the best blogger ever. Most of my posts are “hey, let’s see if this configuration tweak worked.”

Since you’re asking, I’m trying to get tags working again. They aren’t, or haven’t.

update: TextMate, brilliant as it is, must have undone some of the blogging.rb changes I made (and I only remember making one, but I could be wrong). Either way, it appears that I’ve fixed my problem, and can post again from TextMate, with tags, at my convenience.

I think this might give me an image.

As the kids say, “TextMate for the win”.

Not sure why they say that.

This is really pretty much just a test of posting stuff directly from TextMate. I’ll have to check to make sure that

• comments are on
• pings are off
• the category is okay

Other than that, we should be cool.

It will be a dream to leave the wysi-kinda-sorta-wyg editor in WordPress. It’s not the only part of that app that needs serious help, but if you’re in it every day you start to crack a little bit. (Oh, my line-breaks are a little off? Let me just log back in and fix that. Oh, fixing that broke something else? Heh, silly me. Let me just log back in, and… so wait, that’s not a list any more? Why’d it do that?)

Images can apparently be uploaded from TextMate, too. I’m not testing that out here.

Or so says Cratchit (who actually said I’m not much of a blogger “these days”, which allows us both to reflect on the glory days of blogging everything we bought, every cheese sandwich we ate, and every annoying person who ever stood in front of us in a line).

The truth of it all is that I am too much of a expectations-defying curmudgeon to really be in self-publishing. Tons of hits for cute kid stories? But I’m so much MORE than that. I am complicated. Can’t write anything else about kids until everyone else realizes how COMPLICATED I am. I will prove it, and then post more kid stories.

Okay, so here’s one: Becky wore a two-piece swimsuit for the first time the other day, and was jumping up and down from excitement, because she’d never worn a “zucchini” before. Zekini? Bikini, anyway, was what she was searching for. Christie gets very emotional about fixing these little English problems, because once they’re corrected, the kids never make that mistake again, and sometimes it seems like that’s all we ever get to keep of them. Stupid growing up.

And remember when I used to write stuff like this?

I played with the Wii on Saturday night. It is excellent and I am totally waiting for them to be actually available without waiting in line, because that’s about all it will take for me to get one. That could be because it’s the only next-gen system that’s not so hard-headed about HDTV (I don’t have one, and I’m not about to get one for video games), or maybe because they have actually done something interesting with the controller (making the whole experience a little more like being in an arcade). Whatever it is, it isn’t the internet-scribbling blog-cows who have been saying that “finally someone made a console that’s FUN, because this is about grown-ups having FUN and nothing else since the Atari has been about FUN”. If you haven’t had fun playing video games since 1985, then you’re irreparably DOING IT WRONG and should seriously consider going back to whatever else it was you were doing, if people still do that in 2006.

Yeah, those were the days.

Otherwise? My MacBook Pro is holding up pretty nicely. I need to register one of these text editors, but I’m not sure which one. Las Vegas was a blast: I hurt my feet walking around so much, but I did win the one tournament I entered, so it was financially successful. Beyond that, poker is good: barring a December collapse, I plan on paying taxes on $5000 in 2006 poker income. (That is gonna hurt.) And I’m not exactly sure what we’re doing for Christmas, despite the fact that I just sent an email out saying that the one thing we are not doing is staying up late Christmas Eve. (Which is a lot of fun, but for the next 12 years, my kids need to sleep, and sleep well, when I am not going to be at work the next day. True.)

I suppose part of my block about writing has been the old design. It was the first thing I whipped up after I installed WordPress: not bad, but not perfect. And while I appreciated the flexibility advantages over TypePad, WordPress has its own complex system of odd corners you have to relearn.

This template is a little better for me, I think, but I might have to tweak here and there. Under construction as always. If you don’t see something that you liked before, but it’s missing now, let me know. I hope you like it.

In all that mess, I added Jer to the friends list, because he’s my friend.

New feature! I wanted to assemble a free-form list, with just brief descriptions of what I’m into at the moment and maybe a link for more information. So that’s over there, called “Top 10″. It’s not specifically Top 10 anything, just ten things that I like at the moment.

I want to remove the “About” blurb on the side there, because I don’t know anymore.

I used to write stories about my life, but my life right now is

1. my kids (private)
2. my work (best not blogged about)
3. the rest of my family (covered here, mostly)
4. my friends (you, pretty much)
5. poker (covered here, kind of)

I sometimes need to opine about music, movies, the news of the day, or goofy computer stuff I’m into, but I’ve done a couple longer pieces like that recently. I haven’t had many pageviews, search results, or comments on them. I should probably take that less personally, but it’s deflating.

I have also used this space to quickly share interesting links, which is what I continue to do over at del.icio.us/dnordquist, and on the sidebar of the same name. That’s high quality, but it’s not everything.
The problem is really about the focus of the site. This isn’t a parenting site (even though I’m a parent), it’s not a technology site (even though most of the stuff I’m writing about these days seems tech-oriented), it’s not a music and movies site, and it’s not even a much-better-than-average personal “confessional” blog. I don’t know why I should write these days, so I’m not writing. When I do know, I’m doing a much better job of it, but when I’m not sure why, it doesn’t come at all.

Anyway. That’s why I haven’t been doing it: because I refuse to do it without passion. When that’s back, so shall I be.

Please stand by.