Incubation Recap

March 18th, 2009 by Sean

Everyone pulls up everyone by the bootstraps.

That was a theme of the Stirfry Startup incubation last weekend.

Stirfry Start Ups is a group of like minded individuals working to develop various projects, web-based and not, as a vehicle for success. While our individual projects vary from building a collaborative work space, selling information on the internet, lifestyle commentary, a yoga business, comic books and podcasting, etc, we all seem to enjoy building something that is our own, and seeing where we can take it.

Rowena hosted this weekend at her beautiful place on the hill above Dolores Park. In attendence were myself, Rowena, Dave, Walter, Sarah, and Ben.

I worked on my OnlyTheValiant website for my Valiant Comics podcast. I recently scrapped the old site and reinstalled a new site, based on WordPress instead of Drupal, which is what the old site was built with. WordPress is now the only CMS I use for sites.

One of the most fun, and helpful, portions of the weekend was when we took turns in the “hotseat”, and put our website up on a big monitor for everybody to critique. Questions came up about what the intended use of the site is, how to design the site to facilitate that intended use, how to convey quickly what the site is about, and how to make sites more readable and present better.

I received a lot of comments on OnlyTheValiant.com, and was able to create a pen and paper markup of how I want the site to look. If you look at the site now, it is functional and presentable. I got a lot of comments on how to emphasize what needs to be emphasized, and how to lay out the site to accomplish the goal for the website, which is to get people to listen and subscribe to the podcast.

I have a very clear idea of what changes will be made in the future, and in another week or two, I believe the site will be much better.

I also realized this weekend that I thoroughly enjoy thinking about, discussing, and implementing website design. It was as helpful and rewarding to offer advice and comments to others as it was to receive them.

This leads to the second major result of this weekend, the idea of the groupstrap. Stirfry startups is essentially a groupstrap idea. Instead of each of us pulling ourselves up by our boot straps, we pull each other up by each other’s bootstraps.

This is an interesting concept, and we saw this in practice over the weekend. Each of us has some relative expertise on something within the group, and we can share that with each other. In this way, each of us benefits from the abilities of each other, resulting in better ventures for all of us. It is mutual sharing, it is community as a service, and it works.

Tags:
Posted in Other Stuff | No Comments »

WordPress Structure

March 13th, 2009 by Sean

This post has been moved over to the Journal at Bad Deacon Design.

*Click Here to see the post*

Tags: ,
Posted in Other Stuff | No Comments »

WordPress Structure

March 13th, 2009 by Sean

In preparation for this weekend’s incubation, I created this outline of how WordPress is structured. WordPress is Stirfry’s CMS of choice because it is simple, flexible, and highly customizeable.

I, and many other Stirfryers, are firm believers that form and content are closely related. Understanding how WordPress works, and how a WordPress site can be structured will help to create the vision for your site. What content you provide, and how you provide it, is intrinsically related to the structure and organization of the site.

With that in mind, this may help you to develop your own website.
BACKGROUND:

  • WordPress is functionally based on PHP and MySQL.  The presentation is based on HTML and CSS.
    • MySQL – This is a database that stores all of the information you enter into WordPress.  The title, content, and data (author, time, categories, etc) for each post or page are all stored in the database
    • PHP – PHP is a web programming language that can do stuff with the data in the database, and use variables, operators, control structures, and functions.  The output of PHP is HTML, which your browser then reads.
    • HTML – basic internet language.  The server throws a bunch of HTML at your browser, your browser displays a web page.
    • CSS – CSS organizes and designs the HTML.  Color, size, location, images, etc, are all determined by the CSS

Basic WordPress, or WordPress straight out of the box:

  • Two kinds of content: POSTS and PAGES
    • POSTS are blocks of content that are then displayed alone or as groups on webpages
    • PAGES are content that is always on a certain webpage.  They are “static” (though they are still dynamic in the web programming sense of the word)
  • Posts are shown in reverse chronological order on the homepage.  You can view a single post, or you can click on various archives of posts to see only posts of that type, such as by date, a certain category, or a certain tag.
  • WordPress often creates a list of the pages you create.
    The header, footer, and sidebar(s) remain the same on every webpage of your site.  Only the content area changes.
  • Themes change how your site looks.
  • Conceptually, this format creates a website where the most recent post is the most important, and the older a piece of content is, the less important it becomes.
    • This is similar to TV, radio, magazines, newspapers, and serialized content

Building Blocks of WordPress

  • There are four default regions on a WordPress page: Header, Footer, Sidebar(s), and content.  You can add regions other than these.
  • The Loop is a basic engine of WordPress.  It collects posts from the database and displays them.  The front page is a loop of all your posts.  An archive of a category, date, tag, etc, is a Loop of posts of just that type.
  • Templates:
    • A template is a PHP file that describes what information is contained in a certain page or element
    • Every webpage has a template. index.php is the template for the main page, page.php is the template for your pages, archive.php is the template for looking at a category or date archive, etc.
    • Many regions have a template.  header.php, sidebar.php, footer.php are templates for the content in those regions of the webpages, comments.php describes content of that region, etc. The individual posts do NOT have a template to decribe their content. This is done in the Loop.
    • A theme is just a collection of templates and a CSS file.
    • You can create custom templates to extend WordPress beyond it’s default content presentation
  • Metadata:
    • Content has metadata attached, such as author, time, and very importantly, category and tag.  You can use metadata to organize and display content.
    • Categories and Tags allow for a 2-D organization of content (which can be limiting)
    • Categories can have custom templates, not sure about tags.

Customizing WordPress

  • It is easy to customize the supplied building blocks
  • It is harder to add new building blocks to Worpress
  • Plugins can add new building blocks
  • Most (all?) changes are done by modifying the theme templates and CSS file.

Tags: , , ,
Posted in Other Stuff | 1 Comment »

Meeting Jim Shooter

February 9th, 2009 by Sean

I have been reading comic books since I was about 9 or 10 years old.  It started by buying GI Joe comics off the rack when my family would go to Thrifty Drug Store for ice cream every now and then in the evening.  Though my tastes have matured since then, I still have a lot of fondness for the comics from this era.

Eventually I found Ralph’s Comic Corner, the local comic shop in Ventura, and started buying my GI Joe comics from there.  I soon started buying Wolverine, X-Men, and a few other comics, branching out into super heroes.

When I was 12, going on 13, I heard about this big crossover story from a new comic book company called Valiant.  They had been putting out comics for just under a year and a half, and I didn’t really know much about them.  For two months though, all 8 of their titles would cross over with each other, telling one large story.

For some reason I thought this sounded pretty cool, and I bought them all.  I got hooked.

I wasn’t too aware of it at the time, but Valiant Comics was the brain child of Jim Shooter.  Jim started working in the comics business when he was 14, by writing a few issues of Legion of Super Heroes.  He submitted them to DC, and they hired him, without even knowing how old he was.  After working at DC comics, then Marvel comics, he became Editor In Chief at Marvel comics, the position he held through most of the 80s.  In the late 80s he formed Valiant Comics, and eventually, in 1991, started the Valiant Comics line.

Though Valiant was a collaboration by a lot of people, it was largely guided by Jim’s vision and ideas.  He was the captain of the ship.  Unfortunately, Jim Shooter was forced out of his own company by the other owners, in what comes down to a conflict between what was best creatively vs. what was best business-wise.  Valiant became a huge success, but wasn’t the same without Shooter at the helm.

With that background, I met Jim Shooter on Saturday at the New York Comic Con.

Awesome.

Jim showed up to the con around 3 or 4pm, and was set up next to JayJay Jackson’s table in artist alley.  I had him sign a copy of Harbinger #1 for me, and I asked if he had a few minutes to record a few questions.  He agreed, but then my friend Brian did one better, he asked Jim to come over to our table when we recorded our episode of Only The Valiant (my Valiant-related podcast)!

So me and co-host Average Joe sat down to start recording, and over walks Jim Shooter!  He sat down, we gave him a microphone, and he talked to us for a while about Valiant.  It was great stuff, and will be in the next episode.

Jim was putting on a panel that evening, “How to Create Comics”.  It was the information that he learned in his 40 years in the comics biz, working with the old greats like Kirby, Lee, and Ditko.  I was hanging around his and JayJay’s booth after we finished recording, and it came time for Jim to head down for his panel.  I got to walk over to the panel room with him.  It was fantastic to walk around and shoot the breeze with him.  I asked him about what he was currently working on, and talked to him a little about working on the Valiant characters again for the recent hardcover books.  He is working for a media company, creating comics to be used in advertising, and he spoke kindly about the Valiant Entertainment guys.

The seminar was completely full, they had to turn people away after the room filled.  Jim’s seminar was fantastic, I would summarize it as “back to basics, but on stereroids”.  It was all about how to tell a story with comics, and what was important about the visual and written parts of the book.  I think it could have gone on for hours, but he only had an hour to talk.

After the seminar I got a pic with Mr. Shooter himself:

Me and Jim Shooter

Me and Jim Shooter

Jim was very friendly, gracious, well-spoken, and very intelligent.  He is quite tall, as is commonly known, he makes me, at 6′-1″, feel short.  I barely got to scratch the surface of all the things we could have talked about, but it was fantastic.

He is responsible for creating the comics that I have loved since I first read them as a kid, so meeting the man who did so much to create these was a real treat.

The comics that he wrote inspired me to start the

Tags: ,
Posted in Comics | 2 Comments »

MAC 2: MAC goes DaDa

January 26th, 2009 by Sean

As I was walking down Second Street this morning, I looked at it in a new way. I was thinking to myself, what would someone who had never seen this street think of it? I forced myself to look at the street with fresh eyes, and notice the things that get lost in my day to day walk due to familiarity.

Second street is peculiar. Along each side of the street are old storefronts, with a new sign every twenty feet at a different height, a different shape, and a different color. This street houses the reject stores and businesses from other, nicer streets. The sidewalk itself is old brick, which is quickly interrupted by newer concrete. The street seems to be an old, run down relic of what San Francisco was thirty years ago. The oldness and smallness of this street is out of place next to the newer, fancier, taller streets just a block in either direction.

Amongst what seems to be an old, worn down street are pockets of newness. A starbucks hides at the corner of an alley, the round green sign is almost lost amongst all of the visual clutter that lines this street. New restaurants and new bars line this street, but the newness is hidden by the old facades that front them.

MAC went to DaDa tonight, one of these new places hidden amongst the drab clutter of this street. MAC is the Monday Adventure Crew, a biweekly social outing to a new happy hour bar. It gives us a chance to try new places and find new deals, so that we can make a better, more informed decision about happy hour when it matters.

DaDa is a long, narrow room, soaked in red light and red paint. The bar extends down the length of the room on the left, while a long booth seat runs along the length of the right side. The wall behind the bar is painted red, and is accented with red lights that run along the back edge of the shelves that are staggered along the wall. These shelves are covered with bottles of whiskeys, vodkas, and pint glasses, all of which glow red from the light just beyond them.

The red lights color everything, from specks of red light on the wood of the bar, to the overly sized, novelty alcohol bottles that sit high up on the highest shelves. The red light also shines from above from old, worn out chandeliers with red light bulbs in the sockets, half of them burnt out.

The wall opposite the bar seems to be in an entirely different room. Bright white lights shine down on the white wall, highlighting the black and white paintings.  Below that is the polyester vinyl cushion of the raised bench seat that extends along the length of the wall. Small, raised circular tables are placed every few feet, making this side of the bar look like a cross between a retro-chic lounge, and a cafeteria.

Unmemorable, mellow music plays in the background, loud enough to be heard, but bland enough not to matter.

The crowd was thin, as is regular for a Monday, which allowed us to stand at the bar for a while before setting up shop along the opposite wall, at one of the tall tables set against the raised bench seating. The drink deals extend only to the wine and “specialty martini” menu, which I didn’t take the time to examine, even though it was propped up in a clear plastic stand in the center of the table.

As I announced this morning when I sent out the email soliciting this outing, it is good to go out on Monday, when the week has just begun.  It reminds me that I am not just a cog in the machine, and it reminds me that spending time with people is one of the better parts of having to go to work every day.

This MAC consisted of: Sean, Patrick, David, Julia, and Zac.

Tags:
Posted in Other Stuff | 1 Comment »

Deflation Now, Inflation Later?

January 26th, 2009 by Sean

Here’s something I have not gotten a straight answer on anywhere as I have been following the current financial crisis and resulting economic slowdown.  Dad and Dave, I think you are two of the three people that read this blog, so if you have any thoughts on this, feel free to put them in the comments.

The government has been printing money like crazy, with billions to a trillion or so created to give out to banks, etc.  Historically, when a nation prints up a ton of money, this leads to wild inflation, but the real activity in the economy points to deflation.

This makes sense, since credit is being destroyed, offsetting the increased money that has been added to the economy by the Fed.  Once all this credit mess is sorted out, however, and banks start opening up the lending spigot, are we gonna get a big dose of inflation, due to the fact that there is a larger base money supply?

When the usual money multiplier kicks in again, and the money the fed puts out there is multiplied by the “magic” of fractional reserve banking, are we gonna have a ton more money in the economy than we did before?

I think there is at least one or two things I am missing here.

Tags:
Posted in Other Stuff | 1 Comment »

Yo Soy El Mejor Cocinero!

January 22nd, 2009 by Sean

I’d like to think this isn’t my fault, but here I am in the midst of it.

It started innocently enough, when I went for a jog at lunch with my co-workers, Sam and Allison. Sam started talking about his chile verde recipe, how easy it was, and how delicious it was.

The real reason I haven’t been too productive the last couple days? I’ve been thinking about chile verde ever since. How am I supposed to focus on heat load calculations when all I can think of is tender cubes of pork, slowly simmered in a mouth watering sauce of tomatillos, jalapenos, and garlic? I knew that if I were not to make a batch of chile verde soon, these thoughts would consume me.

Today, I couldn’t take it any more, and I decided to give in to these culinary urges that have been building in me. I went to Whole Foods after work, bought a big chunk of pork shoulder, a couple pounds of tomatillos, some jalapenos, and a few other necessities. I got home and went to work!

Some of the raw ingredients. The Tecate is to maintain sanity during the process.

Some of the raw ingredients. The Tecate is to maintain sanity during the process.

I learned some things about food today.  Tomatillos have a strange paper coating that they grow in, and they are sticky on the inside (I don’t know why).  There are a couple different cuts of pork shoulder.  There is the picnic cut, which is a fatter cut, and tends to fall apart when you cook it.  This is good for shredded pork in stew, or pulled pork.  The cut I got, the butt, is leaner, and holds together better when you cut it.  Further, even though the butt is leaner, there is still a bit of fat in the sucker.  I feel like I threw away a good quarter of the pig that was just fat when I was cutting it up into cubes.

So here was my basic plan of attack: cut the tomatillos, jalapenos, and the lone pasilla in half, and roast them in the broiler.  The tomatillos roast about twice as fast as the peppers, so take them out early.  Throw a couple cloves of garlic in there to roast too.

While that is getting broiled, cut the pork shoulder into chunks about 1-inch square.  Throw these in a pan with some olive oil to brown off the meat.  Apply salt and pepper.

Oh, man, don’t forget about the peppers in the broiler!  Take them out, remove the skin, and put the tomatillos, peppers, and garlic in the food processor.  Mix until it looks like salsa, then dump it in a pot and heat it up.

Now the pork cubes are getting hot, and the pan of salsa is getting hot, this seems like a perfect time to put them together!  I added a cup of chicken broth to add some liquid to the mixture.  Since I am gonna cook the pork through by simmering it in this mixture, I want the liquid to fill up to the top of the pork cubes. Dice up some cilantro to throw in there, make sure you dump in a bunch of oregano, and mince up more garlic, and things are good.

El trabajo del mejor cocinero

El trabajo del mejor cocinero

Now it is time to kick back. Grab your tecate, listen to some Voodoo Glow Skulls, and maybe write a self-congratulatory blog post. It’s all good at this point, the coast is clear. After simmering for an hour or two, I added more chicken broth because the liquid had been boiling off. When that is boiled down a little bit, I am gonna eat.

Preliminary tastings prove the title of this post, this very well could be the best chile verde ever made. My apartment is filled with the sweet smell of roasted jalapenos, with the juicy smell of roasting meat. It is sweet, with some spice, with a little zing from the lime I put in there. The meat is soft and tender, and is starting to take on the full, sweet flavor from the tomatillos and peppers.

Oh man.  I just took a writing break to try it out, and every time I taste it, it is better than the previous taste.  It is about time to eat this.

I apologize if you have ruined your keyboard by drooling all over it while reading this post.

Tags: ,
Posted in Other Stuff | 5 Comments »

Happy Last Day Of The Bush Presidency!

January 19th, 2009 by Sean

That’s the greeting I got this morning at Starbucks this morning when I got my cup of coffee. It made me chuckle. It hasn’t much been on my mind, and I had forgotten that inauguration is tomorrow. I’m over it.

Then I thought about it, and further realized, I didn’t used to be over it.

Even moreso after that I realized, I have sure changed a lot in the last 8 years.

The Bush presidency has been a constant throughout my twenties. I was 21 when Bush entered office, I voted for Al Gore in 2000 shortly after moving to Berkeley in the summer of 2000, and now I am 29, and Bush is leaving. Thank God this crap is over. When I say “crap”, I mean my twenties, not Bush. Again, I’m over the whole Bush thing.

Man, I used to care a lot. I spent weekends at protests during the buildup to the Iraq war, and spent 4 days straight in the streets of San Francisco when the shock and awe began. In 2004, it took me a while to get behind any candidate, and when I finally realized that Howard Dean was the best choice and best chance for America, it was a little too late, he was just about to lose those first Iowa and New Hampshire primaries.

I think it was when Howard Dean lost that I stopped caring about politics. Regardless of whether he was the best candidate in terms of his positions and policies, he was the most likely to defeat Bush. Most people that voted for John Kerry weren’t voting for John Kerry, they were voting against Bush. Kerry was a total dork though. He couldn’t pass the drink test.

So, the drink test: George Bush, despite how one-sided and special interest his policies are, would be a fun guy to go to the bar and get a beer with. It would be a really good time. The democrats didn’t realize that people pick their candidate based on emotion, then they use facts to back up their emotional decision. The fact that Bush won in the first place is evidence enough of this for me. I know I do this too, and I think everyone in that election did to some extent. When I looked at John Kerry, I thought, “that guy’s a tool”. I looked at Howard Dean and thought, “I’d like to hang out with that guy”. Seeing him speak in person back during the primary cemented that for me.

When Howard Dean lost the primary, I lost a lot of faith in politics. I still put a bit of effort into that election, I volunteered with Democracy For America, the group Howard Dean formed, and spent a weekend in Nevada canvassing people to vote for the democratic candidate. After that election, I was pretty much done though.

In the four years since then, I have changed fairly drastically. I am still very socially liberal, in that I think everyone should have the same rights as anyone else (me so crazy), and that I think we should take care of people that are, by design, left out of the system. I also believe that (holy crap) education is important, and (-gasp-) women should be able to decide for themselves what happens to, and in, their bodies. On the other hand, I have become really conservative in lots of ways. I hate taxes, I want less of them. I want less restriction on business. I support gun ownership and second amendment rights. I think deficit spending should be a special case, not the norm. I could go on about some of my crazy libertarian views on money, but I won’t.

Ultimately, being angry, having a lot of bumper stickers, and spending weekends holding signs at protests accomplishes very little. If something is gonna happen to change the world, it is gonna happen from within the system, not from without. If all these punks and hippies wanted to really do something useful, they would start successful businesses and gain some real power to make change. Smashing the window of a McDonalds is not gonna change the world. Starting a successful alternative to McDonalds will.

I have switched my focus from outside to inside. I don’t want to change the world, I want to change my world. I want to make myself successful, because that is honestly going to have the biggest impact on the world. It has been a pretty major shift for myself, and it has come in the wake of the last four years in which I realized that I can change who I am, how others perceive me, and what I can accomplish. In this light, the president has very little effect on my life. Mr. Bush, Mr. Obama, it doesn’t much matter who is in there as I pursue my goals. Their work has very little effect on my work. The amount that they matter is drastically outweighed by the amount that they don’t matter. In that respect, I’m over it.

I know a lot of people are excited, and that’s great. I know a lot of people are fearful, and that’s fine. It seems that Barack Obama is either the Messiah or the Antichrist, depending on who you ask. To me, he is just a man with a job to do, and his job doesn’t have much overlap with my goals and pursuits. I want the world to be a better place, of course, and I hope he works to make it a better place, after all, he is in a much better postion to do so than I am.

Good for him, and good for me. I really don’t care much what Barack Obama is going to do over the next four years, I am much too focused on what I am going to do for it to matter too much.

Tags:
Posted in Other Stuff | No Comments »

MAC No. 1 – 83 Proof

January 18th, 2009 by Sean

There is a new Monday tradition, the Monday Adventure Crew!

Every other Monday, the idea is to go to a new happy hour place in downtown SF to grab a drink.  Just one drink.  This will expose us to new happy hour venues and happy hour deals, so that we can make a more informed decision regarding happy hour when it MATTERS.  In other words, no more loser bars for happy hour on Thursday and Friday.

There are a ton of places in SF that I haven’t been to, and we always end up going to the same old places that happen to be within a block or two of the office.  In other words, we commit social suicide on a regular basis.

For the first MAC, we went to 83 Proof.

It was a nice bar, $2 heinekens and $4 well drinks during happy hour.

Yelp reviews say the bar gets pretty busy later on in the week, but Monday was pretty low key. We were able to get seats at the bar.  I drank a Sam Adams.

I’d defintiely go back to this bar on a Friday to check it out.  I imagine it fills up with financial district types, but the bar doesn’t seem like it gets too pretentious, just a good place to grab a drink.

Attendies of this MAC were Sean, Jimmy, and Patrick.

Tags:
Posted in Other Stuff | No Comments »

Newer Entries »