Homecoming

Last night I had the chance to get together with a few friends and have a few drinks. It was a great night and a wonderful reminder of the things that are important.

Great Advice – Buy Cheap

“Buy the cheapest tool that fits the job. If you use it so much that it breaks, buy the most expensive tool. — My pal’s dad.” – @brianboyer

I have a tendency to ignore wisdom such as this most of the time. Growing up almost everything I had was cheap and dodgy, and that affected me in a way. I remember when I first tried to learn to play guitar, the guitar I had was this piece of shit that wouldn’t stay in tune, always had string buzz, and would short out any time I moved the damn thing. It made playing the guitar a depressing experience.

So now I have a tendency to buy the best whenever I can, but this also means that I’ll buy the best (and sometimes the most expensive) and not use it.

That’s always the most important thing. To use it.

Ready Player One

I just recently finished reading Ready Player One by Ernest Cline (Random House, 2011). The book, (read in Kindle format on iPhone 4S) was quite thoroughly remarkable, delightful, and entertaining. And it’s the only one in the series (at time of writing 01/21/2012) which means that I’m in a funk. I don’t know if you experience this, but whenever I read a really good book, I want to read more.

Sometimes this works out really well (see anything written by William Gibson), and sometimes it doesn’t work out so well (see the fact that The Hunger Games was really good, but the following books weren’t nearly as good).

So Ready Player One was the first book that Cline has written, and it’s an amazing start, and I’m ready to see more of his work, but now I have to wait for them to be written, edited, and put out into the world.

I highly recommend Ready Player One, and a lot of other people do to.

Press & Render

In December I had the idea of making a tool that rendered out your standard WordPress installation to static HTML. I’d named this project “Press & Render“, and started work. I got about 100 lines of code (PHP) written and then a bunch of life got in the way. Last night after everyone else was asleep I decided to start over again. The new version is 5 (bash) lines and working much better than the previous version. There’s a couple of things I want to fix before I post it up, but I’m hoping to have the first version up soon.