Category: observations

Rugged Maniac will be interesting

For the past few years, I’ve been doing Rugged Maniac and Warrior Dash obstacle races. I scheduled myself for two races this year, but withdrew from Warrior Dash due to a July wedding conflict. I find myself staring down my September 12th Rugged Maniac race with extreme trepidation. I usually start running in the Spring but when I could not participate in the July race, I pretty much shut down my training. I’m out of shape and now there’s probably not enough time to prepare…I’m toast.

Frustration.

There’s nothing worse than contributing to the WordPress.com support forums and not being able to edit your contribution. The WordPress.org support forums allows a short window of time to go back and clean up a mistake or add something meaningful that you forgot the first time.

Apple TV, AirPlay and the Harman Kardon Aura Wireless Speaker System

My family has been pretty happy with the addition of our Harman Kardon Aura Wireless Speaker. The setup was pretty easy and the HK Remote iOS app is fairly straight-forward to use.

The sound quality has been a huge improvement over the television or the iMac speakers. AirPlay compatibility was a huge selling point for us. We can send music from our iOS devices and other Apple computers quite easily.

Our only gripe is when the Apple TV occasionally loses its connection with the speaker and defaults back to the television. We have the television on mute and when it flips like that, we need to switch it back in the Apple TV’s AirPlay settings.

It could be more of an issue with my second generation Apple TV. When the fourth generation Apple TV comes out, hopefully in June at WWDC, I’ll get the new model and perhaps solve my issue of losing the speaker.

I’m not an audiophile but the sound coming from the speaker sounds great to me.

schulte.mn is back again, too.

There was a time where I was running a self-hosted blog on schulte.mn, but I found that I just didn’t write enough to continue to pay for hosting.

As I mentioned before, I used to have the schulte.mn domain running a WordPress installation. My hosting company, TextDrive, moved me over to Joyent and then back again to a TextDrive after some sort of rebirth. I admit that I didn’t keep up with all gory details regarding my hosting. I think the second incarnation of TextDrive slipped off quietly into the night and along with it, my old posts and site. I wasn’t super invested in my old content. C’est la vie! I had to look that up. I did try to jump back into the fray with Linode a few years later, but even then, it was more than I needed for a simple blog. I’m sure their services are great — it just wasn’t a good fit for me.

Eventually, I just started to redirect schulte.mn over to Twitter. Twitter is something I actually use and it seemed like a logical move on my part.

I got back in the blogging game on May 7th with WordPress.com and decided just the other day to reestablish schulte.mn again. WordPress.com makes it so simple to map a domain. Seriously. $13/year is all that it will cost me for the service. Very reasonable. Did I mention easy? It was!

The worst part of the whole process is waiting for the DNS propagation to complete. The changes eventually completed in less than 24 hours but it seemed like an eternity when everything else went so smoothly.

Not only can I say, I’m back, but schulte.mn is back, too.

From “Strayhorn” to “Powell”

I had a brief conversation with Matthew on the Slack #forums channel that spurred some memories about what I think was my earliest use of WordPress.

A #forums Slack conversation I had with Matthew.

Back in February of 2005, Matt Mullenweg introduced “Strayhorn” and released WordPress 1.5 to the world.

Announcing WordPress 1.5

(This is my favorite part of what I do.) To the 12,126 of you who have already downloaded WordPress 1.5, congrats for being on the ball. We had a “soft launch” on Monday the 14th while we worked out some infrastructure issues and we’re now very ready to announce WordPress 1.5 to the world. This release is named “Strayhorn” in honor of Billy Strayhorn the pianist and sublime composer who worked closely with Duke Ellington and wrote tunes like “Take the A Train” and “Lush Life.” We thought he was perfect to represent the power and elegance of this release, which has been under intense development and testing the past few months.

I’m not sure I can definitively say that “Strayhorn” was my first use of WordPress, but it’s certainly a moment in WordPress’ history that I can definitely remember. Pages were introduced, the plugin repository became a thing and theme templates continued to evolve as did spam mitigation. I was so impressed with Kubrick (the default template for WordPress) and then Michael Heilemann rolled out K2. Wow! I really thought that theme was cool. Heilemann introduced some other concepts that were later adopted like widgets and a settings page for themes.

All the stuff we see and do with WordPress today started with some very humble beginnings and has grown tremendously in the last ten years. The “Strayhorn” release seems like it was a huge turning point and I feel pretty fortunate that I was able to witness a chunk of it in those early days.