Wootopia.net

A bundle of appetites

Stitched together by memories

Fed by sensation

Unspooling through time

I went and visited my family this weekend, and took some pictures. I’ve put them in the Easter 2008 gallery. Happy Easter!

Early July, 2003 found me a victim of “downsizing,” or for the even more cowardly, “rightsizing.” Losing my job just in time for my birthday didn’t sit well with me, but at the same time, I had seen it coming. I’d been sending out resumes, but the economy of 2003 was such that young Computer Scientists with a small amount of IT experience weren’t exactly in short supply, and I didn’t get a single callback.

However bummed I might have been, I hadn’t lost my sense of adventure. Talking about my plight with a friend of mine who had graduated just that spring, we decided that if the business world wasn’t beating a path to our doors, we’d beat our own path to it. So, with a handshake and a sense of optimism, Clever Bison Computers was formed.

In retrospect, we were fairly clueless. While we were fine technologists, and dedicated to working hard, we didn’t have a good grasp of running a business. Someday I’ll probably write a long, introspective post about what I learned from the whole affair, but that day isn’t today – I’m here to talk about web development!

As the more experienced programmer of the pair, the development of our website became my priority. I knew the web development I had been doing just a few months prior would be inadequate for the task, so I fished my friends for suggestions, and ended up buying a couple of O’Reilly books on PHP and web development and an SQL manual. After spending a week uploading the contents of the book to my head, I got to work.

I found an online storefront called OSCommerce that was open source and seemed to provide a lot of functionality that we needed. Of course, the code was messy, and while I had a fine background in theoretical computer science, the practice of web development was a field of which I had a tenuous grasp at best.

The months went on and I tweaked things and added features, and it certainly occupied me well enough. In the end, however, we just weren’t doing enough business to make Clever Bison Computers worth our time, so we agreed to keep it as a side business while we both pursued other, hopefully remunerative, interests.

I just can’t win…

So I’ve been working on a consulting project, and I’ve been having a great deal of difficulty getting the hosting server to work with CakePHP, the framework I’m trying to use. After spending a week trying to get it working, along with many factually incorrect but utterly unhelpful exchanges with their tech support, I’ve essentially given up on hosting the project with them, and I’m pursuing other options.

Of course, the reason for this is that while fighting with the hosting company is great fun, the client doubtless expects actually progress on the project. So, I downloaded my files from the nigh-useless hosting server, installed XAMPP, which is a “double-click-to-install-and-you-have-a-complete-server-environment” application so I could see the results of the code I was grinding away at, and got back to the business of writing code. Several frustrating yet productive hours later, I decided to call it quits around midnight.

While saying my goodnights, my attention is drawn to something odd. What is that fizzing noise? Why is it bright and orange behind my computer?! WHAT’S THAT SMELL!?!?! And at that point, my development computer goes dark.

Dead power supply – it shorted and burnt, so far as I can tell. I *could* RMA it, IF I could get access to an “invoice number” (whatever that is) and I’m willing to fax them details, get an RMA number, ship it to them, have them decide if they’ll honor the warranty, and then have them ship it back.

Or I can just drop $150 on a new power supply. Which I’ve done, and when it gets here we’ll see if the power supply simply discovered the joy of cooking itself, or if it took other pieces of hardware along for the ride.

If I ever incorporate, I think I’ll register “Flaming Web Development, Inc”