April, 2005:

I’ve been wanting to make this break for a long time. Now that I’ve got several domains to hold it all, and software that can handle it reasonably well, it’s time to go for it. Only I’m having a really hard time regarding where to draw the line.

For those of you that don’t know, Jim Reverend isn’t my real name. It’s a combination of my real name, and a nickname given to me years ago. For the purposes of employment and allowing my family access to certain portions of the things that I put online, I’d like to associate my real name with some of the more family friendly stuff that I offer. If that means merging “Jim Reverend” with my real name and creating another identity for the stuff I’d like to keep hidden, then so be it.

So I’ve attempted to list out all the types of things that I put online, and break them into categories. I’ve placed a “*” by the categories that I would like my real name associated with. I’ve places a “-” by the things that I absolutely do *not* want my real name associated with. The remaining items, I could go either way with.

Of course, those items with the “*”s can never link to the items with the “-”s and vice-versa.

My question for you is three-fold.

First, are there any types of content that I left out that I should categorize? I want to make sure I cover everything to that I can make sure the plan will be easy to follow and obviously separable.

Secondly, do you think that any of the items below should have their categories changed? Have I done a good job at breaking it all up appropriately?

Finally, where should I leave the association with the name “Jim Reverend”? Should I leave it associated with the Technical, Family me, and make up a new name for the more personal things? Should I leave it associated with my personal life and my photography and remove the use of that name for my personal life and technical contributions?

Thank you for your help, it means a lot to me.

(* Technical)
Technical: Computer News
Technical: Mobile News
Technical: Software I’ve written
Technical: Other Electronics
Technical: Web services
Technical: Web sites
Technical: Programming links and news

(* Personal – Work and Family Friendly)
Announcements: Family
Announcements: Job
Journal: Personally Identifiable pictures (of family, friends, our house, vacations, etc)
Journal: Things I did today
Journal: Places I went
Journal: Places I’m planning on going
Journal: Places I’d like to go

(Photography)
Photography: Photography News, Tips, and Tricks
Photography: Nature
Photography: Things
Photography: People
Photography: Events

(Personal – Friendly enough)
Announcements: Personal
Articles: News, Politics, and Personal Beliefs
Articles: Movie/Book/Music Reviews
Photography: Women
Journal: Camera Phone Images
Journal: Phone posts
Journal: Silly personal updates of no importance
Journal: I love my family
Journal: I love my wife
Journal: I love my friends
Journal: Posts about Exercise and Health

(- Personal)
Photography: Soft Nudes
Photography: Self-Portraits
Journal: Bad things that happened at work
Journal: I hate my family
Journal: Poetry
Journal: I hate my friends
Journal: Personal Problems (Smoking, drug use, alcoholism, low self-esteem, etc)

(- Restricted)
Photography: Explicit Nudes
Photography: Nude Self-Portraits
Photography: Porn
Journal: Sex and Sexuality

I always make things more complicated than they need to be. I always go a lot further than I have to. I always over think and over prepare. As a result, very little gets done. That needs to change. Right now.

Writing software is easy. I’m really good at it. So why do I make it so complicated? It’s only difficult because I try to consider what other people might like to make my software more generally useful.

Well, I’m making a change. Fuck the other people. It’s my software, I’ll write it for me. Maybe later I’ll try to make it more suitable for you — but me first, dammit.

I’ve got about 40 minutes before it’s time to leave work. Since I’ve worked my butt off today, I’m spending these last few minutes on me. My goal is to whittle down the 70+ messages in my “INBOX”:http://revjim.net/pages/inbox/ and read/respond/write about the 23 items on my “TODO list”:http://del.icio.us/revjim/todo/.

You can watch the list get smaller, or watch it climb high by sending me new comments and emails. The choice is yours.

Jess made me a salad for lunch today. It was great. I ate it at 11am in the middle of waiting for a bunch of data to reparse after fixing a huge problem in a program that caused lots of data to not show up where it should. Yay Fun. But, I’m hungry again now, and I need to get away from this desk anyway. So, I’m going out for some fries. That okay with you? Good. I thought so.

Rails 0.12.0 is out, and with “this release”:http://weblog.rubyonrails.com/archives/2005/04/18/rails-0120-eager-associations-new-basefind-api-assertions-revisited-more-ajax/, comes many more benefits to drinking the koolaid.

First is the new “Eager Associations”:http://ar.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Associations/ClassMethods.html. Prior to this, accessing data from a related object would require N+1 queries — 1 to get the list of objects and another query for each object to get it’s related objects. The only way around this was to inject your own “piggy backing” SQL to retrieve the information from the other table. This, however, drove over the object concept of the associated information, since it now appeared to simply be an additional data member to the original object. With Eager Associations, this is all handled correctly. N+1 queries are now replaced with JOINs when requested and real objects are returned where they should be. This is a vast improvement.

Secondly, there is the new and improved method of calling “ActiveRecord::Base.find”:http://ar.rubyonrails.com/classes/ActiveRecord/Base.html#M000226 that makes remembering the syntax much easier than it was before and features nice integration with the Eager Associations mentioned above.

Couple this with more Ajax features, even more Assertions for testing, and the fact that this release is entirely backwards compatible with the last, and you’ve got not reason not to upgrade.

It Will Pass

(click to enlarge)

Went for a run again this morning. I’ve got a pretty decent plan that works pretty well to get my heart rate up without it beating right out of my chest.

I start out with a brisk walk from my house. After about 1/2 of the distance to the corner has been covered, I run until I get to the end. I go back to a brisk walk until I cross to the back street. Then, I run (though slower than before) the entire back street until I get to the end again. Then, it’s a brisk walk until I get back to my house.

This whole thing takes about 7 minutes. I only did it once this morning, since I got up too late. But, I intend to do it three times every morning. As time goes on, I’m sure I’ll get faster and will need a lot more running and a lot less walking to keep my heart rate at a good level. So, I’ll adjust it as I go to keep my morning exercise to somewhere between 20 and 30 minutes.

When you take that and add a walk that’s twice as long, though less strenuous work, on most evenings, and I’d say that’s a pretty good boost for my metabolism and a decent way to increase my cardiovascular health. Plus, it might even help me drop a few pounds.

There are lots of great services all over the web these days. From LiveJournal, to Flickr, to Del.icio.us, to Tada, to 43Things. And, from the looks of it, these services are only going to get better and more numerous.

The availability of all of these services, however, leaves a difficult question in the minds of software developers and website owners: do we reimplement these services on our own, or two we integrate with existing services?

If I want a weblog on my site, do I simply link to LiveJournal? Do I use LiveJournal’s integration options to provide a small stub to the information contained at LiveJournal? Do I use extensive integration options to make it appear as though LiveJournal isn’t in use at all? Do I house my own data and use LiveJournal only for the community via syndication? Do I forget about LiveJournal all together?

If I want a gallery on my site, do I simply link to Flickr? Do I use their badging service to display recent items on my site? Do I use their API and write my own code to allow their services to be deeply integrated in my site? Do I house my own data and syndicate my image into their service for the community aspects of Flickr? Or, do I ignore Flickr all together?

Reinventing the wheel is stupid. Services like LiveJournal and Flickr are great. They are featureful, and have a great community. However, relying on these services means giving up a large piece of control. If a feature that isn’t included with these services is desired, there is no way to add it. If these services dissolve, go down, or are no longer maintained, we are left without those services for who knows how long. Implementing them ourselves is possible, but means redoing what’s already been done, and missing out in the community of it all. Of course, we could write even more code in order to house our own data AND participate in the community of it all.

So where do we draw the line? What do we implement in our own software, or software that we use on our own servers, and what do we rely on other services to provide for us?

The decision becomes even more difficult when we start to see these other services implementing integration methods between each other.

So where do you draw the line? What services are you willing to have hosted for you and what services do you insist on hosting yourself? What would you do if, tomorrow, those services that you rely on from others were to disappear… what would you do?

I’m sure quite a few of you have noticed the Ads on this site. These Ads are powered by Google’s “AdSense”:https://google.com/adsense/ program. I’ve included them to attempt to offset some of the costs of running this site. I don’t get a lot of traffic, but I get enough to matter. In web traffic alone, I transfer more data in a month than Jess’ mom has hard drive space. The Ads just get a little of that back. They’ve been running for about 4 weeks now, and work on a pay-per-click basis (i.e. if someone clicks, I get paid). If everything keeps going as it is, I’ll make about $1 a day. Not great, but it helps a little.

Do the ads annoy you? Are they slowing the site down? Are they in a bad spot? Are they marked clearly enough that you understand that I am not directly providing that content? Did you even notice them?

I appreciate your feedback on this.