Personal « The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell

Category : Personal

Slide On The Ice

Filed Under : College Life,Personal by Douglas Bell

Aug.15,2010

“Ladies and gentlemen, take my advice: Pull down your pants and slide on the ice.”

So goes one of the most memorable quotes from the television series M*A*S*H, spoken by Dr. Sidney Freedman, as he reminds the camp to remember to take time to enjoy life every so often.

If there’s one thing that I remember about this time one year ago, it’s that I was quite nervous and anxious about the uncertainty that lay ahead of me. For the first time, i was leaving pretty much everything familiar in my life behind, and had absolutely no idea what my life was going to be like even a week away. And it was with these thoughts that I arrived at American University, and launched myself headfirst into a bunch of general-education classes (read: classes that helped me figure out what I don’t want to do with my life), an insane and needless late-night impeachment scuffle, surviving through the snowiest winter in District of Columbia history, organizing a televised presidential debate (and almost losing my sanity doing so), and quite a bit more. Throw in seven (count them, seven) all-nighters, six of which were during the final six weeks of spring classes, and a bunch more late-nighters throughout the year, plus a truckload of papers and homework, adjusting to living away from home, and all of that, and I had one hell of a freshman year.

And that is why I bring up Dr. Freedman’s quote to start off this post, because that’s what I want the theme of my sophomore year to be. This year is going to be different. This year is going to be enjoyable. This year I’m going to take things less seriously and enjoy my time at American University.
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My August Pre-Travelogue

Filed Under : College Life,Personal,Travel by Douglas Bell

Aug.14,2010

Sorry for the nearly-one-month absence from this blog; let’s just say that I’ve had my hands full during the latter part of summer. Of course, tomorrow I’m planning to kick out a bigger blog post wrapping up the summer and looking ahead to my Fall 2010 semester, as I sojourn back to AU once again. However the story of my multi-faceted travel plans next week warrants its own blog post, especially since I like talking about itineraries so much.

I’ll cut to the chase first — I’m flying back to Washington, DC on Monday. I’m taking off on Southwest Flight #1142, departing San Francisco (SFO) at 9:50 AM and arriving in Phoenix (PHX) at 11:45 AM. Then, after a long two-and-a-half-hour layover there, I’m hopping on flight #155 at 2:15 PM, which will arrive at Baltimore at 9:35 PM.

But from here is where the story gets interesting. Originally, I had planned from there to hop on a Metrobus, then hop on Metro, then hop on the AU shuttle to get back to AU, getting in at around a quarter after midnight. Late, yes, but I would be able to check into my dorm, since after all last year I arrived at AU two days earlier.
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OSCONvasion 2010: Let the Portlandvasion Begin…

Filed Under : Personal,Technology,Travel by Douglas Bell

Jul.17,2010

Last year, I organized a phpBB users meetup for the first time coinciding with the O’Reilly Open Source Convention, called OSCONvasion 2009, thanks to the fact that OSCON was in San Jose. It wasn’t a huge meetup, but it was a great experience to get to meet with a number of the colleagues whom I’ve worked with over the internet, and it was a lot of fun. And we resolved that we wanted to plan this again for 2010, and maybe even see if the phpBB project could sponsor a booth.

Well, this year, OSCON moved back up to Portland, Oregon. So, unperturbed, we made plans last January to follow it up to Portland, and will be having yet another OSCONvasion 2010 meetup this week. Plus, the phpBB teams are also going to hosting their own booth there yet again.

Of course, in order to get to Portland, there is one added variable appearing on my radar that I didn’t have to worry about last year: travel. However, I’m actually really looking forward to this one, because for the first time, I’m not going to be flying out of state; I’m going to be taking the train! Specifically the Amtrak Coast Starlight, on a 19-hour ride to Portland from San Jose. (I’m departing from San Jose because of this pesky thing called the San Francisco Bay that gets in the way of trains on the peninsula. It’s actually kinda cool, because I can joke that I’m running the “Olympic Relay” from last year’s OSCONvasion to this year’s!)

When I depart on Monday evening, I’ll first be taking Caltrain to get to San Jose, departing San Mateo at 6:57 PM and arriving at San Jose at 7:32 PM, comfortably early. My Amtrak train will then depart at 8:39 PM, and arrive in Portland on Tuesday at 3:40 PM.

While in Portland, I’m actually staying with a friend, Lorelle VanFossen, whom I’ve gotten to know well at past WordCamp San Francisco events and who lives in the Portland area. After the long bout of travel, I’ll meet up with her at the train station, and won’t have anything else planned to do on Tuesday.

Of course, the awesome thing about OSCON is all the amazing stuff available for free (mostly on Wednesday & Thursday). Not only is there an amazing Expo Hall with some of the best in the open source software ecosphere, but also a number of free sessions, attendee-organized Birds of a Feather sessions, and lots more. In between bouts of volunteering at the phpBB booth, I’m also going to be roaming around the expo hall interviewing folks at the booths for special episodes of phpBB Weekly (hopefully involving video).

The OSCONvasion 2010 festivities take place on Thursday, with a schedule quite similar to last year. Once again, I will be moderating a special phpBB “Berties of a Feather” session as the main attraction for OSCONvasion. (It’s really a Birds of a Feather session, but we like to rename it after Bertie, our mascot.) A number of presentations are on-deck for our hour-long session, which we are planning to once again stream live via phpBB Weekly (hopefully with live video, or at least live audio). After the BoF, we’ll have an open group dinner at the nearby Burgerville restaurant.

Finally, on Friday, we’re going to meet at the Convention Center and then go for a group visit to the Oregon Museum of Science & Industry, which should be a fun experience. (Last year, we went to the San Jose Tech Museum on kind of an impromptu decision, so I thought, why not plan for the same kind of idea this year?) After the OMSI and lunch, I’ll be heading back over to Portland Union Station to catch my return Coast Starlight train, departing at 2:25 PM and arriving in San Jose at 9:55 AM on Saturday. From there I’ll take Caltrain back up the peninsula, completing my four-and-a-half day trip.

This year’s OSCONvasion doesn’t quite look like it will be as big as last year, or maybe it will be about the same. These smaller meetups really are hit-or-miss, especially given that we’re doing it as part of a larger convention, where really anyone could come along and join us. But one thing that I learned last year is that size doesn’t matter. What matters is the experience, and getting to interact face-to-face with colleagues whom you’ve previously only gotten to interact with through a computer screen. It’s a unique and special opportunity, and I’m really looking forward to it.

Oh, and the nineteen hour train rides. I’ve always loved trains, but have never ridden on one for more than two-and-a-half hours before. That should be an interesting experience, and may very well cause me to spit out a number of follow-up blog posts.

So with that, it’s T minus 43 hours until my “All Aboard,” so keep following me on Twitter as I start my trek up along the West Coast! Maybe I’ll see you there.

Meet Smorgasbord 2.0: My Personal Blog, Reloaded

Filed Under : Personal,Web Development by Douglas Bell

Jun.24,2010

That’s right, I just can’t seem to leave well-enough alone for a long period of time before I have to get up and start working on a brand new refresh of my personal website. And it is in that spirit that today I proudly announce the unveiling of Version 2.0 of The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell.

Interestingly enough, I’ve held a personal blog for myself for about five years now, and it’s gone through a number of iterations as my experiences and needs have changed over time. I actually went back a ways to refresh myself with the history of how it has evolved:

First Webmacster87.info (March-June 2005) — I didn’t know what I was doing, so I actually set up a phpBB2 forum and posted my blog posts on there. Needless to say, it didn’t last too long.
Webmacster87.info 2 (June-July 2005) — My first experience with WordPress, version 1.5. (My, how it has changed since then!) This version utilized some kind of notebook-like theme. Though I didn’t stick with it for long, you may have noticed that I’ve since returned to those roots, eh?
Webmacster87.info 2.5 (July-November 2005) — I remember actually declaring this “version 2.5.” Unimpressed with the notebook theme, I adopted a cooler theme with red/silver boxes that glowed on top of a black background. It was kind of cool, and my most meaningful content here was commentary on Hurricane Katrina. Went down due to web hosting issues.
Webmacster87.info 3 (1 Week in January 2006) — I don’t even remember why this went down, but for a week I had a black-themed K2 version of WordPress 2.0 which I used solely to post Macworld 2006 photos.
Webmacster87.info 4 (April-August 2006) — This was the first time that my blog truly had a good design. It ran K2, but had a header with a big “W” themed like Apple’s logo for Mac OS X Tiger, made by a good friend. However I was using a friend’s webhosting service for free, and he unexpectedly abandoned it in August, causing me to lose all of my content.
Webmacster87@WordPress.com (October-December 2006) — I restarted my blog WordPress.com with the same theme and layout, again on K2.
Webmacster87.info 4.5 (January-April 2007) — On January 1, I took advantage of WP.com’s new Domains feature to reinstate Webmacster87.info with my WP.com blog, reinstating its proper name. Nothing else changed. (I still have all of my blog posts since 1/1/07 posted on this site!)
Webmacster87.info 4.6 (April-June 2007) — Maybe I got itchy feet, but I decided to splurge and pay for web hosting (partly in order to host a new site for phpBB Weekly), and so I moved Webmacster87.info off of WP.com. Same theme and design, still.
Webmacster87.info 5 (June 2007-June 2009) — This was the biggest redesign of my personal site ever and represented my first effort digging into the WordPress codebase and tweaking stuff (which is now second-nature to me). I loved this design, particularly the header, which is why it stayed in place for two straight years.
Smorgasboard 1.0 (June 2009-June 2010) — I had purchased the DouglasBell.us domain back in early 2008, which originally redirected to Webmacster87.info. However, as I readied to graduate high school, I recognized that Webmacster87.info was getting hard for a lot of people to type, and I started to have a desire to “graduate” from Webmacster87.info, which represented my high school years. Unfortunately, this version was somewhat rushed, and did not serve me particularly well over the past year.

New Design & Features
Smorgasbord 2.0 represents about a month of planning, followed by a week of actual work, doing a lot of planning and fine-tuning of many corners of the site. It takes advantage of the newly-released WordPress 3.0, and a really nice new theme called Wood is Good. While it doesn’t have very many more features than the previous version of Smorgasbord has, it presents them in a much cleaner, more organized manner.

The homepage puts much more emphasis on the blog posts, thanks to some CSS which I stole from a website I like. The Google Calendar is still here, and sits side-by-side with a Twitter widget. (Much more attractive than the unordered list I used before.)

The Weather has now moved to the sidebar, using the new WP-Weather plugin, and my Social Media listing is now back on Dustin Bachrach’s ShowYourself plugin, a blast from the Webmacster87.info past. A new Linkroll links to other organizations that I’m affiliated with, and then there’s the Random Quote. And I’ve gotten rid of the “Tip Jar,” because I got some flak about that previously.

I’ve built-in some customized location-awareness to the site. As a special addition to the theme, you’ll notice an extra slip of paper in the header identifying my current general location, which is also where the date/time/day of year is now shown more prominently. Plus, the rest of the site, including the Weather and Google Calendar has been tweaked on the back-end to be integrated with this location awareness as well. So now you’ll be able to quickly see where I am as I take my cross-country journeys and follow along. Not bad, eh?

Finally, I’ve made some updates to my About Me page (formerly called the Colophon, but I decided to apply a clearer name), and I have a new Portfolio page highlighting my web design work. The Portfolio is just the first of a few more pages that will be coming soon to highlight some of my more professional work and other projects. That’s right, there are a few more features still in the pipeline.

New License
Like many people, I want to see the internet become a more open place. Not the Facebook-kind of “open,” where people have no privacy, but “open” where people are more willing to share knowledge and ideas with each other. And so it is in that spirit that I have changed the license used on this site to a Creative Commons Attribution License. The previous Attribution-Noncommercial-ShareAlike license allowed reproduction of my work but still established rather strict guidelines. The new license now allows anyone to reproduce my work in any way, shape, or form, with the only condition being that my work is attributed to me.

New Commitment
I used to be a frequent blogger–blogging every day or two–up until the end of summer 2008. Then, I must have gotten busy or something. And during the first year of Smorgasbord, I almost entirely abandoned this blog. This is something that I want to change, which is why I am also committing to blogging, on average, at least once per week. I’m also going to try to broaden my scope from just blogging about myself, to also blogging about more general thoughts on college life, issues affecting my local area(s), technology, etc. In short: I want more content and better content on my blog, and I’m going to try to make that happen for at least the remainder of 2010.

So that’s Smorgasbord 2.0. Not exactly a huge slew of new features, but a lot more polish and cohesiveness that will make this a personal site that I can be proud of again. I’m looking forward to getting a lot of use out of it in the weeks and months to come. Enjoy, and thanks for visiting!

Coming Soon: Smorgasbord 2.0

Filed Under : Personal by Douglas Bell

Jun.1,2010

I know, it’s been forever since I last posted here. Partly this is because I’ve never quite been happy with the way that I redid this site at this time last year. As such, The Smorgasbord of Douglas Bell will be fully restocked with an extreme makeover, which will launch sometime this month. (No specific launch date has been set yet.) Until then, stay tuned…