I developed a bit of an obsession with Chipotle’s guacamole, it was good but expensive, so I decided to make my own. I’m still tweaking the recipe but this is where I started and gives great results. You can find avocados with the other fresh produce at your grocery store. (extra points if you find them at a market!)
I work for a small web shop and enjoy a very casual atmosphere. This is great most of the time, but recently it caught up with me. We were all sitting around the conference table eating pizza on the company’s dime and watching the classic Batman film over lunch. I was sitting there scarfing down pizza next to my coworkers and my boss when our sales guy poked his head in and asked me how much we’d charge for hosting a simple e-commerce site.
We’re not exactly what I’d call a premium services sort of company, so I quoted him a price of $25/month. But I quickly added that at that price point it really was a bargain and should probably be more if the client is likely going to be a pain in the rear or otherwise using up our support resources. You know… breaking their own site after demanding FTP access or calling us because they forgot their password or they need new email accounts setup or any variety of other tech support/ customer service related calls.
I’m going on in my whiney client voice when I see that my boss is looking at me weird and the sales guy is bringing his finger up to say “shhh”. I realize that there was a reason he wasn’t having pizza with the rest of us. Evidently he was busy selling something to a client in his office, the door wide open just 10 ft from where I sat. My boss laughed it off, so it wasn’t a huge deal but I certainly didn’t make the sale any easier.
While I never found out for sure if the client had heard me, it was likely that she had. It never hurts to watch what you say, at least a little, especially in a small office, you never know what might happen, even if I did dodge the bullet this time.
Whenever you’re building a site that has a directory of businesses or people or anything with a physical location, it commonly lends itself to offering a search form which allows the user to search by distance from a given location.
For example, a national or state-wide company with many branches may want to allow their website visitors to find a location near them. Or perhaps you may be building a directory of specialist doctors, or a site with real estate listings, and want to offer users the ability to search within X miles from a given location. It sounds like a difficult feature to implement but in reality it is not.
Pretty spiffy new iPhone app just released; available in the App Store for $19.99 is Wyse’s PocketCloud, an iPhone application that acts as a thin client offering full terminal services/windows remote desktop support right on your iPhone. PocketCloud.
H1N1
What a fantastic read on H1N1 and the basics of DNA And RNA as they function in the body using the analogy of a computer program. The author then goes on to suggest ways in which the virus could be improved, from a reverse engineering standpoint. Read the original article »
Quick Wordpress tip for you, especially useful when you’re initially setting up your blog. If you’re switching from theme to theme and then find yourself unable to add certain widgets, it’s probably because they were left enabled on a different theme. Try switching back to the theme you were previously using, remove all of the widgets and then try adding them again after switching to the new theme.
I’ve recently been charged with finding a couple new hires for entry level positions at our company. We posted an ad on Craigslist and within a day had dozens of applicants. If you find yourself new to the area of web design and are applying for your first job, here are some things to keep in mind, in no particular order:
“Hello, my name is Dave.”
“Hello Dave, nice to meet you… so what do you do, anyway?”
“I work as a Web Developer over at Sparkfire.”
“Oh, cool.”
This is inevitably followed by a blank stare. It’s at this point which I’m always torn, do I go off on some suitable explanation of “web developer”, or do I just move on.
I’ve been away from running Linux on my desktop full time for a bit and I’m already getting a bit rusty at some of the command line details. I’ve stepped up to the task of deploying an inhouse server for a local web development company who needs a platform to do internal testing and to act as a general file structure. I’ve always been hesitant in the past to buy physical books because so much information is at hand with a quick google search. That being said, I found the format of Linux Phrasebook (and Apache Phrasebook) to be just right, offering comprehensive coverage of core CLI functions in linux with examples and plain english descriptions. If you don’t have years of hardened linux experience burned into muscle memory, this would be a great book to have at hand for looking up a command or option that you can’t quite remember, and at 7″x4″x1″, 400 pages, it is quite compact. You can find it at Amazon.
With so many other positive changes that I’m trying to make, and after acknowledging the reality of meat consumption and its impact on our environment, I’ve decided to do my part and consume less meat. A lot of people immediately run to meat substitutes, boca burgers and soy bacon and tofu, but for quite a while I didn’t bother, I just started eating more fresh vegetables and taking care to just reduce my red meat intake. Steak and burgers were first to go, nor do I eat pork often, and now I just have chicken and fish occasionally. A friend of mine tried a blackened tofu wrap at a cafe inside a great, local, organic supermarket Nature’s Food Patch, and I took and interest in trying tofu, so I picked some up and decided to try making chili. A quick Google search returned this great chili recipe that was easy to make and came out amazing.
