It's been an awfully long time since I've posted anything here and I want to update you and let you know I'm not dead (I know you were wondering about that...) and that I have a few plans for moving things around on here. First, I've been posting more and more to my Tumblr page and I also freshened up the design a bit, so I'm thinking of porting that design over to here. I also want to move this site into Django, so that I can experiment and learn with it. Finally, I want to break out my blog into a code/nerd division and a 'life' division – the former being the stuff posted here and the latter coming from a feed from my Tumblr, though I haven't decided on the best way to do this. The reason being that I don't think anyone cares about posts about my dogs, the places I eat, etc. except maybe some of my friends, so I'm hoping to banish stuff like that to my Tumblr account and keep this place "strictly business" so-to-speak. Sound good? I hope so. And if you have any experience setting up a code blog or you have any awesome method of integrating syntax higlighting or demos, please let me know!

I've always been a late adopter of new, cool stuff and, as a web developer, it's not a good habit to have. For example, I was late in getting into each and every social network including MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. It's in my nature to avoid the hype I suppose. I decided recently that anything new that I see, I'm going to sign up for it. Or at least seriously consider it. I have to keep in the now, stay hip with the kids, stay open-minded. And for my job, I never know when someone is going to come along and ask if we've done any work with (insert over-hyped new company here)'s API or whatever.

I have two recent adoptions into my repertoire: Posterous and Tumblr. If you're unfamiliar, they're both Tumblelog or Micro-Blogging platforms, A.K.A. blogs for the A.D.D.-impaired, A.K.A. everyone using the internet. Both have some great features and I think the beauty of them (and perhaps the format in general) is the simplicity of it all: simple to imbibe and simple to use.

We've been using Posterous as a blogging platform over at Cuban Council and it's been really great to use. Normally getting everyone to contribute to a company blog would be difficult, but a good chunk of us have been adding regularly, probably due to its ease of use. You don't even need an account to post anything. If your email is added to the list of contributors then you're set. You send an email to post@myaccount.posterous.com (simple to remember) using the subject as a title and the body as the post content, including images and other media attachments that are parsed into a blog post on your Posterous site.

I've also made a personal Tumblr blog and of the two, I think Tumblr really takes the cake. Posting is easy in either one, but with Tumblr you can completely customize your site design using HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc., with a very simple template syntax to display your Tumblr post contents. On Posterous you're stuck with the generic site-wide "sticky note" styling. One of the features of Tumblr that blew me away is that you can post audio to your blog directly from your phone! You set your phone number in your account, along with a pin number, you call the Tumblr number, enter your pin, it records your voice, and blam! It's on your blog! There are only a couple of slight pitfalls in my mind: first, the post email is a random key (e.g. ti7kwn44@tumblr.com) so it's not so easy to remember, and second, there's no built-in commenting system. The latter, however, is remedied by an API with which you can use a plugin to allow commenting.

To continue my bandwagon bonanza, I've finally started off into the world of jQuery! Alright settle down, I know that was huge. I've been a big MooTools guy for the longest time and I haven't purposely avoided jQuery, I just haven't needed to use it (much). Again, with my job I should have a decent grasp on the various Javascript frameworks out there so, with jQuery being the biggest one these days, I finally dove into the tutorials tonight and I'm actually pretty excited about it. I've used jQuery before — or a better way to describe it: stumbled around jQuery before — but looking through the tutorials gave me a good basic understanding that I was missing before and introduced a feature to me that I think is awesome: Live Events! I remember hearing about this feature but I never quite understood it until I put it into practice. I realize I'm aeons behind on this, but if you're interested in Javascript and you don't know what live events are, I'll explain why it's so cool. I've had situations before where I'll load HTML content into a div via AJAX, and I need some Javascript events to apply to some elements in my newly added code. Let's say I want all my links to log their 'href' value into the Firebug console when clicked (MooTools style):

$$('a').addEvent('click', function(e) {
    console.log(this.href);
});

or jQuery style:

$('a').click(function(e) {
    console.log($(this).attr('href'));
});

With MooTools, I would have included some inline Javascript with my loaded HTML, duplicating the code above to take care of it, and turned on the evalScripts option like so:

var oRequest = new Request.HTML({
    update: $('put-html-in-me'),
    url: '/some/url/',
    evalScripts: true
});

Two things suck about this: it's redudant because I'm applying the same events to the same type of objects using two different sets of the same code, and it's using something with the word eval in it, which makes me pee my pants a little. So jQuery live events takes care of this by using whatever selectors you want and applying the events to the all DOM elements as they are added:

$('a').live('click', function(e) {
    console.log($(this).attr('href'));
});

This means that any 'a' tag existing in or added to the DOM is going to log it's 'href' value when clicked. And I can use jQuery's Selectors to apply it to more specific elements if I need it to. Pretty damn sweet.

And that's about all for my nerdy rant tonight. If you're a hip kid and you think there's a bandwagon I need to jump on, let me know. And yes, I already know about Flutter.

That's right, we've been all settled in Portland now for about 3 weeks and we love it! We managed to paint, unpack, put everything away, hang curtains & shelves, etc., etc. in a seemingly record-breaking span of a week. Here are a couple of shots of the house:

And you can see the rest in my lady's Flickr set here

Being that we're new to the city and we're both working from home now, we've been doing a lot of exploring to get to know the city and avoid going stir-crazy. So here is my top 5 list of discoveries so far:

1. Signal Station Pizza
   This place just looks like it would be delicious so we gave it a try on a whim for lunch one day and it was fantastic! I had a slice of the "Ivanhoe" which has mozzarella and provolone cheeses, salami, roasted red pepper, and roma tomatoes and it was amazing! The pizza gets 4.5 stars from me—it would be 5 but the crust did not blow me away. But amazing pizza right down the street from my house pretty much rules.
2. Pastrycat
   Delicious! You can't miss this bright pink building on Lombard (the main street near our house) so we tried it on our 2nd day here! We've tried their baked potato scones, ham & cheese scones, Tillamook cheddar biscuits and cinnamon pull-aparts—all of which were phenomenal! And it's run by the kindest lady who is also a Bay Area transplant.
3. John's Marketplace A.K.A. The Magical Beer Emporium Wonderland
   Colby told me about this place and it's amazing selection of beer before I got here so we went last week and discovered it together! It just looks like a stretched out, plain liquor store and even has a B.O., urine, and beer smell to it but the selection of beer was mind-blowing! And the best part is that you can buy by the bottle! I found a seemingly hard to find German favorite, Weltenburger there and we tried out a few mystery brews including a delicious espresso stout from Portland-native Laurelwood Brewing Co., among others. We will definitely be going back for more.
4. James John Cafe
   This is a nice, quiet cafe that serves my new favorite, Stumptown! It's conveniently located right near my place and conveniently delicious. It seems nice and quiet and the dude knows everyone's name who comes in, maybe even mine soon enough...
5. Voodoo Doughnut
   OK this was discovered before I got here so it's technically cheating but it's still amazing! I've been a good 4 or 5 times since being here and I don't think it will ever get old. The Miami Vice is my very favorite so that's been a consistent choice but I've also been trying out some of their other stuff like the Grape Ape (very grapy), the Mango Tango, the Butter Fingering, the Bubble Gum donut, and much more to come.

We've got a guest room so I dunno what you're waiting for?

The 2009 Sasquatch! Music Festival recently announced their lineup for the event coming up May 23rd – May 25th. I checked out the site and it is so littered with awesomeness that I couldn't resist blogging about it.

The list is quite extensive: The artwork above is done by one of my favorite design/illustration studios, Seattle-based Invisible Creature. And if you visit the site and click the little TV on the right, the extremely well-done animation that ensues is done by JD Hooge & Gridplane, friend of the Cubans and Portland natives. And the list of performers includes not only awesome musicians, but comedians too! I love me some stand-up comedy! Some of the musicians that leapt out at me include: Kings of Leon, Silversun Pickups, Gogol Bordello, The Decemberists, Explosions in the Sky, Devotchka and tons more, sprinkled with the comedy radness of Demetri Martin, Zach Galifianakis, and Todd Barry.

My new Portland home (which we are leaving for tomorrow night, woah!) will be relatively close but still 4+ hours away—very tempting! The addition of $50+ per day price tag should keep me away, but I will dream about how rad it would be to go. If you plan to attend, please hold up a lighter/run a circle through the mosh pit/whatever for me!

I decided I'd add a little something to my site that I'll call 'Nerdy Morsels'. Working with code all day, I'm bound to stumble on weird stuff here and there that will throw me for a loop and force me into hours of debugging over something insanely simple. Something just like this happened today (though it didn't take me too long to figure out) and I figured I'd share it with you. You might think some of these posts will be the most retarded thing in the world, but likely so do I, but I hope they help someone.

I was working on some MooTools Javascript magic today, applying some events to an <a> tag to animate open a menu:

<a id="btn">Click/blur me for some stuff to happen</a>

Basically I wanted the menu to expand onclick and I was trying to work some trickery to hide it onblur:

window.addEvent("domready", function(){
    $("btn").addEvent("blur", function() {
        // Do some stuff when focus is removed
    });
});

You might already see the problem, but I was setting both 'focus' and 'blur' events with no result, and I ran a few circles trying to figure it out. The simple reason why? I did not set my 'href' property! If you want blur/focus events to occur on a link element, you have to set one! I simply added "href='#'" to the tag and it worked fine. Obviously when you're thorough with your markup you'd almost never have no 'href' property in a link tag, but since I was just using it to trigger an event, I didn't think too much of it.

Simple as that—that concludes my nerdy morsel for the day, hope it was nerd-liscious for you...