When I was a little boy (no older than 7 or 8), my parents took me to Disneyland in California and I got my first glimpse of the exciting future I’d been promised. In the Tomorrowland area of Disneyland, I remember being fascinated with the promises made by attractions like The Carousel of Progress and it’s vision of the world I would be inheriting and the magical interaction of human and computer.
Don’t Call Me “Christian”
Written by erh on
August 6th, 2010
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With a lot of thought, meditation, and heartfelt prayer, I have decided to follow the lead of Anne Rice and renounce Christianity. This decision is the ultimate conclusion to my lifelong struggle with my faith and my difficulty reconciling my logical mind from the things I’d been brought up to believe. A recent disagreement with someone I hold in high respect ended a long relationship built on trust and love and severely shook my flimsy spiritual foundation, but after thinking about that painful dispute non-stop for over a week, I finally realized what I needed to do.
The Better W3C Core Style Preview
Written by erh on
July 28th, 2010
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An article was posted on Hacker News about the W3C Core Styles page that I found very interesting. I’ve never seen these stylesheets before, but each and every one of them are very nice styles with an emphasis on cleanliness and readability. For whatever reason, the W3C Core Styles page offers an awful user experience with their style preview page. Their preview page is basically straight out of 1999, with a nasty form with radio buttons that force you to actually make a new page request to a silly URL with all sorts of nasty get parameters like family=3&doc=Sampler. Another crappy thing about it is that the form doesn’t remember your last stylesheet selection when you click the back button to return to the form to look at another style. Yuck! We can do better!
Surviving the Fall
Written by erh on
July 12th, 2010
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As an intelligent American young-adult, apocalyptic end-times scenarios have always been one of my most favorite day dreams. I always believed that I would be a “survivor” through sheer force of will alone. I believe that confronted with any scenario, I would be absolutely willing to do whatever it takes to survive at any cost. But, like any average naive American male, I have done almost nothing to prepare myself for any cataclysmic event and have not changed my mental model of what I would do to survive along with my loved ones. All of my fantasies revolved around me going out on my own and living off the land. Now that I’m married, my survival model has changed. I’m no longer responsible just for myself, but must alter my model to include my wife and two children. This family oriented survival model requires a radical adjustment in my plans and I’ve found myself rethinking everything I once believed would be necessary for survival.
I would like to preface this article by saying that I am not a “survival” nut. I don’t think that an apocalyptic end-time scenario is fast approaching and I’m not the kind of guy who stockpiles food, water, and gasoline in my garage. But I do like to be prepared for any eventuality and I think that at some point in the future, America (as we know it) will cease to exist. It seems to me that a failing empire is a historical inevitability and to claim otherwise is optimistic to the point of being stupid. I recently read Emergency: This Book will Save Your Life by Neill Strauss and it opened my eyes as to how unprepared I am for such an event. I promised myself that I would start doing some things to change this and be ready for anything. This is my first article about what I’m doing to get ready.
I Made a Cartoon!
Written by erh on
June 30th, 2010
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Inspired by the comedic genius of the iPhone vs. HTC Evo video, I set off to build my own little cartoon. As with any “writing” project I undertake, my creative process started pretty much the same way it always starts: I just started writing.
At first, I had absolutely no vision for the direction I wanted my little cartoon to take. I just wanted it to be funny. To my surprise, it quickly turned into a fairly realistic depiction of my thought process behind building UserPing.
Announcing UserPing.com
Written by erh on
June 14th, 2010
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For the last few weeks, I’ve been hard at work building my first commercial product. Essentially, I’m building an alternative real-time analytics product for small businesses. I’ve always been completely happy with the free analytics service provided by Google (Google Analytics), but I really like what companies like ChartBeat and GetClicky offer for real-time analytics. [...]
Someone Other Than Me Wrote Something Awesome
Written by erh on
June 8th, 2010
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It is with a heavy heart that I am forced to admit personal failure. I released PHPainfree a while back and then got busy building applications with it. I fully intended to go back at some point and write some nice tutorials and such, but my ADHD was forcing me to continue building new things [...]
AMA: Career Progression from Zero to Hero
Written by erh on
June 2nd, 2010
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Another wonderful Ask Me Anything question came in to my Tumblr dashboard today. This was an excellent follow-up question to the AMA question about freelancing from yesterday. This was too good not to repost here. The Question Anonymous asked: In your last answer you mentioned you love your job as a Senior Software Engineering. As [...]
AMA: How do I get started as a freelance web developer?
Written by erh on
June 1st, 2010
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On my tumblr, I enabled the “Ask Me Anything” feature that allows anonymous users to submit a question. Today I discovered that I had my first question and spent a little while giving it the best answer I could come up with. It was such a weighty response that I decided to re-post it to [...]
GitHub is the Best Thing Ever!
Written by erh on
May 28th, 2010
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While catching up on my HackerNews RSS feeds today, I randomly decided to open a link to a project to add magic Konami codes to any website. The project in question was created by someone named John Hobbs (whom I’ve never met) as a simple and fun little gag project. Over the span of an hour, I had downloaded the script, forked the project, made a change, committed my changes, requested a pull to John, and had my patch added to the main project–all with no fuss or muss. Today is the first time I’ve seen GitHub really work it’s magic and to be honest with you: I’m shocked at how great this process is.
