philisha.net

Wups. We said previously that we would be selling books, but forgot to mention them here. Anyhow, you can find them on the wiki. Post a comment or contact us if you’re interested in anything.

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Ok, I must be getting old now. Old or jaded. I no longer feel a compulsion to be able to hack on my blog engine, and I’m allowing myself to switch over to not only a non-custom blog package, but even one that’s not written in a language I feel comfortable hacking around in. On top of that, I’m even going with one of the built-in templates. The horror.

I just got a little tired of keeping Typo running on my home server. It’s grown so huge and bloated since it started that I actually feel a little guilty about how I used to tell people how great it was. I could switch over to its successor, Mephisto, but I want something that’s easy to run on my Dreamhost account rather than my home server since I’m going to be gone and don’t want things to fall apart in the mean time. I’ll let Dreamhost worry about keeping things going; it’s worth the slight loss of control.

There are still a few rough edges regarding the migration: I haven’t gotten comments moved over yet, and some of the posts are showing up in their original Textile formatting. (If links look like “this”:http://site.com then that’s why.) Should be able to fix that momentarily. Permalinks are also different now; don’t know how hard that will be to fix. Comments are moderated until I can set up the Akismet spam blocker. Bear with us as the dust settles.

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Well, we’ve been saving up for a while… Not posting for seventy-two days on this blog to prepare for one big (in impact, if not length or quality of prose) post.

In January, I got a call from my dad about someone he met in Indonesia. He had been working with his team in the city in which I went to boarding school for seventh through tenth grade. There was a fellow there who ran a software development shop who he talked to, and apparently they were thinking about switching over to developing for and with GNU/Linux, using Ruby on Rails, and other Free Software, but they are somewhat unsure of how that works and how they should handle the move. The thing is, it’s all technologies I’ve been working with for the past few years. My dad immediately thought of me and mentioned it to me.

I thought it was a little crazy, but the more I thought about it, the more the idea appealed to me. Alisha has also gotten pretty excited about it too, especially since she hasn’t been there before but has heard a lot about it. So we talked with the folks over there, and our plan is to head over there right after Easter and stay for a month. I will be training them with the new tools and new styles of development and maybe even doing a little managing, which would be a first for me. Anyway, it looks to be a great opportunity, a chance to see Indonesia again, and a time to expand my professional skills.

Right now Alisha and I are deep in the process of packing up things. Not only do we need to get ready for our trip, but we’re also going to be moving out of our apartment in La Habra before we go. When we get back, we’ll be staying with Alisha’s parents in Oceanside. This
will save us lots in rent—about the cost of the flight. It can be hard to make choices about what to keep and what to get rid of. I’ve even ended up putting a few books I haven’t read in the “get rid of” pile, which probably just means that we have too many books. Anyhow, we’ll be posting a list of stuff we’re getting rid of on my wiki, so you can peruse that once we’ve got our stuff in order. We’re keeping all the good stuff, though.

So this is a pretty huge change for us. The fresh air and beautiful mountains of the area around Salatiga will certainly be a different scene from what we’re used to here. We’d appreciate prayers for wisdom and safety during the trip. We’re really excited to get going, but we’ll miss all our friends around here immensely.

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