Jayeblog

I've been into rock-climbing "for-reals" for about a year now--I've been going to a rock-gym steadily since last September. Before that I had taken a "course" at school and done some outdoor climbing on the granite cliffs at Denrock Park near my hometown. But I've been climbing for the past year at the rock-gym at RIT, the aptly-named Red Barn. As far as indoor climbing goes, this place is the tops. First off: for students, it's twenty dollars for three months of climbing. That can't be beat. I'm into bouldering (no ropes) much more than I'm into free-climbing (with ropes),... (read more)

I have three applications on my laptop that I use every single day. Office is nice to have, I open up CS2 whenever I'm working on web stuff, and Paintshop Pro is a very close friend of mine (maybe I'll explain later), but these are all ultimately expendable in my day-to-day computing experience. The three applications that I cannot do without are my browser, my IM client, and my music player. I have a feeling most people could probably say the same thing.

But one of these things is not like the other, one of... (read more)

Hey look, a poster! If you're in the Chili-Henrietta-Rochester-New York-North America area on July 12th, I highly recommend you come to an improv show in the evening. It's BrainWreck's first off-campus performance (and hopefully not its last), hosted by the Leaf & Bean coffeehouse in Chili. The show starts at eight and should run until ten. Come kick back, sip some coffee, and laugh until your tonsils hurt. Did I mention there's no charge (except the price of your coffee, but that depends... (read more)

What do you look for in a homepage? Are homepages even relevant nowadays? I think, ideally, your homepage is a page that grants you speedy access to any or all of your most visited sites. So when you open a fresh browser, or double-click the tab bar, or do the ctrl+t thing, what are your options?

There are a number of browser-based solutions. Opera's Speed Dial (and its imitators) is a pretty nifty solution, offering nine spots to quicklink to your favorite sites. There's also the ever-advancing curtain of address-bar intelligence, which are probably even faster than... (read more)

So I started this new co-op job. I'm working at RIT for one of my favorite professors doing all kinds of webwork. My current project is setting up a new site (not designing it--that was done last quarter, apparently) for the Software Engineering department using Drupal. When I got here, I had no idea what Drupal was. In the past week, it has become my favorite piece of web software.

If you want the full story, I'd go check out the Drupal website, but I can give a summary here. Drupal is a giant, extensible, open-source Content Management... (read more)