travis' brain dump

Ok, so… anyone who has visited my site in the last year has probably tapped their fingers on the desk for more than a few moments waiting for content to load. Well, you weren’t the only one and I’m pretty sure that was one of the reasons why I didn’t update more content out here. It’s been just as much a pain for me, but I’ve lacked the time to actually dig into it and figure out what’s going on.

With my vacation ending today, I figured I’d do one more me thing before I return to work tomorrow… So with that, I’m pleased to say, the sites is working much cleaner now that I’ve slimmed down some of the plugins; removed outside sources from loading content to the blog; upgraded and tweaked php significantly and did some pretty neat stuff with the sql backend. In short, I believe became a victim of bloating my own blog and essentially shot myself in the foot because of it.

So… will I get to posting useful items anytime soon? I honestly don’t know. I’d like to think I will but given the last year and my work schedule working through a large merger, I really got burned out and didn’t want to do anything “personal” in the technology world. The sad part? I usually dump stuff here that I know I’ll forgot and I’ve forgotten quite a bit of the cool stuff I figured out over the last year because I didn’t dump it off here for reference later. It may work out, I’ll probably end up repeating some of this work as we prepare to do some similar activities in moving objects around our domain, in the cloud and into a dumpster, so we’ll see. 🙂

For now, one less thing to haunt me, lol.

So, the question came across the other day… ‘dude, why don’t you blog anymore? I still reference technical stuff from your blog from time to time and would love to see more’ … Good question! Why? Oh yeah, because I’m lazy.

Actually, in truth, I’m not lazy. I just have a lot going on. I used to blog a lot more when I was stressed out, it helped to just throw my thoughts out there somewhere of something important or even unimportant so that was one less thing in my head rolling around. Hence the name, Travis’s Brain Dump. Well, let’s just say that my head got less complicated with a job change and had a lot less stress and stuff going on in my head.

Should a new post be indicative of more stress coming? Not really. I figure I need to just do this from time to time. It’s quasi therapeutic to some degree I guess and hey, at least it can become my personal knowledge base that is shared with the world. Right?

So yes, new posts on the way, starting today.

– T

A man at the gym told me this morning, “make it a good day.” interesting, I never thought of it that way. Good advice.

So, I figured I’d at least get one post in every month in 2012. That being said… it’s January 31st. I think for a while there I was shunning technology a lot. Crawling into my little hole and trying to ignore electronics for a while seemed like a fitting thing to do with all the workload I was under for so long. It’s been really nice to have the last couple of months be somewhat “normal”, if there is such a thing. I rolled into 2012 with some cool tech toys… upgraded my failing HTC G2 with a nice Samsung Galaxy S2, scored myself a Transformer Prime and I’ve been on a rampage of updating things the last few days on the backend of my servers. Feels good to be back in the saddle again. I may even pick up some lightweight development projects for android along the way if I can keep this up.

So, 2012… a new year and lots of things to do. Fitness, major revamp of that project in order this year. I haven’t gained any weight back but I’ve been in this maintenance mode for all too long. It’s quite pathetic and I need to bust out of the plateau and just finish the job. I only have about 10-15 lbs to go out of my journey, why just settle now? 215 is right around the corner and is taunting me. Still, where I’m at is quite the departure from the 270 I started at. *shudder* Aside from the obvious non-resolution, I’ve decided this year to spend some time getting some things in order in my life… the typical gambit of things… doing more family stuff, finances, future goal setting/planning, etc… etc… I figure I’ll get it all figured out just in time for the 12/21/12 apocalypse… *laughs* whatever. Top on my list of things to do, be a little more focus on who I should be… This blog is probably going to turn into the most bi-polar representation of my psychological state that anyone has ever seen trying to meet that goal. Should be fun from an observers point of view though so stay tuned!

With that… I need to go to bed.