Fictional stories, in my mind, all fall somewhere along a line connecting two broad categories:

1. Everyday life, and
2. The extraordinary.

Dramas are closer to #1, while fantasies (the “fantastic”) are almost by-definition #2. The truly mundane is not exciting at all, but when events become too unbelievable, we lose our ability to connect with them. Read on…

This wasn’t supposed to be a full redesign. And really, it isn’t.

But the time had come for me to say goodbye to the home-brew CMS that was running this site. It was instructive to create a basic CRUD system from the ground up. But its been neither educational nor interesting attempting to bolt additional features onto it, when I had little idea what I was doing at the outset.

It’s silly to spend large amounts of time implementing what’s already been done many times over in open-source packages. Read on…

Programming languages vary in power. Paul Graham argues that it’s a mistake to use anything but the most powerful language available. And power is roughly equivalent to level of abstract-ness.

PHP is a very useful language. It’s got associative arrays that completely rock, a tremendous set of functions for string processing, and a truly extraordinary level of online documentation. Besides that, it’s ubiquitous on shared hosts, so it’s a snap to get started.

But PHP is missing certain language structures. I find it curious that it was not Ruby that revealed this to me, but, in fact, Javascript. Read on…

Our new class website has launched. And it’s a portal.

Google succeeded by being just a search and not a portal. The previous version of this site succeeded by being a private forum, not a portal.

So why have I made us a portal? Read on…