Starting on September 6th, I’m going to be joining the team at Woot. Yes, that Woot. I’m super excited to get started there. Of course, since their software team is located in Seattle, I am going to have to (read: get to finally) relocate up there. I’ve loved Seattle ever since my first visit 15 years ago. The city, the climate and the countryside are all extremely appealing to me.  Another bonus is that I’m going to be relatively close to the large grouping of friends who moved to Portland after college.

Of course, it’ll be sad to move away from all the people and places around the greater St. Louis area, but we will definitely be back to visit. I will also try to keep this blog up to date on stuff going on with us  in Seattle.

P.S.
I can’t believe I’m moving to the city of PAX the weekend after PAX. Nooooooo!

This weekend, I decided that it was finally time to move on from that job and accepted a position as Senior PHP Developer at The Loud Few, a great web marketing and development firm in downtown St Louis (literally a block away from the City Museum, happiest place on earth).  While I will definitely miss working with everyone at the college, I know that I will face exciting new challenges when I start at The Loud Few in a couple of weeks.

For now, I guess I’ll have to finally unpack those boxes I brought with me when we moved to our new offices a few years ago.

P.S. Yes, I realize that this is my first post in a year.  I’ll do better this year, I promise.

So here I have been in London for five days and I haven’t even written a decent blog post about it yet.  There’s just so much to talk about!  Julie and I are having a fantastic time.  The folks at MOO are just as cool as you’d think.  Today, they let us take part in their Easter egg hunt.  Sadly, between Julie and I, we only found a fourth as many eggs as the winner, so we did not get to take the giant chocolate egg home with us.  Alas.  After work, they invited me to go to a pub (an actual English pub!) with them.  I had to leave earlier than I would have liked (it was fun hanging out and I hope to get to know them a bit better next week), because we went to the awesome Jonathan Coulton show up in Camden tonight.  Look for videos on YouTube, they should be up soon.

Going backwards in time, I took an evening stroll through an historic part of the city the other night.  It was quite a bit of walking, but coming up out of the Underground into Trafalgar Square was breathtaking. Everything I had seen so far was basically a modern city with some old brick and crazy streets.  I suddenly felt like I was in an old city (in fact, I am).  From there, we walked down to the Palace of Westminster.  We walked right past Downing Street, but didn’t realize it until we had already passed.  From there, we walked around Westminster Abbey and up to Buckingham Palace.  We’re going to see more of some of these places and I’ll keep you updated.  Tomorrow, it’s off to the Tower of London, the Tate Modern and Shakespeare’s Globe!

That’s the other thing.  I already have a place that I post most of my quick little thoughts and they’re already coming into my blog.  After a little digging, I found a very useful plugin called QuickPost that can bring one of the most useful parts of Tumblr’s functionality in to my WordPress blog.  For short text blurbs, you may notice that I stole the design idea from Matt.  I’m saving tons of vertical scroll space by compacting the bits of text into one or two line segments.

If you have any comments about this new design feature, let me know.  I haven’t decided whether I want video and photo “quick posts” to share the same design as the text posts.  That left bar looks kinda weird on videos and photos.

Last night, we visited with Len and Nora and their relentlessly enthusiastic children.  I think I’ve had around 10 awesome portraits made of me (Julie got a couple too).  The ones they gave us will be going up on our fridge when we get home.  We got to be on their podcast, so go check it out.  Tonight, I got to play some “slayer” in Halo 3 with the kids, who ended up teaming up on me and the praising my “skills”.

This morning,  Julie and I went to see the house from A Christmas Story.  It has been recently remodeled to look as much like the house in the movie as they could make it.  It should be noted that most of the scenes in the interior of the house were filmed on a sound stage in Toronto.  We got our pictures taken in front of a replica of the famous leg lamp.

After that, it was on to the Cleveland Police History Museum which houses an exhibit about the “Torso Murders,” complete with death masks made from the remains to aid in identifying the victims.  They also have a home-made shotgun and a gun wielding robot.  From there, we visited the world’s largest rubber stamp on the way to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.  I’d have pictures from there, but they forbade photographs because they’re laaaame

We’ll be in Cleveland, OH for the rest of the week and will post plenty of pictures of the world’s largest rubber stamp and the taxidermied carcass of Balto, the sled dog.

For these examples, we’ll assume that I’m in a folder that contains the folder that this domain’s files are in. First, we’ll want to make a backup of my files and then delete everything inside the subfolder for the domain. You can skip this if you’re doing a fresh install.

tar czvf dancoulter.com.tar.gz dancoulter.com
rm -rf dancoulter.com/*

Next, check out the Subversion “tag” that corresponds to the version of WordPress you were using. I was using 2.2, so it looks like this:

svn co http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2/ dancoulter.com/

Now, if you have made a backup of your files (if you’ve made any changes to your theme, or uploaded any files or plugins, you definitely need to do this), simply unzip that backup file you made before.

tar xzf dancoulter.com.tar.gz

If you look at your WordPress site now, you’ll see that it should be working normally.

Now to upgrade (this is the only step you’ll need to do to upgrade files from now on), just point your Subversion “working copy” to the new “tag”. I was upgrading from 2.2 to 2.2.1, so I just ran this command from the ssh prompt.

svn switch http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.2.1/ dancoulter.com/

Pictured above: Kevin McDonald (Left), Nicolas Sarkozy (right)