I recently changed my mobile number.  It was a seemingly innocuous act; but in reality it threw a huge wrench into the cogworks that touched practically every facet of my life.  This isn’t hyperbole, people.  It’s almost surreal how much this one data point in my life affects everything else.

I had to update my credit card company, bank (and other associated financial institutions) and insurance company.  Update my security settings to my Email account (Gmail allows SMS confirmation for account recovery).  Notify Human Resources at work about the change.  Update Payroll.  Update various government databases because of my reserve status and the emergency response database. —Notice I haven’t mentioned people yet?

Bosses, watch centers, landlord… Why am I not done yet?
Family, friends, a few co-workers…

This footprint is HUGE for something as little as my mobile number.  I’ve changed addresses 10 times in the past 5 years; the majority of which happened in the span of 6 months.  I’ve had to go through this process every single time… and for how much work this has caused me, I feel like I may as well have moved for the trouble.

Once, I went to play mini golf where everyone took the popular colored golf balls.  I wanted blue, naturally, because it was my favorite color.  However, it became apparent that this was the case for everyone as all three shades of blue had been taken.  I didn’t complain or sulk about it at the time, but instead took what was left over—because you know what?  I’m an adult.

Just so happens the golf ball no one wanted was that hideous orange-yellowish color everyone just went along with in the 70’s because plastic apparently couldn’t be made in any other color.  I made the best of it, though, and decided to call it butterscotch—because you know what? I’m an adult.

I then proceeded to kick their asses.  I mopped the floor with them.  I made them rue the day they ever decided to take all the blue golf balls and play against ME at mini golf.  And at the end of each hole I shouted at them with tyrannic exuberance, “Butterscotch RULES!”

Because you know what? I really only pretend to be an adult.

Finally! You’ve probably noticed the addition of the Photoshop button in the main navigation and I’m very happy to cross that sucker off my to do list.

A few of you were around while I was tweaking the navigation and working some last minute bugs [there are still plenty]. I smiled to see the hit counter increasing on the new pages [that’s right, I’m tracking you all], despite my frustration that it wasn’t running at 100%.  I’m still tweaking, mind you, so I don’t consider this solution finished either… I’ve been having incredible difficulty troubleshooting Fancybox [for some reason it doesn’t want to work. at. all.] so I scratched it for the time being in favor of having something rather than nothing.

Additionally, the addition of the gallery has caused a problem with the calendar [which will only get worse over time].  It’s counting my photos as posts, thusly leading you to post pages that don’t exist. Not nice if you ask me. I’m still not sure what I’m going to to about it yet; most likely I’m just going to scrap the calendar in favor of a previous/next button feature [this will also solve the max 5 post issue; you probably didn’t notice so don’t fret].

1. Have you all know I have the book, and I am digesting it.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all of this, it’s that I’ve been out of the web design game entirely too long.

I think back on high school web design, when I used to code my pages in nothing but notepad. Could you imagine, with my spelling? That was nearly a decade ago, and a lot of things have changed [imagine my surprise to finding out CSS can now create whole navigation buttons].  I hate to admit it feels as if I’m still catching up.

God, Wordpress made me lazy.

You’ve probably noticed the little differences over the last few weeks [...nod with me even if you haven’t], and I’ll admit that I’ve pretty much been sticking with the low-hanging fruit on my procrastination list.  This is mainly because I’m rather lazy and I’m still wrapping my head around the best implementation of photo galleries in EE2.  Perhaps I’m just dumb, but it isn’t clicking for me.

2. I’ve just returned from a random [and less than enthralling] trip to DC for business, only to turn around and fly out again after the weekend.  This time, however, for vacation.  That’s right, my Washington friends, I’ll be returning to the Evergreen State next week to celebrate the 4th of July in the middle of the woods [three cheers for psudo-camping].

The good news is, with all this frequent flyer miles I’m getting I’ll be booking a free trip internationally in no time.  Heed that warning!  I’m pretty much planning a take over of the Korean peninsula [I couldn’t be that much worse than ol’ KJI, could I?].

3. I spammed my blog with the correspondence I’ve been keeping with Pandora [mostly for giggles] as I found it personally entertaining.  Sure, it only entertains me; but isn’t that what all this is about anyhow?  You can all thank me if my changes get made in future iterations of our favorite internet radio station.

4. Until next time.

Hi Raldo,

Thanks for the feedback - I have passed it on to the appropriate department and hopefully some of these changes may be implemented someday.

For now, I can tell you that we give assume that if you dislike a song, then you don’t want to hear it. If you like it but not on the station you have created, we give you the option of moving it to a different station. These two tools should be enough to get by on.

Hope this helps.  Thanks for listening!

Best,
Jesse