Migrating yourself

I have recently moved to Chicago, and it is one of those events that forces you to reconsider a number of things – the definition of home, your spatial distance from people that you took for granted, and a number of those “Big Life Decisions” to mention a few. Though it was never a thing that worried me (say apart from the weather), I could not help but recognize what awesome opportunity it was to purge one’s possessions and make a reckoning of what’s to come.

The wife and I sold many objects (not enough in her mind), loaded our various effects into an 18-ft. bullpup truck and hauled ourselves into the Mid-West, a term I still struggle understanding (as Chicago is obviously in the longitudinal center of the US).

I have also started my first legit developer employment - finally the time to put all that wisdom that has been accumulating in my browser bookmarks to work! I’m really looking forward to new ideas and have already found myself learning a bunch in the little time I’ve been coding for a living.

After the ritualistic dumping of old things and rearrangement of furniture, I’ve finally had the time to reassess my ongoing projects and my to-do list created at the beginning of the year. I’ve been inspired by the new scenery and the sad fact that I’ve read less than 10% of my book collection (granted, they are large books) and have decided to get moving. Every single errand in my to-do list is worth pursuing and I now get a rush of excitement when that happens. Lo and behold, it is all in our minds.

One of the items was my blog - it has been deprived of love lately, and I have an awfully long gap in between my latest posts. I could say I’ve been very busy with work and personal projects, but the truth is that I suffered from a lack of discipline. I’d gone off and heavily customized my Octopress site a while back, and it had become bloated and crummy. It is chock full of features, but I realized it was distracting me from my text. And content is king. Not good.

Listen. I was cruising in my web browser, and found an awesome spin by @mdo (of Bootstrap fame) in a clean, sleek design which did exactly what I wanted. It’s called Poole and I love its simplicity. Even better - it’s got enough structure to run with it, but I’m also hoping to review the SASS with the wife so she can get familiarized with this one I have since desisted from having the wife join me in one of my jolly framework-of-the-week adventures. She’s also made me realize we’re getting too old for yak shaving friction. I will write more about my thoughts re: finished software, and its potential revival in an upcoming post.

. I’ve tweaked some styling to my liking and added some basic listing to appease any with the patience to go back through previous posts I still really like the concept of poole and the clean lines of @mdo. However, yet again - there’s another set of widgets that need to be maintained/security-patched/etc. And then wait, somehow GH has an inexplicable obsession to continue running with Jekyll as the default for GH pages. What gives?

. If you like the tweaks head over to the repo and nab yourself a copy.

And what will happen with the older posts, say you? Well they’ll be migrated later, of course. Or maybe not. This is one of the benefits of a reboot - you get to recreate the universe, albeit a really small one. Oh well.