I’ve recently moved to jenn.com for my “online presence.”
For a while (read 12 years), I’ve let jenn.com sit with the idea that I’d eventually turn it into an online Web referrer + Email host + OpenID service for people named Jenn. However, I never had the time or to build it out and work out the business logistics.
I may eventually revisit the Jenn-service idea, but for now I’m blogging at jenn.com.
See you there, and thanks for stopping by.
It’s been so long since my last post — and with the move and all, it might be time for a new beginning.
So, hello there. I’m Jenn and I’m still alive.
It’s been a rather hectic past few months, but there has been momentum in a forwardish direction.
I have much to write about, some I will post about later.
There were two trips across the Rocky Mountains towards the Pacific Northwest and on to Vancouver Island — one in a huge 26′ Uhaul truck. I was originally going to rent a 17′ truck, but last minute worries about too much stuff proved well-founded after the larger truck was filled to the top and back door. I still have too much stuff.
There was a really great send-off party (and after-party) organized by Mike Edwards and Lorenzo Carver attended by friends from Boulder Open Coffee Club and beyond. So many thanks to the people who came out. I will be back, but I’ll miss you all in the meantime.
There’s my new swanky pad in what I’ve learned is in the James Bay neighborhood of Victoria. I’ve been out and about and have found the local market, post office, walking routes and a quick walk downtown. There’s also a helipad nearby, for when I need to get to the airport or Vancouver or even Seattle (When the Victoria Clipper passenger ferry just won’t do).
I’ve been experiencing a lot of server grief — mostly by my own hand in trying to optimize the Boulder infrastructure (oops) and to preserve disk space on the yallery web server (oops again). There’s some impending potential grief that will hopefully be averted by the timely deployment of new servers asap *crossing fingers*
Logistically, my move couldn’t have been any smoother and I was really lucky. I’m now reconnected to the Internet and I’m ready to get back to work. Let the work begin.
Hmm, this is the second post regarding a major upgrade of Wordpress in a row — without any substantive posts made since forever.
I’m writing this from the Bay Area, where I’ve been visiting friends and re-centering after a busy and mind-numbing summer of all-consuming contracts that pulled me and my brain away from my web-related world.
I’m meeting some of Yallery’s San Francisco members tomorrow and will be participating in a conference this coming weekend. I’m hoping to be back in Yallery-mode when I return home to Boulder.
There are also some fairly large changes coming up in my life:
I’m leaving Boulder at the end of January, but will be back visiting Boulder-Denver regularly as soon as the revenue-generating Yallery is unleashed.
This is a positive move for me and Yallery, I believe. There’s a small but strong start-up and tech community on Vancouver Island and I will be very close to friends and past clients in the Seattle and Vancouver areas and a commuter flight away from the Bay Area. It’s time to make Yallery real.
My blog software (Wordpress) was full of well known holes and it was well past the time I should have updated my installation.
After reading that scammers have started to exploit these holes, I decided I’d better update now rather than after a 12 year-old pwnd me. If this post is successful, it means the update has gone well.
I saw this out of my home office window tonight and had to grab a camera and get a clearer look.
Amazingly lit clouds 1
Amazingly lit clouds 2
I’m guessing that the sun light is blocked from below by the mountains to our west leaving radiant tops — pretty incredible. If I wasn’t half-naked when I ran out to get these photos, I would have run to the park with my EF 20mm 1:2.8 wide-angle to capture the whole row of clouds.
Click on the photos for a larger picture.
My mother and I did our annual trip to New Mexico a couple of weeks ago. Though our trips are always relaxing, our primary interest is in visiting all the galleries we can fit into our time there and seeing great art (a close second would be finding and eating great food!).
The following works found their way into my focus and into my collection:
Yei Mask Sculpture by Elijah John, son of David K. John. This piece was part of a show of artwork sold to support his travel to China in search of his Navajo roots. My mother has one of his father’s Yei Masks in her collection.
Three new miniature seed pots created by Julio Mora. I met Julio during the 2005 Santa Fe Indian Market, at the Frank Howell Gallery where he was working as part of a Mata Ortiz potter demonstration. The piece he was working on that weekend became the first of his works in my collection.
A seed pot in the Mimbres style by Acoma potter Rachel Concho, sister of Carolyn Concho, who’s works are already in my collection.
The highlight of my art buying spree: "Observational Notes on Lepus" by Timothy Chapman, recently featured in Southwest Art magazine. The second my mother and I saw this painting, we both knew it would be mine. I love this piece.
These pieces are also now included in my Yallery collection. (and yes, I do collect rabbit art)
The worst part of our trip has to be our stay at the Hilton Santa Fe Historic Plaza, where virtually anything that could go wrong, went wrong. My mother and I each paid for a night of our stay in Santa Fe at this Hilton — by the end of our stay, my mother received her money back and I received a credit of the 35,000 HHonors points I paid plus an additional 40,000 “oops sorry” points. Thanks to the manager for trying to put things right.
I’ve been living in Boulder since early 1999 and every year since, as Memorial Day approaches, I’ve thought that doing the Bolder Boulder 10K Race would be a cool Bouldery thing to do.
This year, my mom was visiting and in planning our time together, we decided to enter the 30th Bolder Boulder and join the “2 Hour” walking waves. We finished and my time was 1:43:21.78 (averaging a 16:39 mile) — my mom’s was around the same.
We’re planning on entering next year’s race and improving our time.
Yallery.com is still softlaunched — meaning that we’re not “officially” promoting our services while we work through some important issues and implement remaining features.
That said, early this month, I presented our service at the Denver Boulder Founders Meetup and the Boulder Denver New Technology Meetup to share our progress with the local tech and entrepreneurial communities.
As I discuss Yallery.com with people, it became increasingly obvious that I needed something other than old and unrelated business cards to hand out. I was also planning a trip to Taos and Santa Fe in New Mexico and thought a postcard would be handy as they are the promotional “lingue franca” of the Gallery industry. I designed and ordered some cards and postcards.
Another obvious need was stickers — It’s a Web2.0 rule I think. I began to look around and ask friends about sticker printers. It came down to two companies, and ultimately one — a local company named Sticker Giant.
Yallery.com moves into meatspace
John Fischer, founder of Sticker Giant heard that I was considering another company to print up our Yallery stickers and made an incredibly generous offer to print up our stickers. I’ve had one of each on my Powerbook since they arrived and they are high quality. Thanks John, we’ll be ordering our future stickers from you.
I was highly impressed with the quality of the product from my initial Overnight Prints order — the postcard and my business card were produced in Kentucky and matched my design exactly. Unfortunately, my second order was produced in California and while the reverse is the same quality as my original card, the front gradient and colors look extremely washed out — very dull and ultimately inconsistent. My email to Overnight Prints about this was ignored and I think my future printing will be done by someone else.
While exploring the hammockverse earlier today, I decided to interrupt my laptop reading to look over some of my older blog posts. It seems that my first blog post was made on Thursday April 5, 2007 at 6:53pm.
In this year, Wordpress claims the following statistics:
There are currently 119 posts and 18 comments (not including the IntenseDebate comments), contained within 51 categories. Now I don’t remember making a post nearly every third day, but who knows — I could be a sleepblogger.
I hope to at least double the first two metrics in Jennlog’s second year.
Wow, so this is my first post in March. I’ve been meaning to post but I’ve been busy with Statuspalooza and a number of other things this month.
I ended last month in California, working on a contract in Sacramento. I returned to Boulder on March 1.
The next week was a very busy event week for Tech/Start-up folks in Boulder with Open Coffee, Silicon Flatirons’ IP Law Panels at CU and the NewTech Meetup all occuring on Tuesday, then the Tech Cocktail event happening at The Foundry on Thursday.
On March 13th, the Boulder County Business Report published an article about the Boulder TechBootstrap project Patti Miller and I have been developing.
Statuspalooza took a fair bit of my attention and energy this month, because not only did I need a new work visa, but I needed a new passport. With the exception of a very grumpy US immigration agent (who felt I had misrepresented my experience to the US government in 2000 and therefore demanded that I re-substantiate my claim to work in the US on this application or be denied entry), it all went very smoothly.
Statuspalooza Tour 2008:
I spent the week at my parents’ place. It was nice to relax for a while and visit over Easter, which I haven’t done in years.
There’s a Yallery update that’s about half finished that is meant to standardize our css implementation. I hope to create a more formal document structure that will enable an easier fix for Windows browser issues (mainly font sizing and layers). I’ve also spent some time looking into IE6 fixes and workarounds and concluded that there will never be an IE6-compatible version of Yallery, so upgrade your old nasty Windows browser.
Lastly, Billie the neighbor cat has gone missing. He hasn’t been by to visit in over a month and a half, so it’s been pretty lonely without my keyboard-hogging head-butting bud around.