Fall Update

November 16th, 2009 / 1 Comment » / by Ryan

What do you mean fall is practically over? I know, I know.  I really haven’t forgotten about the blog.  I was walking to my car last week and it was snowing and I thought, “hey it’s freezing, what happened to all of those nice cool days of fall?”  Then I realized, I’ve worked right through it.  Work has been crazy for the last few months and we’ve still got a few more weeks to go.  Looks like those projects that I’ve been wanting to do before winter aren’t going to get done… oh well.

Since so much time has passed since my last entry, I’ve had a lot of time to think.  I’ve decided that I want to redesign this blog.  I’m just using a template that I found somewhere, and while I like it, it isn’t entirely unique.  I expected that because it is a template, but I think I’d like to do something that’s all my own.  I do have “ideas”.  Don’t expect it anytime soon though, because my ideas are pretty crazy and I don’t really have the time for that right now.

I did also come up with a new idea for an iPhone App.  I’ve already started putting together a prototype for that one.  I’m not going to give away any details on that just yet, but I hope to have that finished up in a month or so, would be sooner if my job would let up a bit.

Anyway, consider the silence broken.

Twitter

August 18th, 2009 / No Comments » / by Ryan

I was going to write this whole big post about how I never liked or understood Twitter and how I only checked it out because I felt it was part of my responsibility as a web developer to keep on top of the trends of what is currently popular on the Internet and blah blah blah…

I won’t bore you with any of that.  The short version is, I didn’t understand it then but now I’m a fan, simply because a lot of the time I don’t have enough to say to fill up a whole blog post anyway.  Since a Twitter post is limited to 140 characters, it forces everyone to just get to the point and I like that.  I really like that.  I added my Twitter feed to this site a while ago for those of you that don’t have a Twitter account. For those of you that do, follow me here: http://twitter.com/rminnick

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Popularity

July 30th, 2009 / 2 Comments » / by Ryan

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, blogging is hard (for me anyway).  I’ve read a lot of articles about blogging and how hard it is to make a living as a blogger and all the tips and tricks and guidelines to make it work.  I don’t worry about it too much because honestly I didn’t ever hope that I’d be able to quit my day job because of this blog.

I follow a lot of different blogs, and I was recently noticing that one blog in particular – not going to name names – has not posted a single thing this whole year (which is particularly annoying because there is no RSS feed so I have to manually go check the site for new posts). Looking a little further I saw that there were only 3 posts in 2008, 5 in 2007, 4 in 2006, 8 in 2005 and 18 in 2004. In 2003 there were 34 posts, which is a more “acceptable” level of posts by blogging standards, but even that many is less than 1 per week and that was over 5 years ago! The blog in question is still considered to be pretty popular and even scored the owner a book deal and corresponding book tour. So how is it that a blog with such a shoddy track record became so popular?  My guess is that it’s just plain dumb luck.  Someone in the right place at the right time by pure coincidence.  I was watching an interview with a software developer recently where attributing his success he says he “stumbled into a big steaming pile of gold”. I think that sums it up nicely.

I know there are bloggers out there that really work at what they do, and there are also those who really work at it AND have a bit of luck to kick them up the ranks.  Then there’s me, who doesn’t really do either of those. But I’ve got the making a few sporadic posts per year part down, so I’m ready for the dumb luck and a book deal part. Who am I kidding, I don’t have enough to say to fill up a book. At least there’s no pressure on me to blog more often.

Healthy Cookie Bars

July 7th, 2009 / 2 Comments » / by Ryan

On my wife’s old blog (which is no longer active) there was a recipe for healthy cookie bars.  We tweaked it a little bit to make it even healthier and I wanted to write it down here because they are too good to forget.

Combine:
3/4 cup canola oil (I suppose you could use olive oil, but I don’t know how the taste would change)
1 cup brown sugar
1 large egg
2 tsp vanilla

Sift in and blend:
1 1/2 cups whole wheat flour
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp salt

Stir in:
1  cups quick oats
1/2 cup chocolate chips (more or less, depending on preference)

Press into 9×13 glass pan, sprayed with olive oil (or other nonfat cooking spray). Bake at 350 for 14 minutes. Set glass pan on cooling rack to let cool.

EDIT: Ok, so I realize that a lot of people are probably put off by the fact that “healthy” and “cookie” are in the same sentence.  I’ll post a picture the next time I make these to help convince you that these are GOOD.  Don’t write them off just because it says they are “healthy”.

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Small Tweaks

May 19th, 2009 / 1 Comment » / by Ryan

I made some small changes to the sidebars of this site, because I just noticed that the exact same content was available in two places so I wanted to eliminate the redundancy (archives and recent posts were in the tabbed box area and in the colums below it).  I also added my Twitter feed.  I know that only 2 people read this site anyway, and they probably had no idea that I was Twittering, so now everyone is a winner.

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