February Disco Death + Sketches
Disco Death last Friday went great, everyone had a blast. We're already planning big things for March - stay tuned.
In the meantime here are some brand-spankin'-new Disco Death sketches:
Conviction & Love in the Inner Circle: My Favorite Uncle Gets Married
To be fair, I should clarify: I only have one uncle - but if I had more than one, I'm confident he would be my favorite. Because he is awesome.
Congratulations to my Uncle George (my father's younger brother) as he celebrates with his beautiful new wife which he is completely in love with. Check out this great instant message that he sent me:
I'm silently confirming to myself that when I get married, this is the mindset that I aspire to. In a world of (what often seems like) people making compromises and getting married for questionable reasons, it's inspiring to witness someone so close to me demonstrate such conviction, love, and courage.
Congratulations George, we love you and we're very proud.
February Disco Death is Tonight
This month's Disco Death is tonight at Xiong Mao in Chengdu. Check it out if you're in town - and if not, we might record the sets and put them online. I'm picking up Enso from the airport in a few hours!
6 Weird Chinese Supermarket Snacks
Last night, while walking through the aisles at a local supermarket, it occurred to me that I should take a closer look at some of the weirds thing I'm surrounded with. I bought some snacks I ordinarily wouldn't, brought them home, took photos, and ate them.
I was joined by my one-man Wolfpack, Coffee. Check out the post on Chengdu Living.
You'll see there are some photos included, which I took by putting two table lamps together. How's this for a ghetto photo rig:
19th Step Updated, 2010 Year of the Tiger Edition
It's been another year, and I've made some updates to 19th Step.
It's been a few years now since I was really posting on a regular basis and I attribute that to spending less time traveling and having more outlets for my thoughts and ideas - but it remains a great place to dump my thoughts or drop a note about what I'm working on.
Makes it so much simpler
In the past 3 months I've been doing a lot of Wordpress design and development, modifying themes and setting up new sites. A few (Disco Death, Chengdu Living) of them are online, but the bulk are still in production. I'm looking forward to releasing those and in the meantime I'm having a great time learning more and refining my skills. It's nice to know that web development has gone in such a modular direction, it's far less of a headache than it was 5+ years ago because powerful, flexible, and straight forward content systems like Wordpress and Joomla have really blossomed.
Having full control over the things that I'm working on is also a luxury that I appreciate each and every single day.
Over the last two days, here are some of the changes I've made:
- Changed background, link, and title colors, added a tiled background image
- Added an RSS banner at the top and delegated the feed to Feedburner
- Enabled comments, avatars which work through Gravatar, and added "Leave a comment" link to each post
- Found the right combination of 14 plugins, like WPtouch, which makes the site look pretty on an iPhone or iPod Touch
- Trimmed down the categories. I deleted almost 10 categories that had fewer than 10 posts and assigned the relevant tags to those posts.
- Tagging previous posts. This is a work in progress but I've started the process of tagging over 5 years of posts!
- Added links to Chengdu Living, Disco Death, and Just Charlie to the sidebar
- Added a tag cloud to the sidebar. This will become more useful when the bulk of the posts are tagged
- Removed my e-mail address and social network links, and replaced them with a simple contact form.
Nothing left to add to this site except content!
Evening Fireworks
Fireworks explode in distance on the first eve of the new year. Taken outside my window
Chinese New Year Begins
Today, Saturday the 13th, is the first day of the Chinese new year. This year is year of the Tiger, and although estimates put the total number of tigers in China below 50, it's still a festive affair.
As usual, Chengdu has more or less closed up shop for the week. Restaurants are closed, streets are empty, and taxi's are difficult to find. As I look out the window in my living room onto the five lane street below, it's occupied by only the occasionally by lone pedestrians or bicyclists. This week I'll be eating a lot more Western food than ordinarily, merely because all the local restaurants that I normally visit closed due to the staff returning to their hometowns for the holiday.
I'm thinking about going to Tianfu Square, the citys center, to photograph some of the fireworks. If I don't do that, I'll sit on my roof next to a small fire and watch the fireworks shot off all around the city tonight. As of yesterday you can buy your own on the street from vendors who've set up red tents all around the city. Although fireworks are technically Chinese, they strike me as especially fun since I grew up with them due to 4th of July culture.
Fireworks explode over the harbor in Hong Kong as dozens of boats watch the show
This winter has been unusually tame - I haven't seen a single flake of snow and I haven't resorted to wearing my heaviest jacket out but once. The sun has been shining more, too!
Today I'm working on my portfolio. When it's finished I'll post it up.
Google Buzz
I've been checking out Google Buzz over the last hour or so and I have to say, it seems pretty great. Twitter is boring and Facebook is cluttered with things I'm not interested in, so Buzz strikes a good middle between e-mail and social networking. If you're on Buzz, feel free to add me - my e-mail address is justcharlie at gmail.
Oh, also - I wrote about Google Buzz and China for Chengdu Living, check it out. As always I'd be grateful to hear your opinion by leaving a comment beneath the article.
Sergey Brin announces Buzz in Mountain View, California
Impressed with the Facebook Update
You can tell that Facebook has a good idea of how to maintain it's market position. Unlike Myspace and Friendster before it, it's blown up and managed to not become a terrible site to navigate. In the updated version it's really presenting a lot of information in a clean and logical way. I wish more websites were this well designed.
The update is rolling out to all users gradually so you might be able to see it now.
Web Host Funny Business
I woke up today and noticed that Chengdu Living didn't come up. Then I checked DiscoDeath.net - also down. This really elicited a very immediate "OHHHH SHIT" reaction.
Turns out, the 403 "Access Forbidden" errors that were preventing me from viewing the pages were related to a PHP upgrade that my web host completed today. According to them, a "small handful of sites experienced outages". Fuck you, those were my sites!
Anyway - everything is fixed and working again, after a full day of hoping these guys can restore the sites that I trust them to host. Sigh.