Pocket Revolutionary

I hate blogging about blogging, and I agree with Jeff Atwood’s rants against “meta-conversations” (semi-ironically in his blog), but the act of blogging (or not blogging) is a valid part of my life to talk about right now. I am writing again after more than six months of nothing, and I want to explain what happened. Everyone struggles with ruts, but once or twice in your life you hit the rut, get thrown from your moving vehicle, and get hit by a train that whisks you away from your pursuits. After mixing metaphors like that, I’m sure you want to know what happened.

I was (kind of) committed to writing last year. I had worked myself to a quivering puddle, but I had saved up all of my vacation days to splurge them in December in a relaxing three weeks of writing, reading, and video games. Unfortunately, just a few days into my bliss my father died. My world turned upside-down, and I dropped everything that didn’t have to do with family or funerals. I dedicated the front page of this blog to a memorial and watched as comments rolled in dedicated to my dad. At that point, I was swept up in the tornado of family, funerals, and estate management, so I couldn’t write. Honestly, though, sometimes I just didn’t want to see my dad’s picture move off the front page. It felt disrespectful or “too soon” for those who were still grieving. Then my mom got sick, and I had another project to keep me away from the keyboard as I drove back and forth to the hospital while trying to keep the web department at Generals International running. I tried off and on to post again, but it just didn’t feel the same and I only finished one article.

My dad’s death and my mom’s illness has thrown me off in every single way… so how do I recover or at least start writing again? Well, I’m not really sure, but for now I’m forcing myself to get back to good habits. My habits were formed over years and were wiped out with one phone call, so I have to force them back in. I’ve added a special repeating “Daily Tasks” bucket to OmniFocus. It forces me to repeat new habits (short ones, at least): read for 20 minutes, write for 20 minutes, clean for 20 minutes, etc. I could say that I’m turning over a new leaf and changing my lifestyle, but that wouldn’t be true. I’m just structuring in tasks that used to naturally be a part of my day until I can “want to write” without a checklist reminding me.

What else am I doing? I’m doing [whatever is important to me] now. I’m not putting my dreams off to wait for a long vacation in December when “I’ll have more time.” There’s enough unimportant tasks to keep me busy for lifetimes, but they won’t matter in the end. I don’t know what the end of this year will look like for me, but I do know my dad’s only regrets were the goals that he didn’t start pursuing until he was 50. He died after accomplishing so many dreams, but he spent decades waiting to start even more.

I don’t write in bullet points, but if I did, this article would be simple:

• Create habits
• Do something important

In a fit of productivity and needing to produce a bio for someone else, I have finally added an “About Me” page. For redundancy sake, I’m posting it below:

Hi, my name is Jeremy Greenawalt, and I’m the head web guru at Generals International. I’m also a freelance programmer, occasional consultant, accidental web designer, and non-commital blogger. Once upon a time, I attended the United States Air Force Academy (until knee surgery), and I’ve been a professional programmer/web developer almost non-stop since then (sans a stint at Fry’s Electronics and one year at a box plant). I grew up programming since I was 13, but I learned the sheer joy of PHP and Linux while I was working at FishNet, Inc. for two-and-a-half years as a software engineer and I got paid to work on fun projects like the open source shopping cart FishCart. I later worked as the systems administrator and part-time java coder at Tek-Tools until I left in 2005 to pursue my current calling at a ministry, Generals International, where I traded in my Linux skills for a Powerbook (now a MacBook Pro) and I’ve been building with TextMate ever since.

I continue to do a lot of work with PHP, and I’ve learned just enough Flash and JavaScript to keep clients happy. My favorite website management system is TYPO3, and I like to use it on my clients’ websites because, as a solid framework, I can always extend and re-work their sites to do almost anything they will ever want (forums, video, blogs, newsfeeds, newsletters, etc). The biggest benefit to me and the clients, though, is that they can own and control the site once it’s built. As I’m writing this, I’m 28 and married to the most beautiful, talented photographer in the Dallas area and our sweet puppy, Aingeal, is now 5 years old. If you like the blog, feel free to let me know.

Sites I’ve worked on:

• http://www.generals.org (head web guru)
• http://www.lightthehighway.org (since it’s a Generals site, I was the head web guru)
• http://www.imagesbyrebekah.com (designer, developer, etc. of my wife’s site)
• http://www.whiterhinocoffee.com (designed, developed, and built a TYPO3 website for them)
• http://www.fulfillingdestiny.com (turned a couple Photoshop files into a full-blown, TYPO3 template, and now I build new features every couple weeks)
• http://www.newnamemissionsociety.com (still a work in progress, but I designed and built it)

How to contact me:
Email me at jeremy@pocketrevolutionary.com
Twitter me at twitter.com/pocketrevolver

Disclaimer:
The opinions and thoughts I express are just my own. Nothing on this blog, in my emails, in my twitter, or in my thoughts represents my employer, clients, wife, or dog.

So far, South by Southwest has been amazing. Honestly, it’s a reenergizing and inspiring experience just being around this many great and upcoming designers and developers. I tweaked my CSS tonight just because I was getting restless with my original design that had been “good enough”. I got to see some great blogger heroes today in panels with John Gruber, Michael Lopp (Rands), and Merlin Mann. Now, hopefully I’ll get the nerve to introduce myself to some of these awesome bloggers and internet celebs… anyway, I’m hoping to start hacking away on the new group blog this weekend, and maybe I can write more about SXSW after it’s all over.

I have finally succumbed to the Twitter bug. My Twitter id is pocketrevolver, so you can see my page or follow me at http://twitter.com/pocketrevolver. I’ll be adding a little widget to the sidebar soon.

Anybody who has seen this site before (and isn’t using an RSS reader) has already noticed the redesign, but I thought I’d mention it anyway. To the right, you can see the old design, and you can of course see the new design by just looking at the page in front of you. If you’re using an RSS reader (I always use NetNewsWire), please take this moment to actually load my page.

I’ll wait.

Okay, I’ll assume you’ve seen the new design at this point. I’m not actually pointing this out to toot my own horn… even though letting other people toot my horn sounds so very creepy. I actually just wanted to acknowledge that I had in fact re-designed the site after spending a lot of time looking at more muted, clean sites like rands in repose, shawnblanc.net, and Wil Shipley’s blog. Technically, I look at probably hundreds of blogs that are more skillfully designed than mine every week, but those are the ones that were most similar already in architecture so they were the ones that I really stared at while getting “into the zone.” Anyway, I just wanted to give an acknowledgement for my inspiration from them and let you know that, yes, the last time you saw this site it might have been tri-color and I might not have discovered the joy of Pixelmator effects just yet. If you like the new look, you can leave me a comment; if you don’t, then you can just use NetNewsWire or Google Reader and never look at the actual site again.

The other major change that happened the past week was that we switched over to mediatemple for our hosting needs. I don’t really feel like ranting about the last host we had, suffice to say we’re all “a little bit happier now.” Now that I’ve switched hosts and brought over my friends and my wife with me, we will be starting a new group blog soon. I don’t want to give away the domain yet, because I’d hate for you to go there just to see the default WordPress Kubrick theme and “hello world” post right now. We do have the domain, though, and it’s going to at least include my friends Neil, John, and a few other soon-to-be bloggers sounding off about God, politics, theology, sandwiches, Dutch sayings, and anything else that needs to be discussed.