Web Development and Technology Blog

This is a techy blog, not a personal one, but just what I have been thinking as I consume all the tech around me.

My Dad, Lynn Pearson, died in 1999. Oddly, however, I find many of the times (which seems to be a lot lately) I spend on social networking sites reminds me of him.  He would never have used Facebook, and definitely not Twitter; it took 3 years for me to get him on the Internet to start with…so I tried to think about why when I am on Facebook do I think about him.

The answer to me, is that Facebook, and to some extent Twitter and the rest of the networks I am on (see previous post about social overload), shows a curious cross-section of your life to this point. I have friends on my Facebook from all stages of my life: including friends from elementary school that I haven’t talked to in years, high school, college, old jobs etc. Most of them don’t know each other and don’t have anything in common except me. In some ways it really does feel like Six Degrees of Separation.

So the random quizzes and conversations that come up with this varied group, leads me to think about those different places in my life. I definitely hadn’t thought about Wesley and his “Why yes” taunting in years, or for that matter his Mustang he had in high school that he put on “5 Cars I’ve Owned,” or all the kids I knew at St. John’s Elementary School.  Maybe I am getting old, but I think it is awesome that new technology is allowing me to reminsence and interact with those people, and do it before I am 80.

In the end, maybe this blog isn’t about my technology or my dad, but rather the curious socialogical experiment that we are undertaking. The one in which an increasingly dispered populace with seeming less interconnectedness, is actually overcoming that distance virtually. Another reason an amazing time to be alive!

It always seems that maintaining and updating your own personal site is the hardest and most neglected. Ironic, considereing you contastantly tell clients that fresh, relevant content is the most important thing to keep visitors returning and improving search results. However, since I don’t pay myself, paying customers always come first.

So as I was looking at my site to get it up-to-date, adding my new job and such, I realized that I needed to add links to all my social networks. Previously, I only had a link to MySpace, which my wife and kids use. At the time I created that, I never thought I would have so many accounts littered all over the place.

I tried at one point to keep them separate, so that Facebook only had personal friends and LinkedIn had colleagues, but that didn’t work as planned, as some personal friends only had LinkedIn and some colleagues only had Facebook, so I ended up with duplicates. In addition, I now Twitter a fair amount so I am following a cross-section of people there. And finally I am using FriendFeed to aggregate some of the data (you know, because Scoble says everyone will leave Twitter and go to FriendFeed, so hate to be left behind :-p). This is only the tip of the iceberg when you think about all the private social networks going up, I know I belong to one for Red Jumpsuit Apparatus powered by Ning among others.

I think it is a big mess.

I know from each company’s perspective they need the traffic and users to get advertising to keep the platform free, but from the users perspective it is a nightmare to keep up with it all. I hope that Facebook Connect and the Google Friend Connect and the like are a step in the right direction. I think we need interoperability and we need to be able to control our own data. If I want my friends to follow me to Plaxo and FriendFeed and back to Facebook, they are my friends, I should have the options for what info gets shared and by whom and to where. Of course, it will take it a while to iron it all out, but till then feel free to add me/contact me, wherever you find me.

Normally, Stacy does all the personal family blogging (and picture posting), but she is still in Kentucky on the second week of our holiday trip, while I opted to drive home on Saturday, so I thought I would post about the trip to Gatlinburg for Christmas. I am sure when she gets back she will have much more to say, and more eloquently too.

We got to the Smokies on Saturday, Dec. 20, where we stayed at the Westgate resort. The weather had definitely cooled off since leaving Jacksonville. Everyone was excited about cooler holiday weather and the prospect of a white Christmas. We got in too late on Saturday to do much, so just went to eat at Johnny Carino’s (they no longer have any in Jax, so we missed it). We enjoyed the drive, our friend Garmin had taken us up 95 through Asheville, which did seem better than going up 75, and we had stopped at rest stop and eat these wraps Stacy made.

We only had a few plans, lots of places to eat from our past trips, but not a lot we HAD to do on this visit. So on Sunday we went out to see the national park and maybe some snow. It was cool, but not as cold as expected, but obviously the higher we got the more it cooled off. The road to Clingman’s Dome was closed, but you could stop at the base of it, where you straddle the North Carolina-Tennessee border. The view was amazing, but the wind sure was blowing, I had hoped we could do some walking, but no one was for that, and Stacy had started to get a cold (I think from the change in weather). From there we went over into Cherokee, NC. Stacy and I had been, but Jacob wanted to see Santaland and Ghost Mountain in the Sky. We will have to go back in warmer weather so he can add to his coaster count.

Once we got back to Gatlinburg, we went to Calhoun’s. I had some very good ribs! Looking back now I am thinking our main activity was eating out, LOL. The next night we ate at Bubba Gump’s. Stacy and I had really liked it previously, but it was very disappointing and over-priced this trip. After we left Bubba Gump’s on Monday we walked the strip to see the Christmas lights. I couldn’t believe how sparse the crowds were, I assume the recession really impacted discretionary travel, but it was still very pretty. I hadn’t dressed warm enough, so we bought jackets in a store, which I probably won’t get to wear again till we go back next year.

All week long we played lots of board games, which went well. Usually someone yells death threats after only a few minutes, so that was wonderful change. Maybe us 3 kids are maturing, LOL. We even had gotten a new game from Santa, a new version of Clue and it was a lot of fun. We also played a newer version of Monopoly where you get $2 million each time you pass GO.

Brianna and I went to the indoor water park on Tuesday, and it was a BIG disappointment. It was one of the reasons we had picked Westgate, but the whole experience was a let down. But the worst for us was the 60 degree lazy river (the water heater had been broken for a week), I thought would be relaxing, not a Polar Bear Dive! While we were at the water park, though, Jacob made his famous peanut butter balls. We had tons of chocolate for the week, will probably pay for it in diet in the new year. That night we went to eat at a new place called Blue Moose, that Stacy’s friend Beth recommended. The burgers were great, and next time I want to try their wings.

Anyway, Stacy still wasn’t feeling good and since Dollywood was closed on Christmas Eve, we postponed that to Friday. Amazingly, considering it was a tourist town, lots of places closed early on Wednesday and were closed on Thursday. But we did go to a great Mexican place called El Paso in Sevierville (apparently it used to be Monterrey, leading to us having GPS issues). I honestly think I could eat Mexican daily, but it was Feliz Navidad for us, LOL.

As is our tradition, we opened gifts Christmas Eve night. The kids are getting SO old, so they get less but bigger gifts, but they seemed really excited about their gifts. Glad Bri liked her record (yes, like LP’s) player after spending hours looking for Beatles albums around town. Christmas day we ate lots of food and chocolate and played games and watched holiday movies. It was so much fun, weird when I think how old the kids are and I figure not too far away from having our family of four maybe include significant others on the trip (of course with Bri’s texting, it is almost like having them along now, :-p ).

So on Friday, we went to Dollywood. The weather was very warm so all but the water rides were open. The mystery mine ride was a ton of fun, but being the old geezer I am, I pinched something on the second ride and hurt the rest of the day. Stacy still had the cold, so we went to a lot of the Christmas shows, while the kids rode. When we left there, we ate at Ruby Tuesday, so Jacob and I could get the unlimited fries, because that is a BIG deal in our house.

On Saturday, I rented my Chevy HHR, which Jacob was jealous of, and drove home. I hit every accident and construction delay possible in Georgia, south of Atlanta, so it seemed to take forever, but I was glad to get home. On Monday, I picked up my “boys”, Tucker and Graedy, and we are having a bachelor-week, except for the time I spending at office working on web site and installing some network-storage.

We have a wonderful Christmas, and hope you all did. Definitely check back in a week for Stacy’s version.

A long time ago (ok, 1998), I wanted a name for when I did consulting. Mainly it consisted of simple networking and computer repair, and was almost all cash (hope the IRS doesn’t read this), and was rarely invoiced. So to be interesting I decided that the name of my one-man company would be ECP5 Networks.

The name I bill on actual invoices these days for my networking/web development/database work is still ECP5 Networks, but that is about the only place you see it. When I launched my first personal web site in 2000 it was name edpearson.net, but had the ECP5 on it and a logo (a logo I designed, so not much to look at). However, when I launched this current personal site, I opted for a different domain as I now have a family and thought that each member would use it, currently, that is only Stacy. In face, the ECP5 doesn’t even appear on the site currently, except under my Curriculum Vitae.

Anyhow, as I am doing more consulting, I wanted to come up with a new look to the site and therefore a new logo and branding. So I am back to thinking about how to use the ECP5 name and it got me to thinking that I use the name as my Twitter id and on many forums around the Net, but only in my head did it mean anything, so thought I would explain…for all of you dying to know. LOL

Growing up, my family heritage was a pretty important thing to me, as I had important lineage, at least if you asked my two grandmothers. Anyways, I was named in honor of my grandfather on my dad’s side (the Edward) and for my mom’s maiden name, Clay. My dad’s name had taken after his granfather, but wasn’t just alike, so it wasn’t like we were ever Jr.’s or Sr.’s etc. However, we shared the initials of our progenitors. For my dad LDP followed from Lorenzo Pearson, who started our family funeral home (the history is here) and for me the ECP came from my grandfather, Edward Clarence. My cousin, Edward Courtney had been similarly named, but he always went by Courtney.

So anyway, being the history person and thinking my heritage was cool, I counted and realized I was the fifth member of my family to be named something with the initials ECP. So decided my “corporate” identity would be ECP5 Networks.

I am hoping I have a new logo soon and can re-design my site and actual use this as the beginning of a real brand, even if just for web, database and network consulting. But at least now if someone were curious, they would know, maybe this will even be a blog Stacy will read.

Stacy read that we needed to upgrade Wordpress, so while we were doing that, we both changed our theme. She was tired of her sunset theme, so she got a Fog theme and I gotone that looks kinda tech to me (call CleanJS..I think cause it has some Ajax-capabilities).

Anyway, it is pretty amazing how customizable the themes are and the amount of option in the themes and in Wordpress. I don’t blog much (obvioulsy), but see the potential. Of course, Stacy doesn’t see the point in spending all the time customizing the CSS and even the layout, but I think it is great that it is so flexible.

Well, hopefully, everyone will like the new looks for our blogs.

If any of you read my wife, Stacy’s blog, you already are well aware of the big changes in our lives over the ast few months. We are now settled in Saint Augustine and I am finishing up my second week at my new job.

I was checking my blog so I could make sure and excise any pro or anti- candidate blogs, since my new job is political. Surprisingly more of my rants were not candidate and/or campaign related, so not much changed on the site. Also, I will be blogging less (if that is possible), because I don’t know what I will be doing to blog about and I won’t be freelancing to keep me much there.

I did do some cool stuff at Bluegrass before I left, so hopefully this next week I can blog about it. Make sure and check out their new web site!

It has, once again, been a while since I have blogged. Either been working or doing band stuff.

Anyway, saw this blog and thought it was pretty funny and pretty much summed up most bloggers. Haven’t decided which one I am (probably the validate my existence one, which no one has yet); although sadly, Bri has an ex-friend that totally fits the “Like Totally, I’m A Teenage Girl Blogger” category – if Bri cut all her hair she might fit that category some days too.

BTW, currently eating a Zatarains “ready to serve” sides, one of those rice packs that is ready in 60-seconds. Good, but not sure if I should be afraid of food this easy to cook and eat. Are we that lazy or that technologically advanced, makes me think of Back to the Future 2 and the Pizza Hut instant pizzas

My wife and kids are out back-to-school shopping. School starts back on Wednesday. I am glad their boredom will be over, but every year I lament the state of our American educational system more, but that is a rant for another blog.

Anyway, currently I am playing with tools in the Yahoo User Interface, some little JavaScript widgets that help give your sites a little more Web 2.0 interactive flair.  I am not doing anything complicated, but wish I knew JavaScript better, but with learning C#/ASP and the MS-SQL, MySQL and PHP work, I don’t know that my brain could take in anymore.

Of course, if the wonderful people at WordPress would put out a Rich Text Editor like the one embedded in this blog editor my life would be simpler. One of the reasons I am working with the YUI is that version 2.3 has a rich text editor. I have tested out quite a few and can’t seem to, at least easily, get the right set of options configured in any of them. So far, YUI’s Editor has been the easiest to configure, but still missing an image upload option (at least that I have found yet).

Lastly, while I took a break from coding, I was looking at the Iowa Straw Poll results. I find these to be great money makers for the party that holds it, but of limited real value. However, because the media places value on them, so do the candidates, or is that the other way around? Anyhow, after watching a video the other day from Mike Huckabee, I was very impressed to see his  second place win.

I went over to his site and thought it looked pretty cool and they already had a YouTube video up of post-Straw Poll spin, in about an hour, that is pretty good. What surprised me was that it was running ColdFusion. I have never done any Coldfusion, but what I have seen of Scorpio, ColdFusion 8 (which maybe out of beta now), Adobe hasn’t abandoned it, and with the help of BlueDragon, it might actually hold some developer mindshare.

On a personal note, I thought Huckabee to be a very articulate speaker and well-reasoned thinker. Plus, he has a good personal story with the weight loss and the Baptist preacher background. I will say the most ironic thing about him is that his sons, one of whom got arrested last year, are all still relatively large, and here the Governor lost all this weight and wrote a book on it. I am not really surprised about one son, as I met him back in my College Republican days and I think we all knew the only way he was involved with the CR’s was because of his dad, kinda reminded me of Tommy Boy.

So guess there are my random thoughts for Saturday…have a good rest of your weekend.

Today, would have been my grandfather’s 97th birthday. When I was a kid I always thought it was so cool that his birthday was exactly a week before mine, I thought that gave us some special connection.

Reflecting back now, I realize how little of a relationship I had with either of my grandfathers. My mother’s father because he died in 1986, and my dad’s father because he just was hard to get close to it. When “grandaddy” would talk and tell stories, it was wonderful. But those moments couldn’t be prompted. Guess he was very laconic, and if you asked tell me a story about X, you got the short version, but when he was ready to talk, he was quite the raconteur (kind of like my son, Jacob, when he wants to talk he never shuts up, but ask him a question and you get one word answers, LOL).

Grandaddy was a real example to do better in your life, both personally and professionally. I know my grandmother misses him, as do the rest of my family. I love you, Grandaddy.

BTW, quite the dapper photo. Found it when Courtney and I were looking through old Funeral Home photos. Doesn’t he look cool!

(Sorry, bad week both personally and professionally, so maybe got a little overwrought earlier when I wrote this)

Well, I don’t know how many readers there are, but sorry for the drought then deluge mode of my blog posts. Apparently, Sunday night is my night to catch up. I long ago read if I blogged to do it daily, well I haven’t quite been able to keep up with that.

Anyhow, I did want to mention why I have been so busy and haven’t posted and also follow up on a previous post.

• First, the previous post about InstallShield and error 1327.  I was looking at the blog’s logs and have gotten a few hits to this post, so I must not be the only one having this issue. It continues to be a problem, and probably will be for a while, since people will use the version of InstallShield for a while, even after they come out with a new one that fixes the issue (which hopefully they will do soon). Of course, the new install pain is for Quicktime. I now have to register and then unregister VBscript.dll every time I load a new version, and Apple is aware of the issue, but of course they haven’t corrected it and you can’t blame this one Vista, you MS haters!

• Secondly, what I have been up to is working on learning Visual Studio at work so I can work on ASP to complement our new ERP program we have.  I have been doing PHP programming for a few years now, and have used Macromedia’s (nee’ Adobe) Dreamweaver for almost 10 years for all my design and development. So using a new IDE is a bit daunting, and interesting to read all the back and forth between the two and their camps. So far best I can determine is that Dreamweaver is not particularly ASP-friendly, but that VS is not a great designer interface.

But I guess both sides knew this, because Adobe hasn’t put a lot into ASP, I guess they figure if you are a MS shop, you will use VS. And Microsoft has answered the designer complaint with their Expression line, which I have only used to play with once. The crappy part for me, is that in my position, I will continue to have to use both, since MS doesn’t do PHP development (although they have opened up to do MySQL work) and Adobe hasn’t improved ASP support with CS3 from what I can tell.

I will be curious to see what VS 2008 has in it, since MS said Beta 2 that was released this week had some of the design and CSS improvements that came from the Expression Web product. Hopefully, I will know by the end of this week, since I actually think I have learned enough C# to actually do some real coding this week in ASP.