User banned from Facebook for taking photo of purchased Star Wars toy.

UK Copyright changes may make it technically illegal to photograph your own furniture.

Link. Xenophobic blowhard running for President continues to tell lies and be delusional. In other news, another Republican Presidential candidate has become well known for his Princess Bride impressions.

Link. "With Morgan’s backing, Curtis spent more than 20 years crisscrossing North America, creating over 40,000 images of more than 80 different tribes. He made thousands of wax cylinder recordings of native songs and language, and wrote down oral histories, legends and biographies."

Link. "It showed me how unnecessary the clutter that’s been built up around the web really is, and just how easy it is to make it all go away."

For the past few months I have been exclusively using Laravel Homestead for all of my personal and professional development, mostly because when combined with Forge it greatly reduces my need to focus on server setup and deployment. Honestly, considering how much I have to keep in my head for web development, it is nice when I can simplify and reduce what I need to know for getting a site up and working. And, let's be honest, even with Homebrew setting up even anything more than a basic web development environment on a Mac was never the most relaxing task.

I recently took on a project that already had its own development setup using PuPHPet, which uses Puppet and Vagrant to create the development environment. While I have had to play with the nginx configuration and add a few items to my deploy scripts, I have not had to tinker too deeply with Homestead. It just works. Well...for the most part. I doubt there will ever be a piece of technology that does not give me a bit of lip service, from time to time.

Now with PuPHPet, I have had to actually learn how Vagrant works in a bit more detail. Having two different VMs running has caused issues with port forwarding, for example. Accessing MySQL through an SSH tunnel required understanding that PuPHPet was creating a new SSH key each time the machine was created. And, if trying to log into MySQL via an SSH tunnel, you logged into SSH via the Local VM IP Address (not with localhost and the VM forwarded port). The article that pointed out that last tidbit of information was from 2014 and half of its information was already out of date. A very common occurrence in this line of work.

It's weird. Maybe it is old(er) age but I am slightly nostalgic for the days when development felt a bit simpler. I spend so much time doing research and figuring things out now. Make an image into a vector so I can export it as an SVG to upload it to an icon creator to have a font library so all of the icons can be colored, styled, and animated using CSS. Use an MVC Javascript Framework that requires gulp, elixir, underscore, dotenv, etc. to build a Single Page Application using individual components that all need to be browserify'ed into a single JS file with an automatically versioned file. Let's not forget that RESTful API on the backend that has access via OAuth2, outputs via JSON (or is that JSONP?), and has auto discovery thanks to it following HATEOAS.

Aside: I'd like to take a moment to point out that OS X's autocorrect gave me hell writing that last paragraph. So many unfamiliar words!

As usual, no real conclusion just a contemplation about how this increase in complexity may actually be a drain on the web. My vendor directories are rarely under 35MB. It is a rare modern website that has a page under 1.5MB in files. And it takes a team of JS engineers, PHP wizards, and server gurus to build a web application. Has it all been worth it?

Link. Half of the state governors and pretty much every GOP Presidential candidate wants to either block or greatly restrict the number of Syrian Refugees entering the United States. Seth Meyers provides a nice introduction into why this is just stupid. Amazing how the GOP seems to be the least "Christian" of the two parties.

More than half of the governors in the United States support refusing entry of Syrian refugees into the United States. These are people who are desperate to escape their war torn country and the very real threat of ISIS. GOP members of Congress and Presidential candidates are calling for similar restrictions. The Washington Post puts it pretty damn well:

It is undeniable that the huge numbers of refugees and migrants reaching Europe do represent some kind of security threat — anything involving that many people arriving in such chaotic situations would. However, it is not only deeply unfair to paint all of those arriving with the same brush — it is also self-defeating.
...
The very same refugees entering Europe are often the very same civilians who face the indiscriminate violence and cruel injustice in lands controlled by the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (though, it should be noted, many in Syria are also threatened by the brutal actions of the Syrian government). Globally, studies have shown that Muslims tend to make up the largest proportion of terror victims, with countries such as Syria and Iraq registering the highest toll
...
What seems almost certain is that the Islamic State wants you to equate refugees with terrorists. In turn, it wants refugees to equate the West with prejudice against Muslims and foreigners

Terrorists are cowards and assholes who indiscriminately punish anyone who is not like them. We do not defeat them by being cowards and assholes ourselves, but by helping these refugees in their time of need and bringing them to a place where they can live in peace without threat of violence.

Link. This is ridiculous! Ridiculously awesome!! Stargate meets Thor?

Link. "The poem isn’t a salute to can-do individualism; it’s a commentary on the self-deception we practice when constructing the story of our own lives."

Welcome back to reedmaniac.com! It has been gone for years! It went off exploring the world and trying to find itself. Naturally, that did not work out and only resulted in a few odd quirks in personality and a nasty infection in a place we refuse to talk about publicly.

No, no, that's all a lie. After my little three and a half month sabbatical, I needed to present myself to the world in a slightly more professional capacity. While I found job hunting to have been a tedious, laborious, and ultimately unfulfilling way to spend my time, I understand that presentation is important. So, pulled out the old code editor and whipped up a site using Bootstrap and Laravel. The Laravel part is a bit overkill as I am only using it for the Contact Form, but honestly I cannot remember the last time I built just a Contact Form. Novelty and all.

And the blog is back too! Hellooooo! ShapelessChaos.com was a fine domain but after my little journey on the Pacific Crest Trail, I was updating on average once a month. It was always so serious too. Something about my multiple year pause in blogging and the rise of Twitter and Facebook had sucked a great deal of the spontaneity and fun out of blogging itself. Given my disdain of Facebook's Privacy Policy and Terms and Conditions, I felt I really needed to start owning my content again.

Also, I went on web.archive.org and started reading my old entries from back when reedmaniac.com was on ExpressionEngine and before that pMachine Pro and even before that on Blogger. Hard to believe I have lived through four blogging platforms. Cannot wait to tell the grandkids. "Ack, ye wee buggers, ye do not know how we suffered! Templates edited in the browser! Updating software by uploading via FTP!" I had a great deal more fun blogging back then. Random links with snide comments. Blog entries that had internal monologues buried throughout. Just wacky shit. I miss that blogger. He was so much more fun.

We're going to try and get back to that. Going to be hard. Been buried in this terrible, awful, downright distasteful overly processed Paul who was always trying to be well thought out. That is not who I am. That is likely not who you are either. Why are we pretending? Why can we not admit the truth to each other? After all these years, isn't it time?! I love Nutty Bars and I love being the Paul who is willing to bellow that from the rooftops!

Welcome back.