Road Trip

Quite possibly I might go to America in March and do a road trip up the East Coast from Florida to New York.

The trick of course is planning work around it. I am planning on moving my company’s web site to another server. Usually this is easy as long as everything goes okay with the DNS. but we have so many CGI forms and scripts that need to be re-written in perl and PHP. This will take me some time, first to learn how to do it properly, and then a few weeks monitoring time after that to make sure nothing goes wrong and that emails get through and scripts don’t get hacked and shit.

On top of that the upper level/last step of our production chain is getting ready to move to OS X. We have to buy probably 6 licenses for OS X, Quark 6, BBEdit, QuickKeys, Photoshop, Illustrator, etc. All that has to be installed and configured. I’m all for moving to OS X. In the long run it will make my job sooo much easier, but there will be some challenges involved.

We have a custom made piece of software written in REALbasic by a really talented programmer, but it doesn’t work in OS X. This software is crucial because it saves me so much time and makes extracting text from Quark and converting it to HTML so easy. We also have a website databank based on Frontier. Frontier is so fucking lame. It is a Content Managment System but I’m the one who feels managed by it. It is so hacked up and it has code practically falling out of it. I’m sure if we used it the way it was supposed to be used it would be decent. Any non-spec changes to the software from before my time there were not documented and I had to figure out what somebody did and why.

Anyway, our version runs on OS 9 only and I could probably port it to X but why bother when I’m moving it all over to PHP/MySQL/TYPO3 in the next 6 months?

So i got to plan my trip around this geek shit. While planning my means of attack I will listen to this so that I feel appreciated.