CoffeeBear.net

Welcome to CB.net!

Posted by Mark | Filed under Site News

Hi, I’m Mark (aka Man­z­abar¹). If you want to know more about me; well, you’ll just have to keep read­ing this blog and see what you can learn as I go along.

I’ve had this domain for a short time now and finally plunked down the moolah to get a proper host for it (thank you Dig­i­tal Sense Host­ing).

I imag­ine if you’ve prob­a­bly got some ques­tions about the who/what/why of CoffeeBear.net, so here are some of the answers. If you have a ques­tion that’s not answered in this post; con­tact me and I’ll reply. Though if your ques­tion is too per­sonal, then the reply might be no more than “I’m not going to answer that.“

Who?

As I said my name is Mark (aka Man­z­abar). The domain name came about from sev­eral nights spent try­ing to come up with a name for my blog that wasn’t already being used 40 mil­lion times over and that some­what reflected my interests…

• While I don’t drink as much cof­fee as I used; I still drink it fairly often and frankly, I’m some­thing of a coffee-snob. I can’t stand that instant crap or that sludge that my office claims is cof­fee. I’ve got my own 4 cup cof­fee pot at my desk and my cur­rent favor­tie cof­fee is the Mocha brew from Gevalia. Or rather I should say that’s my favorite cof­fee when I’m mak­ing it myself. When I want some excep­tional cof­fee; I run over to my local cof­fee­house, the Ter­rapin and order a Grand Canyon (2 shots of espresso, steamed milk, 1 shot choco­late sryup & 1 shot mango syrup). *yum!*
• For my com­put­ing needs, I lust after the Apple’s 15inch G4 Power­book but it’s cur­rently out of my price range; so I use a home-built PC run­ning SuSE Linux Pro 9.0 but occas­sion­ally boot into Win­dows XP Pro for the absolutely nec­es­sary items (e.g. cer­tain video games & down­load­ing new/free songs from iTunes).

With those 2 items in mind, I first thought a domain name of lizardcofffee.something would be bril­liant. Except, some­body else had taken lizardcofffee.org, lizardcofffee.net & lizardcofffee.com. I know there are other .some­things out there but none appealed to me. So I started look­ing around for other ideas. Another one that came to me was minion.org² but it too was taken. Then I started think­ing harder. I knew I wanted to incor­po­rate my love of cof­fee into the domain name and I liked the idea of using the name of an ani­mal. I don’t much care for dogs, so that was out. Cof­feeCat just sounds weird. Cof­feeP­en­guin sounds weird and is a tri­fle long. Then inspi­ra­tion hit me and CoffeeBear.net was born (.com was already taken and .org just didn’t sound right for what I had in mind).

What?

CoffeeBear.net is my per­sonal domain. Cur­rently, I’m work­ing on set­ting up this blog to talk about what­ever hap­pens to strike my fancy. I got into the blog­ging scene because I work on com­put­ers, alot. While I’d had per­sonal web­site before; it was a has­sle to main­tain it and I’d lost inter­est in it for a long time. Then I changed ISPs a few times and once I’d got­ten my cable modem; I got involved with a project with some peo­ple scat­tered across the planet for a while. They needed a place to be able to store large files that every­body could access. My ISP at the time was run­ning DHCP but my IP address never changed unless some­thing got really screwed up (e.g. bad firmware upgrade to my router).

Since I effec­tively had a sta­tic IP; we setup a small www & ftp server on a spare machine in my place. Since it was my machine, I fig­ured I’d start a new web­site for myself on the side. When I did this; I’d just found out about PHP­Nuke and was play­ing with that for the main site. But it was big, buggy and really more than I wanted for my per­sonal site; how­ever it show me how pow­er­ful a CMS is and made me want some­thing for myself.

So I did some search­ing around, found MT and was ini­tially awed by how per­fect it was for what I wanted to do. I loaded a copy of MT on my server and mus­ings³ was born. I’ll admit it wasn’t the most orig­i­nal name, but I didn’t care as I didn’t really adver­tize that blog and only a few peo­ple even knew it existed. After I’d been using MT for a while; I noticed some­thing that really annoyed me about it, rebuilds⁴. *ugh*

Even­tu­ally this started irrat­ing me like sand in your shorts after a day at the beach and I started look­ing around at alter­na­tive sys­tems. Some of the ones I con­sid­ered were:

• Dru­pal
• Geek­Log
• Word­Press

But Dru­pal looked too com­pli­cated and Geek­log resem­bled PHP­Nuke too much; so I went with Word­Press and I’ve been using it ever since.

So where are all my old posts?

I’ve learned in play­ing with the backup/restore plu­gin for word­press that it really doesn’t like you to backup the data from a log on one host and restor­ing it to another. So I plan on man­u­ally mov­ing the old posts over (and trim­ming out some of the dead wood as I go).

Will CB.net be just your blog or will other stuff go up here?

Once I’ve got my blog up and run­ning smoothly (right now I’m still wait­ing for the DNS changes to go through); I plan on do my own style/theme for the site. After that I want to inte­grate some sort of pho­to­blog. As for other kinds of con­tent, well… that’s some­thing we’ll have to wait and see on.

Where’d you get your style for Word­Press? The default install doesn’t look like that!

Cur­rently, I’m using the dots style by Alex King. It’s sim­ple & clean but doesn’t exactly match what I want; so when I’ve got some more time I’ll be work­ing on rebuild­ing my own cus­tom style.

Why?

I’m writ­ing this blog: in part because it’s a trendy thing to do, in part because I want to work on my web design skills and in part to let my friends/family know what I’m up to. I’m absolutely wretched at keep­ing in touch with them either by phone or by writ­ing let­ters. I can talk for hours to a buddy of mine when he calls or reply at length to any let­ters I receive, but calling/sending let­ters to other peo­ple is just some­thing I don’t see to have any skill for. *shrugh* Go fig­ure⁵. So now that I’ve got a my own domain and a proper host; I’ll start telling more of my friends/family about this blog and encour­age them to visit it for the lastest news in my world.

Foot­notes

¹ I’ve been using Man­z­abar for a pseudonym/alias for a long time now. The name comes from one of my old D&D char­ac­ters that I came up with in high school. Yes, I am a geek. Get over it. Any­way, in every RPG that I’ve ever played, I’ve had a hard time com­ing up with good char­ac­ter names, except for this one wiz­ard that I cre­ated back in high school. That wiz­ard is Man­z­abar and that’s where the name came from. It had such a since ring to it that I’ve con­tin­ued to use the name to this very day.
² Dur­ing my col­lege years, I went to a local sci-fi con dressed as a Face­less Min­ion. It was a pop­u­lar idea with that crowd and I still have the robe that I used for the cos­tume (and still where it most times I go to that con). If you’re not fami­lar with the idea of a Face­less Min­ion; then just take a moment to reflect on the most minor of char­ac­ters in your favorite book/play/radio show/tv show/movie. Some of those char­ac­ters are so minor they have no names, but they still per­form some nec­es­sary func­tion to the plot. Those char­ac­ters are Face­less Min­ions. I thought about doing some­thing like facelessminion.org but that just seemed too long a name.
³ mus­ings has been offline for a while now. Orig­i­nally because there was some prob­lems renew­ing the domain name but now it also appears that my ISP is block­ing inbound traf­fic on port 80.
⁴ MT is only par­tially a dynamic sys­tem. It builds sta­tic pages for all your con­tent but when you update exist­ing con­tent; then you have to rebuild your pages. Some­thing as sim­ple as get­ting a com­ment posted on your blog could cause MT to rebuild a dozen pages or so. This ends up eat­ing a lot of disk space and depend­ing on the num­ber of pages need­ing to be rebuilt; it can take a looooong time. Rebuilds are MT’s worst enemy. Word­Press on the other hand trades rebuilds in for eat­ing up server pro­cess­ing power. All of WP’s pages are built on the fly based on the con­tent stored in a set of mysql tables. Less disk­space is used but more pro­cess­ing power is required to dis­play the pages.
⁵ It just occured to me that the rea­son I’m likely so bad at talk­ing to my friends/family about wht I’m up to is that for the most part; I think my life con­sists of long peri­ods of bore­dom inter­twined with the good stuff. The bor­ing stuff is some­thing that nobody wants to hear and the good stuff isn’t nec­es­sar­ily some­thing that I want to share. So I don’t tell them about my life because I can’t image that they’d really want to hear about it. But if I write about it here; they can always stop read­ing any given post and come back later when I’ve updated again.

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