So there were like, 10 different companies that I ultimately interviewed with, running the whole spectrum from management consulting to applications design to non-profits to marketing firms to all around web development and etc. Many of them I had multiple rounds of interviews with even, going to the recruiters office to interview, going to their offices to interview, doing interviews over the phone. I must’ve interviewed at least 2 dozen times by the time all was said and done (not all of them progressed beyond a first round). In the end, I had 3 offers, and went with my BRAND NEW JOB THAT I START NEXT MONDAY!

Not bad eh? 2 weeks, 24 interviews, hundreds of blocks walked, and I’ve got a job! More on the job later when I know more, but I anticipate many good things.

Other things that took up lots and lots of time, Maria and I went up to visit her sister in Boston! This would be my 3rd time ever in Boston, and first time with Maria. They live in a cute little town outside Boston proper with rivers and parks and tall grass. Oh and a giant murder of crows one night as we were walking back from a park we had gone to so we could get some exercise and air and some quiet, alone time because Maria’s sister has twin boys and they’re a handful so it’s good to have an opportunity to spend time alone with her. We also went to Chuck E Cheese (anyone been to one of those recently?) and met up with a whole bunch of their friends in one of those settings where you’re all grown up and you get to refer to your friends as couples by last name only, like, the Smiths, the Wallabees, the MacCaroos. It was good to go though, and to drive around. New England is lovely in the winter, and this winter is really a WINTER. I’m sure everyone’s heard of the recent snow trouble and all the flight cancellations and everything, well it’s just been snowing non-stop as far as I can tell! I lived here for like, 4 years before and I don’t think I remember it ever snowing this much I was just telling Maria this afternoon as we were walking in the Upper East Side looking, and failing to find, white sauce/hot sauce. And even though its snowing, and cold, it’s still better than China no bitterness intended.

We also spent a lot of time looking for an apartment. The place we’re in, lovely though it is, is still small, and we thought we’d want to move some place nicer and bigger and where we can see ourselves staying for a decently long period of time because I think we’re both sick of moving. So we tromped our way all through the Upper East Side, Midtown West and Midtown East, and the Financial District. We had different kinds of targeted searches going on between 4 different realty brokers. In the Upper East Side, we were looking for something with a nice outdoor space like a terrace or balcony where we can BBQ and have a fire pit. In Midtown West we were looking at high rises with gorgeous views of the Hudson and the city. In Midtown East we were being practical, cheap but good, if possible, because it’s the closest to where my car’s currently parked and the Harvard Club; so we were trying to be efficient. In the Financial District we were looking for something that reminded us of Downtown LA, concrete forest type imagery. In the end, we only managed to find apartments in the Financial District that lived up to the searches and standards that we were looking for. We even put in 2 applications for places. And we’re talking gorgeous places, brand new buildings and renovations, top of the line kitchens and bathrooms, generous amenities like gyms and rooftop terraces and lounges and libraries. I had my job you know, so we knew what we could afford, so we were skinning the top of our budget, but it was doable. But then came why all these are in the past tense and not for a necessarily good reason: the one and only places that we really wanted gypped us out of 1 month’s free rent because “that concession is no longer available,” wasn’t proactive in letting us know where our application stood so we had no idea if we were accepted or not or whether or not we would be able to get it, and in the end was just delayed by 3 days in the entire process before they decided they wanted us after we decided we wanted it, and by then we had mulled and discussed and drew out intricate floor plans and everything ad our minds had been changed. So without further ado, I introduce you to our new apartment, our current apartment. It’s gonna be great. We’re gonna renovate a little with the management company’s help. We’re going to get good furniture and be comfortable; something about nesting procedures. We actually spent close to 5 hours at the Ikea in Brooklyn yesterday (photos coming soon of the Water Taxi ride!) looking at everything we thought we’d want, making sure we both liked them and that they’d work within our space. I stayed up late into the evening mocking up floor plans (to follow). I think, it’ll be great.

Otherwise it’s also New York Restaurant Week, so we’ve been taking advantage of the fact that I don’t have to be at work yet during the day and hitting some of the lunch spots. So far we’ve been to Bobby Flay’s Mesa Grill and Les Halles (a French bistro) down in the Financial District. We’re going to a couple of places for dinner tomorrow and Saturday with Maria’s NYC friends. We’re also putting together fancy job applications for Maria and getting our car in our names and with New York places and getting New York drivers licenses and getting New York car registrations and just a whole bunch of logistical/administrative stuff.

In short, been busy! But this brings us up to date :)

Now, photos!

Our new (otherwise known as current) apartment!

I’ve also created a couple of other sites to showcase some work. At current count, there are:

http://portfolio.textures-tones.com (web portfolio)
http://photos.textures-tones.com (photos)
http://music.textures-tones.com (music, very initial stages, coming soon)
http://www.textures-tones.com (this site)

There are some other sites I’d like to put together, some things for Maria and her school, some things for the IFC, etc., but those I guess are in the idea only stage at the moment.

Putting personal programming aside, I’ve now got a part time programming job for a company called Pixology Studios, Ltd. They do great print design, and I’ll be working for their web side. I’m also in the process of moving all of FTC’s websites over to a new server down south. I kind of wish I had a little bit of notice before they just unplugged the old server and so some websites have been down for over a week now, and I had to grab database stuff off the old server which we only took delivery of into Michael’s office a day ago or so. Either way, you do what you can. But I mean, the point is, I’m actually racking together a decently large web presence of sites I’ve designed and coded. I’m decently impressed with myself.

Putting all programming aside, the point of this post was that I’ve now also started a hand written journal on the side. I find the process of doing something by hand, something slower, to be appealing. Plus, I have so many half finished journals and sketchbooks I’d like to see what it feels like to actually one day finish one. I also have lots of recycled journals and sketchbooks that use to be half finished but just had half the pages torn out. Still not desirable. That content will not be translated here. I’m also writing a short story, something I’ve wanted to and had the idea for for a while now, about the nature of loneliness and how it affects our perception of the world around us. But my mother had suggested that Maria and I write a screenplay, and though it didn’t work out too great the last time I tried this with my ex, and though I don’t make it a habit to take my mother’s suggestions, I am nevertheless also writing the screen play version of the short story. It’s kind of funny actually. I have 2 files on my desktop, one in Word and the other in Final Draft format, both at the same points in time story wise.

I’d like to think I’m a good web programmer…

And I suck at tagging things…there really needs to be a system already in place even before the first tag gets created, otherwise it’s just chaos.

So this redesign had a couple of initial inspirations.

1) I like text based layouts. I always have, and I probably always will. I never quite understood what all the fuss about pictures were and images and graphics and all that crap. It probably comes from the fact that I was a writer first and foremost, and an artist in other senses of the word later. Obviously then, this redesign is heavily text based, read entirely text based.

2) I have a couple of Flash mp3 players on my site for music I’ve written in the past and music I’ve recorded for my Maria. As some of you may know, the problem with Flash mp3 players is that as soon as the page gets refreshed, the playing stops, and you have to start over again. Some solutions other sites have used, and even myself at one point or another in the past, is to have the player show up in a little pop up window so that even if the main page gets refreshed, it can sit there happily and play away. I never liked that idea anyways, so the only other solution would be for all the other elements on a page to be loaded and reloaded via AJAX so that there are no actual page refreshes. I suppose another option would be to have the refreshing elements of a page loaded through an iframe, but I don’t really count that as a solution, not that I’m trying to be an iframe hater here.

3) I wanted to create a decently fancy javascript based animation. I’ve known for a long time that with the development of HTML 5 and all the new javascript libraries out there, the necessity for Flash to animate elements on a site is being phased out (though Flash still seems necessary to create a decent multi-track mp3 player for some reason…). Most page effects, menus, even some animations, can be handled by javascript now. So I wanted to give it a try and create one of those animated logos that fancy companies have. And so I did. I also just wanted in general to have a seamless user interface, but that’s another point. Since I wanted the animation, I obviously only wanted it to show the once because it’ll be a pain in the ass to keep seeing the same animation on every page load, hence even more reason for the entirely AJAX based layout.

4) I wanted there to be a seamless user interface and experience. I didn’t want there to be page refreshes, I wanted everything to be fluid, I wanted everything to be accessible. I actually had in mind a much fancier menu system for the posts/tags/categories browsing, but that went by the way side mostly because I lost interest and like it this way anyways. Obviously though to achieve such a kind of site you have to heavily rely on javascript and AJAX.

5) I just wanted to keep my skills up. I’m kind of only partially employed at the moment, moving from tiny little projects to tiny little projects, getting paid only some of the time, so I wanted to make sure that my programming abilities didn’t dull. That’s one of my biggest fears actually, that one day I will be 30 all of a sudden and without a single marketable and useful skill. I really want to avoid that. Not that this project was the world’s most challenging, I didn’t have to create any classes of my own or any large PHP files, but it took clever thinking to do, I think at least, to get around what needed to be gotten around and come up ultimately with the feature set wanted.

And so, without much more talking about all that, I present the new layout and its features:

1) Entirely text based
2) Entirely javascript and AJAX based for all post navigation, browsing, etc.
3) Widgets enabled, with widgets floating and draggable within the site.
4) Built in support for Flash MP3 Player, Flash XSPF MP3 Player, and Flash JW Video Player
5) Custom photo gallery support using jQuery
6) Although everything is loaded via AJAX, a direct link is generated to bring you back to any part of the site

And now a couple of interesting challenged:

1) I had to create a plugin to be the receiving end of all the AJAX requests, plus I’m operating entire outside of the WordPress Loop.

2) Given that jQuery more specifically operates on DOM elements generated when a page reaches its onready state, the newly generated HTML elements from the AJAX requests aren’t accessible, so the javascript code is a mish-mash of actual jQuery code intermixed with normal javascript code that have also been then intermixed with some jQuery code as well. Kind of messy, but straightforward enough for even the everyday javascript developer. Again, one of those do what you can, what you must kind if things.

3) Getting comments to work was a pain! At one point I had miswrote “_id” and “_ip” instead of “_ID” and “_IP” so my comments were going into the void, showing up in the WordPress Dashboard as existing (a number), but then not visible in anyway. I had to track it down through phpMyAdmin before I realized the key value associating a comment with a post”_ID” was missing…Also the fact that I had to reset the timezone based on the WordPress value, not something one would normally think about.

4) I think I’m going to make this post Sticky, at least for this particular theme. I installed a new plugin that allows me to test drive themes, so it only needs a querystring variable of “&theme=text” for anyone to see the new layout.

Other thoughts:

I think this theme will never exist formally for use. I’m thinking of stripping away its respective parts and coding a normal WordPress them with them, so the text based layout without any of the AJAX. I’ve already got it all pretty much sorted out and that process I’m hoping will be relatively painless. It’s just, I’m not sure if this AJAX only version should actually be used in any major way…

Since this post will be Sticky in the AJAX only version of the theme, I’ll probably keep updating it as I go along with specifics of what had to be done to get everything working.

Some To Do’s still:

1) Since I’m running 2 themes using 1 set of widgets, it’s a little messed up in the new theme because there are 6 widgets crammed into 4 clots.
2) The new theme still doesn’t recognize when a user is logged in. Mostly relevant for things like commenting and “Edit” links.
3) I don’t have a posts tags yet…something you’d think would be easy huh? But apparently outside of the Loop, it’s NOT!

But the “as promised” bit is that at some point I mentioned I’d consolidate into a separate MP3 player all the songs I recorded for her while she was away, and I have. I mucked around in WordPress, though about writing a custom plugin to generate the XML playlist file, or forcibly access and muck around in the MySQL, but both solutions seemed, complicated. Instead I’m using the built in WordPress functions to grab the data, format it properly, then just copy and paste it into a static playlist file. [shrugs] Not nearly as elegant, but sufficient and simple, and it’s even more important as I just realized my “Maria in NYC Music Project” posts don’t actually say what the song title is that I recorded for the day so there’s no easy way to browse, but it’s up now, the new MP3 player that is, and that’s the salient point of this post, so I’m going to go back to hacking up a lung and not being able to sleep.

On a completely unrelated bit, I was working on a PHP screen scraper to pull specific data out of web pages. The two projects seemed to work well together actually. I found a page of all the plaintext CSS color words and their appropriate hex codes, used my screen scraper to just grab the name and code, then generated a pre-formatted output and preview, that’s attached to this post :)

I’m using 4 spaces per tab, so a simple Dreamweaver convert-spaces-to-tabs will give you a properly formatted array of valid CSS plaintext colors and their hex codes. It works great in my sensor web application by the way. I’m having it loop through it and randomly getting colors for 15 sensors at the moment.

[edit]
This was actually also inspired by the fact that I came across this header graphic that I had created many, many years ago for another project that never got off the ground.

[edit 2]
And it validates! And I even went through the trouble of making a screenshot and theme description and meta for the WP Admin.! w00t!

Maria is at a trial class today at Tsinghua University. I don’t remember if we had mentioned this earlier, but she wants to attend either there or Beijing University (Peking University) for their MBA programs; Tsinghua SEM iMBA and BiMBA respectively. They’re both “international” MBA programs, targeted to foreigners. It’s been three hours since I dropped her off; apparently it’s a long class.

Things are in progress as far as a whole slew of things that are going on.

Connections Bar and Grill: This is the restaurant that it appears I will be taking over shortly as General Manager. There’s been a good bit of family politics going on involving disagreements with the current GM and some potential investors, but that’s all being taken care of and I’d rather not get into the details and/or specifics because I’m not sure I should. Suffice it to say, I am figuring out how the current supply chain works, we have two cooks who can prepare everything on the menu, and one experienced waiter. This is a major staff cut, which just means a lot of work for me. The idea is to keep the restaurant afloat until the NEW restaurant can come to fruition. We’re changing the focus entirely, moving away from the relatively fancy fare to simpler stuff: all day breakfast, burgers and pies. Did you know you can’t really get a decent Western breakfast anywhere in Beijing? Specifically, pancakes and waffles! Same with pie?! So the new menu will have full breakfast, specialty burgers, and seasonal pies. My first task will be to keep Connections running AS IT IS until the new investors are ready and the new direction is ready, then we can close down the restaurant, renovate the kitchen and interior, print up new marketing, and “turn over a new leaf” as it were. This blog will soon be filled with excruciating detail about the whole “running a restaurant” schtick.

More is going on now with the Swiss helicopter people. New/additional investors have been found.

The idea behind Epiphany (that idealistic one where we want to imbue passion into the musical souls of the masses of musically educated but passionless Chinese through social music making and performance thing) has been shifted a little; we are out of money, don’t have the original venue we wanted (though I think we have a new and even better venue, right behind Connections and on the 10,000 sqm roof of the complex), but we’re moving forward. I think the idea now is to find other people who do have money and steer them in the proper direction.

A new company was formed to handle some “Remote Medicine,” whatever that is; apparently it might be relevant to something one of Maria’s good friends does, so we will be in touch with him.

Cow Farm! Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, I think we want fresh milk, yogurt, and cheese…

FTC Art and Gen-Next (the young, urban, born post 1980s, Beijing artists thing) is moving along nicely. I’ve got all the separate bits working now, the only thing left to do is tweak and perfect the silent bidding system. As I look at the scale of this project I’m doing for my father, it’s surprisingly how large it’s gotten. In one of the older posts I broke down all the different bits of it, but suffice it to say, I might be undercharging him for only 700 USD. Either way. This will be online soon, expect its announcement here. This may be the only place online to find the modern art of Beijing for sale…and I’m not talking about a specific person’s personal site; we’re actually gathering and representing currently 8 but soon to be many more artists and their works.

Oh, and I guess I’ll be doing something very similar with fashion…? I have very little details about that right now.

Maria will also be taking a trial class at BiMBA on Thursday. She’s going to study for the GMAT all day tomorrow, that’s happening relatively soon.

Well this post is long enough, the original idea was just to introduce expat-blog, so I’m going to end with that.

As an aside…I’m wondering if I should re-vamp my tagging system…

I also realize my WordPress install’s gotten a little bit, messy. Some of the plugins I tried using left database tables even after I deleted them :-\

And, most importantly, only about two weeks left! And only four days of work left! And uh, man my father wants me to delay leaving for China until the 25th because that’s when he’s going. I really want to just, ignore that, and go whenever I want.

Keep a look out for photo albums, under the photos sidebar.

I must say I’m surprised. I really do enjoy this theme that was created already, and it’s been quite easy to customize and tweak and whatnot, but I had at least expected the code to validate on it’s own, out of the box. All of the css classes/IDs are in Italian also, which is a total pain in the ass. Still, I feel good. I’ve implemented some new features, made some minor, probably not noticeable streamlining changes in the backend php. Coming along nicely if I must say so myself.

We have also just passed the three week mark. Only eight business days left of work also, one of which includes the luncheon. Maria got our Visa applications in to the Chinese Consulate today. She’s picking them up on Thursday. Everything is progressing.