Back From the Dead

I have returned and it is time to start writing again. Here is my obligatory excuses reasons post and some thoughts for the future. It has been a long while since I last posted anything to this blog, but I am picking it up again. Here is the summarized version of why I have not written in over two years:

• Busy getting married
• Busy making art with Dim
• Busy turning 30 and the surrounding pseudo crisis that comes with that
• Busy converting my blog over to Google Appengine after my Wordpress install got hacked (again and again)
• I discovered Walking Dead (Comics and the Show)

Making Art with Dim Media

The artist collaborative I am a part of, Dim Media, has been steadily kicking butt in the last few years. We released a book, a handful of zines, numerous painting series, and have a mural now in downtown St. Paul. I'll be posting a lot more about happenings with Dim in the near future, but currently we're working on getting our second book published.

Getting Used to being called "Husband"

This past June I got to marry my partner in crime, Katie Hubbs. She's now officially a Garrett. We started dating in early 2011 and were engaged a year later on a romantic get away in Miami complete with alligator wrestling, abandon Hotels, and a stop at Coral Castle. We had a small wedding on my parents farmland in Northern Wisconsin with friends and close family. There were yard games and brats and keg stands. Afterwards, we booked it back to Minneapolis for the "wedding afterparty" at the Blue Nile DJ'd by my buds Jamez, Ian, and Jobot. It was an amazing time. I am a lucky man. We planned the wedding ourselves and were on a tight budget. Needless to say, planning a small, cheap, outdoor wedding means you spend a ton of time on it since usually people pay someone to do most of the planning. I'll write more on this later perhaps.

The Exodus from Wordpress

Since I started writing in 2007, I have been using the Wordpress platform. Originally, it was hosted with my (now) former consulting group JR Corps. When JR got out of hosting clients' projects, I also started managing the website for Dim Media. As such, In 2010, I picked up a Linode account and installed a Multi User Wordpress install. If you have ever managed a Wordpress install, you know that you have to keep up on updates to prevent security issues. Despite my best efforts, I got bit a couple times with the Tim Thumb Exploit. At one point, I was inadvertently hosting a Belgian bank's login page that emailed the login credentials to the hackers. At this point, I decided I really wanted to get out of the hosting game. Meanwhile, I had been working with Google Appengine for over 2 years and decided to build a platform on it. After a lot of tinkering and tooling in my minimal spare time, I finally have a somewhat functioning blog that I can post to without a ton of fuss. This is topic for later discussion, but aside from lack of time, that is the primary reason I have not been writing as much.

Moving Forward...

Writing has always been a good outlet for me. It was always quite nice to collect your thoughts, write a post and have a slice of your mind saved to the aether for posterity. The current environment of the "Blogosphere" is not the same as it was in 2010 due in part to more people "microblogging" on Facebook and such. However, the experience is quite a bit lacking. If all feels so temporal, futile, and one big marketing ploy. By firing up this blog again, I'm hoping to fill a bit of a void created by the Internet dominated by Facebook, Twitter, etc. Look forward to posts about happenings with Dim, my programming efforts, 'around the house' projects, and my usual random thoughts. I'm excited to be back.