About

… Meg and Jay

I imagine most people reading this site know who we are. If not, I’m impressed you managed to stumble across the site, since I haven’t bothered investing any time in getting the search engines to find it. On top of that, I’m impressed you stayed long enough to read this about page.

We met at Villanova at the start of our junior year. Meg got me drunk on rum and cokes, and I haven’t been able to get rid of her since. She’s an accountant, but spends more time taking care of Leanne and me.

I’m a programmer. I’m hesitant to say where I work, but I will say it’s for a Linux company, so most people probably won’t have problems figuring out what I mean. And people who can figure that out immediately realize the kind of technological zealotry to expect from me.

…. Leanne

Let’s be honest, most people are still floating around this site because of Leanne. The gallery is packed with monthly (if not more frequent) albums of her.

If you’re new here, she’s our first and only daughter (for now — er, for now on the only part, she’ll always be the first). She doesn’t say much on the site, because she doesn’t know how to type yet. Not that she can speak yet, but you get the idea.

This site started back before we were married, so “megandjay.com” made sense and was easy to remember. Now we have a daughter, who is unfortunately not represented in the site title. “megandjayandleanne.com” is just too damn long and not practical since we’re expecting to have more than just one kid, and I don’t want to go nuts registering new domain names each time we have a kid. Instead, we’re hard at work trying to think of a cute and clever name for the site to migrate to instead.

… the Web Site

Those of you who have been around for a while will remember back to when this was supposed to be just a site for information on our wedding. Not content to sit by idly while Meg pulled me into wedding hell, I created the He Says, She Says blogs as a way for me to scream, yell, and otherwise attempt to get attention throughout the wedding planning. People seemed to like watching me suffer, so post-wedding the site evolved to become very blog-centric, allowing us to let people know just how boring our lives actually are.

… Technology

The non-geeks can feel free to skip this section, but I view it as a pretty important part of megandjay.com’s history. What you’re looking at is actually the third major version of the site. The site has evolved from Java to Ruby to its current home in PHP, and migrated from being hosted in my family room to out at a reliable, stable, and otherwise kick ass hosting location.

What you’re currently looking at is my second Wordpress theme. If Leanne had popped out a boy, I had every intention of doing an entirely dinosaur themed web site. But the baby was born sans testicles, so I had to adapt. I didn’t want a vomit of pink and purple on the screen, so I went for a daughter-inspired but still applicable to the family overall theme.

I’m happy to say that the site was written with and runs on 100% Open Source software. Working for a major Linux distributor, I also find myself infused with such fanaticism as to have to pay my respects to the projects that made this possible.

  • Linux - Both the web server and machine I used to write and maintain the site run Linux. None of that Microsoft Windows bullshit for me.
  • Emacs - My text editor of choice, and yes, you Vim people are just weird.
  • Wordpress - Backend software that keeps the site running smoothly and lets me focus on the important stuff, like writing bitching and whining.
  • Gallery2 - The backend to our picture gallery runs off of Gallery2, with a custom theme to fit it nicely into our Wordpress theme. This thing has some serious power to it, which allows Meg to handle all of the pictures without waiting on me to upload the files.
  • Inkscape - Awesome open source vector graphics application.
  • Xaralx - Another open source graphics application, I use Xaralx less than Inkscape these days, but it still has its uses.
  • Gimp - Yet another graphics application (see a theme yet?) used in the theme making process, the Gimp is pretty well known when it comes to Open Source graphics.

… Web Browsers

I run Linux on nearly every machine in my house. As such, it’s not common that I have access to Internet Explorer, and even less likely that I’ll actually run it when I do. However, based on the statistics tracking I have on the site, way too many of you have yet to see the light and still use IE. As such, I’ve employed a crack team of offsite IE testers to keep an eye on the site to make sure it renders correctly. Well, not so much team as it is one person, and he’s not exactly employed since I don’t pay him shit for his troubles. But thanks to my dad nonetheless for being vigilant in his testing.

Professional Web Designers have to be concerned with making sure the site appears nicely on all possible browsers. It’s a real bitch to deal with. I, however, am not really a Web Developer. I work on a much deeper down end of things. That allows me to not really care what platforms the site supports. Put another way, it lets me not give a shit if your Mac running Opera can’t view the site.

I can tell you that I’ve tested on Firefox 2.0. If, for some unholy reason you’re still using IE, I’ve also tested on IE6 and IE7. If you are stubborn enough to insist on using a different browser and the site doesn’t look right, tough shit, get a real browser.

… Comments

Very frequently, and to my surprise, random people find their way on to the site for whatever reason. Don’t let my excessive sarcasm fool you, I’m very happy you’re here. Feel free to comment on any of the posts you read that are of interest, or more likely, offend you in some way. If you don’t think I’ll know who you are, then just quickly mention that at the start of your comment. If you’re new, you’ll come to know the regular commenters and quickly realize which are my friends and which just like to give me shit.

… Appreciation

I’m amazed when I hear someone complain that I haven’t blogged in a while. It feeds my low self-esteem to know that so many people find what I have to say interesting. I never thought the site would be around post-wedding, and I thank everyone who has stuck around to keep the comments interesting.