I started this blog about three years ago because I went to a Mission Viejo City Council meeting to see if the council was going to approve a dog park. I have a dog named Hunter and at the time he was about six months old. I came home from that one meeting knowing I'd have to get involved in city politics in some fashion. The problem? Some right-wing fascists were trying to take over the Mission Viejo City Council.
Hunter is going on four years old now and the dog park still isn't built. Let's be clear about something. A dog park is a two maybe three meeting decision. There are something like 22,000 dog owners in Mission Viejo and about 23 people who are opposed to the dog park. Any idiot can do the politics on that one. Or so you'd think.
The Mission Viejo Dog Park was placed on the agenda in 2002. It's now 2012. The city has 53% of it's budget in reserves, they have $8 million that has to be spent on parks. Conservatives don't appear to be the sharpest tools in the shed. But then they tend to descend from the Puritan stock which fled Europe because their way of thinking was mocked and scorned. And now those European countries are extremely progressive and could teach the United States a thousand things about Human Rights.
Anyway, this blog gives me a place to vent. I wouldn't take anything I say too seriously. After all I could be wrong. I pretty much wing it on the shit I don't make up out of thin air.
I usually clean up the language on pieces I like and publish that sanitized version on The Mission Viejo Patch. Get this: the fascists have a blog called the Mission Viejo Dispatch. The owner sent a cease and desist order to The Mission Viejo Patch, which is owned by AOL. The editor sent this cease and desist order on to the legal department at AOL. Imagine the level of intelligence in a person who thinks the first amendment only applies to him. Very funny stuff.
My day job is creating web sites. I tend to see myself as a craftsman and I'm very interested in the newer web technologies now that you don't have to put a poem inside of a table. That was just a little too violent for my tastes. So I'm playing around with ruby and static site generators to speed up the work flow, but still produce quality.
The other day I stumbled onto Octopress. I'm checking it out. So far I'm loving it. Below is the relevant parts of the Octopress README file.
Have fun!
Octopress is Jekyll blogging at its finest.
- Octopress sports a clean responsive theme written in semantic HTML5, focused on readability and friendliness toward mobile devices.
- Code blogging is easy and beautiful. Embed code (with Solarized styling) in your posts from gists, jsFiddle or from your filesystem.
- Third party integration is simple with built-in support for Twitter, Pinboard, Delicious, GitHub Repositories, Disqus Comments and Google Analytics.
- It's easy to use. A collection of rake tasks simplifies development and makes deploying a cinch.
- Ships with great plug-ins some original and others from the Jekyll community — tested and improved.
Check out Octopress.org for guides and documentation.