She does covers from a few genres:
The Secret to Cutting Glass
February 14, 2011 By
Since I changed back working at home again, I sometimes miss working with stained glass. Right now, I don’t have a studio to do it in, so I haven’t worked with it in about 5 years. The last piece I did was the one to the right.
I had worked my way up to that one by doing a number of smaller pieces. While I was working on the oval window, I was also doing a tradeoff with the owner of the stained glass studio. One day a week I ran the studio in exchange for having free use of the studio for that day. Between working on my own pieces and cutting glass for customers, I had lots of practice at cutting glass. My first tip is don’t go for a cheap glass cutter. It won’t take very long for the $5 one to ruin $25 worth of glass. With a good cutter there are three things that make easy work of cutting glass.
Steady Pressure
The way a glass cutter works is that it scratches the surface of the glass. It’s called cutting glass, but it’s really glass scoring. The molecular structure of glass is such that it’s under tension. By scoring the surface, you are creating a line of stress. If you don’t press hard enough on the cutter you don’t create a scratch. If you apply too much pressure, the glass cracks under the cutter and creates a fracture laterally through the glass.
Keep Moving
When you are cutting glass you can move the cutter across the glass too fast. But you need to be more concerned with stopping. I mentioned above that you are creating a line of stress. As long as the cutter keeps moving, the line of stress stays with the cutter. When you stop, the line of stress keeps going. Without the cutter to lead/direct the stress, it follows weaknesses in the glass.
Heat
In a home studio situation, you should not be cutting glass without a hairdryer nearby. After you have scored the line in the glass with the cutter, warming the glass around the score helps it break cleanly. If you heat glass enough it becomes a liquid. Even though the hair dryer is not warming the glass anywhere near that point, it is making the glass more flexible and reduces the stress in the glass. That increases the weakness along the score compared to the glass around it. Then all you need is a bit of pressure trying to bend the glass along the score and it snaps clean.
Valentine’s Day
Today is our 23rd Valentine’s day. Andrea’s post for today is Words to describe my husband. Between reading her post and thinking about cutting glass, I realized that relationships are like cutting glass. In addition to being husband and wife, Andrea & I are best friends, business partners and co-workers. All of those types of relationships succeed on similar behavior.
Be Consistent
The secret to scoring glass is consistent pressure and speed. Trying to maintain a relationship with someone who is all over the maps is extremely difficult. You never really know what to expect. That works both ways. If you are all over the map then the other person won’t know what to expect. Being consistent helps the other people in the relationship know where things are going to go.
Don’t Hesitate
He who hesitates is lost – old proverb
When you hesitate scoring glass, the stress carries on without you and follows the weaknesses that are already there. Hesitancy in a relationship is usually a result of not knowing the other person well enough or not trusting them enough. Obviously when you first meet someone you don’t know them that well and there isn’t a strong basis for trust. The trick to navigating to a strong relationship is to try to keep things in a zone where you’re comfortable. If a relationship is frequently out of the comfort zone, hesitancy will ensue. The path the relationship will follow will be determined largely by the weaknesses in it.
Be Gentle
Just like glass, all relationships have stress. The people involved are individuals with different ideas, values, personalities & experience. Being gentle, considerate, thoughtful, patient, etc. goes a very long way in alleviating the stress in relationships. You can be firm and be gentle. You can be critical and be gentle. Unless a relationship has already gotten way out of hand, situations where you need to forsake virtues are rare. A good relationship is one where it serves both parties. Being interested in the the other person’s well-being serves both the relationship and you.
Milestones
February 5, 2011 By
Yesterday afternoon, Andrea took Emma & Meaghan to the library. Emma came home with a Scholastic Star Wars novel. Although she did pop up here and there, she spent most of the rest of the day in her room. When it was getting near to bedtime I checked on her. She was reading the last chapter and I told her she could go ahead and finish.
I’ve been reading to Emma before bed since she was three. Over the last few weeks I had read a couple of the other novels from the same series. I prefer reading the novels to reading children’s stories. Over the last year or so, her taste in what we read before bed was changing and because she’s number 4, I knew we were getting close to her choosing to read it on her own.
We made it. Emma was unschooled from the get go. I haven’t given her a single “school” lesson in her life. When Emma was 6-7 she had asked Andrea to do school a few times (which Andrea did with her). We have never compelled her to do any *lessons* or learning.
New tools
January 2, 2011 By
About a month ago, I mentioned that I would be adding some plugins to this site. I added one just a few minutes ago. I’ve been working on a new plugin for WP 3.1 so uploading this one waited until I had upgraded this network to WP 3.1 (RC). When the KSES security alert came out with WP 3.0.4, I decided to update this network to 3.1 instead of 3.0.4.
Rudimentary Front end Editor
There is a screenshot of me creating this post. The plugin is still a little rough around the edges & has a few quirks. It’s probably going to be a few weeks before I have some more time to do a bit of cleanup work on it. Plus I need to have a few more things happen automagically behind the scenes.
As I was typing this up, I realized it should really have a link dialog of some kind. A second feature that’s on the list is a category drop down.
If you’re wondering, yes, the editor includes support for the standard post formats included in WP 3.1 *if* the theme registers support for them.
2010 in Review
January 1, 2011 By
Family
This year our family grew by one. Andrea & I have our first grandchild. If you click on the thumbnail, it takes you to Andrea’s flickr set. That picture is from Christmas morning. She is a delight (of course) and having her here for her first Christmas was very special for both Andrea & I. Without anything else, Izzy would have made our year 
WordPress
In the summer of 2009, I sent off an email volunteering to work on the merge of the WordPress and WordPress MU code bases. A few weeks before Christmas 2009 I received an email from one of the WordPress leads asking if I was still interested in working on the merge. On Jan 5th I was temporarily given commit access to WordPress trunk. The temporary access lasted considerably longer than what I was initially expecting.
In 2009 I had spent quite a bit of time doing some exploratory prototyping and had a fairly solid feel for what was needed to support existing WP installs, existing MU installs and allow WP installs to be converted to the equivalent of a MU install. My estimate for getting a functional but rudimentary merge completed was 1-2 weeks. We landed somewhere in the range of 11-12 days. I was kept on the WP commit team until a few days before WP 3.0 was released in June.
Working on the merge & WordPress was a huge amount of fun. Nearly all the development work I’ve done over the last 20+ years has been working alone. One of the things I really enjoy about the WordPress community is that there are many opportunities for collaboration. The core platform is collaboration in a major way and, in addition to the success of WordPress 3.0 dev cycle, I got to know quite a few of the people who contribute to WP core.
The main challenges I had while working on WordPress 3.0 were the time commitment, IRC & trac. Time commitment I’ll discuss later. I didn’t really know what IRC was until I started using it in January. Essentially, it is a dedicated group chat channel. When we had dialup Internet and a single phone line, Andrea & I sometimes used gchat (or yahoo messenger before gchat existed) to communicate while she was connected (because I couldn’t call her). But I’ve hardly used chat programs out side of that. Ironically, building a TCP based group chat server and client was part of the curriculum in one of the programming courses I taught.
Getting a 45 year old brain used to having something like IRC running all the time is a real challenge. Even after more than 5 months, I only connected up to the IRC channel for part of the day. Most weekends I checked the IRC logs a few times a day to see if there was urgent that I needed to address.
WordPress trac is the site where people report and discuss bug reports and enhancement requests. Every one who has a wordpress.org username also has access to create or comment on trac tickets. Keeping up with all the trac activity requires several hours a day. The folks who do keep up with trac on an ongoing basis gained a whole new level of respect from me within a couple days of starting on the merge. It requires more than a little dedication.
StudioPress
Andrea & I have partnered with Copyblogger Media and StudioPress to provide BuddyPress support for the Genesis Theme Framework and most of the official StudioPress child themes. Our first iteration of BuddyPress support for Genesis and Genesis child themes consisted of a Genesis child theme that supported a psuedo-grandchild theme. The biggest issue with supporting the BuddyPress theme components this way was that it involved an integration process. The integration process had to be repeated with each update to our child theme.
In mid August after I had had a chance to catch my breath from working on WordPress 3.0, I looked at the possibility of converting our child theme to a plugin. By the tail end of summer I had most of the functionality ported over to a plugin and we began a beta. While it was in beta, I continued development and by the end of September all of the functionality had been ported over. BuddyPress 1.2.6 required updating the theme support, so our beta was extended until about a month ago when we officially launched.
Ron & Andrea
2010 was our second full year as a WordPress based business. In our first year and a half we had learned quite a bit about what it was we liked to do, the work we didn’t enjoy and the type work we should avoid. Our goal last year was to re-orient our business toward those things we enjoyed more and gave us better revenue stability.
Two of the critical things on the list were to switch from a WordPress MU focused business to one focused on WordPress and shifting the type of work we did so that less of our revenue was dependent on me. Although we had quite a bit of work to do once WordPress 3.0 was released, the time I invested in core development definitely addressed the shift from MU to WP.
In 2009, about 90% of our revenue came from development projects. Nearly all the development work fell to me. In several projects Andrea handled all of the implementation but her work schedule for that was dependent on when I had the development work done so she could implement. A year later, we are somewhere in the range of about a 50/50 split between project revenue and educational & commercial revenue.
2010 was the year where we wanted to arrive at a final decision as to whether we would continue with the WP based business or I would go back to doing corporate project management. Over the last few months business has stabilized to the point where we are comfortable that we will be able to sustain a reasonable revenue long term. So, we are definitely going to continue working within the WP community.
However, we are not in the place where we could sustain me making the kind of time commitment to the WordPress project that was required while I was a core committer for WP 3.0 (which was well over 50% of my time). Between Andrea & I we are planning on contributing 25% of our combined time to WP core, BP core, forum support & free plugins and themes. We are fairly comfortable that that level is sustainable long term.
This fall we discussed the pros and cons of incorporating a business and have decided that is the route we will be taking over the next 2-3 months. We have already decided on the business name and had initial discussions with our lawyer. So, hopefully we will have something to announce on that soon.
Summary
In 2010 we were extremely busy & sometimes fairly stressed. Other than Christmas, the only breaks I took from work were WordCamps which I really enjoy. Even though they are still focused on WordPress, WordCamps are a really good break for both of us. In September, we lost the engine in our 10 year old car. I had really been hoping the car would make it to at least next summer. Replacing it set us back quite a bit on our financial goals for the year. However, overall, we had good progress on those goals and we are really looking forward to our plans for 2011.
22 years and counting
December 9, 2010 By
Today, Andrea & I celebrate the 22nd anniversary of officially meeting. Technically, we had had a few conversations before that. But those were the “Is this seat taken?” type conversations. It was at the college Christmas party for the program we were both attending. I was in second year and she was in first. Witty repartee ensued & it was pretty much a done deal from the get go.
Of those 22 years, I’ve spent about half my career working from home. A little over 2 1/2 years ago, we decided that we would have a go at doing WordPress consulting & services full time at home. It took about five months to get things sorted and shifted from a full time corporate income to a more volatile freelancing income.
We set out on this part of our adventure with the goal of being captains of our own ship at least until I was ready to retire from information technology based work. During the 5 1/2 months I was working on the merge of WordPress and WordPress MU, Andrea & I a good chance to assess our experience over the previous year and draw some conclusions & plans from that experience.
Once WordPress 3.0 was released and my commitment to WordPress core was over, we dug in full steam toward developing a stable revenue base doing the things we both enjoy doing the most. While we haven’t quite reached the level of income I had as a corporate lead developer, we are getting into that range and can see it on the horizon.
Our goal from 2 1/2 years ago is still our goal now. I’m looking forward to another great year with Andrea who is a great partner both in business and in life
John Cleese on extremism
December 5, 2010 By
Starting the transition
December 3, 2010 By
For whatever reason, yesterday I woke up groggy. By suppertime I realized I wasn’t going to get into a groove and do a significant amount of programming. Instead of trying to plod away at that, I decided I would work on the color scheme & layout which I had talked about in my previous post. The theme I’m using is Prose. Because I work with nearly all the StudioPress Child themes doing the BuddyPress support, I usually grab the beta of a child theme as soon as it’s available. Prose wasn’t an exception.
Prose has a built-in designer that I added BP support for. I actually spent quite a bit more time working with Prose than I do with most child themes (as far as the BP support goes). While I was working with the beta, I decided I would use it on this site. Most of the time that went into the design was choosing the colors. The Prose designer makes it really easy and quick to implement.
I have plans to add more functionality via plugins. I’ve started those and hope to finish and have them live on the site by Christmas.
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