His last post, which he entrusted to me, went viral (CBC, Daily Mail UK, Globe, MeFi, Brisbane Times, among many others) and was seen by millions of people around the world. I was unprepared for the enormous popularity of the post and spent the next 4 days in sheer panic as I searched for servers with ever-greater bandwidth to place his final words.

I was riding an emotional roller-coaster: dealing with the death of my friend, working hard with friends and colleagues to stabilize access to his blog, realizing that each new solution wasn’t enough to handle the load. I was devastated that his final words were being missed in the tiny window of opportunity offered by the attention-deficit online community that would soon move on to other things, but I was also elated that his words would be seen by people that might never have read his writings.

A year later, everything is back to normal on the site. I still have trouble reading his words, looking at his picture and listening to his music, but I do all of those things anyway. I’m the custodian of his site and I take pride in this task he bestowed on me – a bittersweet burden.

Derek shared a lot of interests, which is what brought us together almost 30 years ago. Yesterday I found some CDs that he shared with me many years ago and it reminded me of when we were younger, comparing music that we favoured. I was a strong Zeppelin, Floyd, Who and Beatles fan. He was a big fan of early Genesis, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush and Laurie Anderson. I spent most of yesterday listening to two of our favourites, ending with Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”.

Thanks, Derek, for being my friend. I miss you.

Yay me.

I knew Derek for about 27 years, meeting when we were both in the Apple Alliance, a club for people interested computing devices from a small company in Cupertino, California.

We became friends almost instantly, with similar likes and both of us part of a geek culture that hadn’t quite caught on yet. At about the same time, we were both enthusiastic members of the local modem/bulletin board community, when connection speeds of 300 baud were standard and we longed for a 1200 baud Hayes Smartmodem. Today, a typical ADSL or Cable modem is around 50,000 times faster. At the time, you could quite literally read faster than the words were being printed to the screen.

A few years later, Derek got his driver’s license and we used to drive around town after school and on the weekends, meeting up with others of our ilk, eventually christening ourselves with the name “The Excursionists” for our frequent travels and explorations. We could often be found at a Denny’s, having sugar-packet wars from table to table, or causing trouble in hotel elevators and stairwells.

Eventually, Derek’s parents moved to Toronto and his house welcomed three roommates: Andrew, Sebastian and myself. We had a fantastic time, created the first glimmerings of a band, invited people for movie nights, and lived like a bunch of bachelors. It was an incredibly formative period in my life, and one that I’ll never forget.

Derek originally was interested in being a guitarist, but as Seb and I already had shown some interest in that direction, Derek decided to try his hand at drumming. He quickly became adept and served as our bedrock for all musical endeavours.

After a few band iterations and a lot of cover tunes played, The Flu was born, with all-original music. We all brought our own efforts to the group, but Derek had a knack with lyrics that really made the difference. He was a talented singer, songwriter, drummer, guitarist and all-round musician. The Flu recorded an album over a number of sessions in 1993 and 1994, culminating with a mini-tour to Australia in February of 1995. It was a magical time for all of us, playing to big crowds at impressive venues, being interviewed on national radio and acting like geeky rock stars.

Soon after, however, I saw that life as a musician could be a cold, unforgiving one unless you hit it big, so I decided to move on. I took a job with my father out in New Brunswick and left the band behind. Derek and the other band mates continued on in various incarnations, with new people coming and going throughout the years.

It was in the summer of that year that Derek and Airdrie were married, and I was deeply honoured to be the emcee at his wedding. It was a beautiful ceremony at Hart House, next to Deer Lake, a photo of the bride and groom which I still have in my living room.

I returned from New Brunswick in under a year after a series of tumultuous experiences, leading to a number of years of depression and internal conflict. Derek and I continued as friends, but our lives were no longer as tightly overlapped. I found work with a software company and put my newly-developed web skills to the test. Soon, I was looking for a better opportunity and Derek provided me the connections at Multiactive (now called Maximizer), resulting in us becoming colleagues in the same department.

A few years later, I saw a great opportunity to run my own web development shop, and I took my leave of Multiactive. Derek helped out early on, providing me assistance in writing and general support. It was during this time that I convinced him to share his writing with the world and helped him start a blog. He took to the task with enthusiasm and continued writing right up to his passing. His writing was so prolific, his site frequently shows up in my search results even for subjects that I would think are unrelated to Derek.

Ultimately, my small business didn’t pan out, but Derek was there with help in the form of an edited resume and a suit-jacket that he let me borrow for my interview at BCIT, where I still work today. I credit him with helping me get a job that I enjoy and am thankful for.

When Derek called me in January of 2007 to tell me he was going to post something to his blog, but he wanted to talk to me first. In true Derek fashion, he just came out with it: “I have cancer”. We talked about how he found out, what it meant, technical discussion (we always got into the details fairly quickly) about treatment and potential outcomes. After the phone call I was dazed, but hopeful. I was sure that this would simply be a blip on the radar that would disappear after a successful treatment. This was Derek, after all.

As time wore on, treatment began, then there was surgery, some hope of success, news became more dire, experimental drugs happened, and finally he decided that it was was enough. I wished then, as I do now, that there was something, anything, that I could have done to allay this fate that had befallen him. It seemed so unfair and targeted someone so undeserving. But as Derek would say: “No one said life was fair.”

Over the years, Derek proved himself to be an honest, faithful, intelligent, capable friend. I have been awed by his seemingly endless ability to grasp ideas and skill, jealous of his writings ability and grateful for his friendship. His words have changed the lives of many and his music has been shared around the world.

Derek K. Miller, my good friend, you died peacefully at around 6:40pm on May 3, 2011 in the loving company of your family. I love you and will forever miss you. Thank you for calling me friend.

The problem is I’m not a natural at anything athletic (come watch me play hockey some time), so pretty much activity takes a lot of energy to get me going. A grossly simplified version of Newton’s First Law of Motion applies directly:

An object that is at rest will stay at rest unless an unbalanced force acts upon it

I’m the object at rest and running is absolutely an unbalanced (that is to say: insane) force acting upon me. However, once I’m actually moving, I tend to enjoy the activity and that’s a good thing.

Now I just have to keep it up for a couple of… years.

The book has quite a lot going for it. Primarily, it’s backed by some bright people who are at the forefront of web development and design. Authored by Jeremy Keith with support from Jeffrey Zeldman, Mandy Brown and Jason Santa Maria, it’s hard to believe this will be anything but a must-have publication.

The issue I have is that it’s only available in print so far. This seems ironic considering the subject matter:  the power of HTML5 to present information across a digital medium. I’d like to see a little more leadership by example rather than killing more trees and putting those of us outside the US through the trials of international shipping. From what I see on their twitter feed, an ebook is a pretty common request and their responses indicate one will be available in August.

I’m hoping their next production sees a simultaneous release on paper and the web. The waiting is killing me.

The frameworks I have investigated so far are:

• Thematic
• WP Framework
• Whiteboard
• Hybrid
• Sandbox

Each framework provides the developer with a basic version of a theme, some with comments and documentation on how to build a theme from scratch. I have been playing with Thematic most of all (I am currently using the default Thematic theme) but I am currently editing a new theme using Sandbox.

I’ll let you know how it goes as I get more done.

I arrived in Kirkcudbright to stay with my aunt & uncle late Tuesday after having dinner with family in Dalbeny and then a drive down to the coast.  On my 2nd day here, I received an email from my Realtor asking me to check on a property I might like in Burnaby.  I immediately realized I’d love to have it, and started the process of making an offer.  I am in the process of this as I type, with paperwork making a digital transatlantic trek.

When I fly back to Vancouver, I may do so as a land owner.  I’ll keep you up to date.

Before I could say anything, my hair was a lot shorter than I wanted. But once it’s done, you can’t get them to put it back.

Photos later. Maybe.

As a faculty member at BCIT (in Web Development, no less), you’d think I would have a nicer web site, or at least on that is current.  Alas, I have constantly struggled with my writing and end up abandoning many posts because I get frustrated with the process.

None of that should prevent me from working on template and the interactions on the site, though.  I thoroughly enjoy assisting my students achieve their potential when crafting their own creations, but somehow I slow down when working on my own.

So, I have reverted the site back to the default design that comes with WordPress until I can put the time and effort in to build something I am proud of.

Let’s see how long that takes.

My infrequent posts hit home today when I upgraded to WordPress 2.6 and glanced at the new dashboard, which reported that I have:

• 34 posts, 5 pages, 14 drafts, contained within 22 categories and 0 tags.

Sometimes I spend hours trying to get a post to feel right, or just organize the words so that they make sense to someone other than myself. I have tried to ‘just write’ from time to time, but I end up editing, re-editing and occasionally removing posts altogether because I don’t like the way they read.

My friend Derek writes with apparent ease, sometimes multiple posts a day, and always very well written. As long as I have known him, he has been exceptionally well spoken and written, clearly evident in the fact that writes for a living. I remember years ago, working on his Apple IIc one night, we talked about writing.  He said that he has a tendency to “over-comma”, something I am pretty sure I do a lot.

Some other issues I concern myself over:

• I rarely use contractions when I write.  If you see any in my posts, it is likely because I have gone in and edited them to appear.  This gives most of my writing a very formal, wooden tone.
• For some reason, I regularly use the same word twice in a sentence, or in two back to back sentences.  I used the word “post” twice when writing about Derek’s work… until I edited it out.
• I tend to mix my tenses a lot.  In one sentence I say “he is” and in the next, I’ll switch to “he had”.
• I try to compress my writing into short, sometimes terse, sentences.  I don’t really know what that is – I usually want to get a lot of information out, but I find a hard time doing so.  I think it comes from my high school days when I was constantly being corrected for having run-on sentences.
• Similar to the last point, I find it difficult to include an aside mid-sentence.  That’s likely where my commas come in, but I have no idea how to use a sem-colon, a dash, an ellipsis to accurately denote my phrasing.  Frankly, I just guess.
• I am supremely tangental in my thoughts, which is evident on any first draft of a post.  I frequently have to move large amounts of text from one paragraph to another because they make little sense where they are originally.  This leads to a similar problem previously noted: two sentences with a common word close together – leads to even further editing.
• In my head, my writing is awesome.  This is likely my biggest problem.  Mentally, I know what I want to say, but that’s because, being my space, I have a huge collection of ideas that make total sense to me.  Organizing them into a sinlge written piece looks a lot less powerful on the page than it does in my brain.  This leads to me being frustrated because I feel like I’m not able to convey my thoughts accurately, which results in a percetion that my writing sucks.
• I think I repeat myself, or add too many modifiers to describe something.  The first modifier made my point, the second was unnecessary.
• I want my writing to be concise, but also interesting and full of the kind of detail that gives writing flavour.  However, these ideas are at odds with one another in my mind, and I struggle to find a middle-ground that works.  Frequently, I don’t find it.

These are some of the things rattling around in my head each time I try to put my thoughts into print.  Perhaps I’ll take a crack at those 14 drafts.