Girish Gangadharan

Stumbled upon this cute little flash based timer the other day. Never thought I’d need it until I realized…

“Wait a second…What if I use it to count down to my wedding date? It could be a depressing reminder tick-tocking it’s way to the end of my bachelorhood and all its glory. Or…or….it could be an agonizing wait till the day i marry Swapna!”

He he he…

Anyways, check out my count-down timer in the header of this site.

If you don’t see it, it’s probably because either the site itself or its flash-content is blocked by your network team (assuming you are at work).

Today is Mahatma Gandhi’s birthday. So I figured I’ll post something about violence.

I know. I’m bored (and going to hell).

Given all the outrage over Apple’s dirty manufactured shortage of the iPhone 3G, and the aggravating activation process where the users had to connect the phone to their computers and wait for hours and hours for iTunes to establish a connection to the pool of servers, which by the way couldn’t seem to handle the traffic as people from about 21 countries were upgrading/activating/syncing their “revolutionary portable communication devices”, it may not be unreasonable if people actually end up blending their iPhones bricks as shown below.

A few days back i bought a new domain name (see URL) inspired by Matthew Mullenweg’s domain, founding developer of WordPress.

I know. i know. Vanity is not really my thing. But hey… sometimes you just gotta give in. (Did that rhyme, btw?)

So anyways, a new (and really cool) domain name deserved a new site i thought. And i started hunting for some cool Wordpress template and after a lot of reviewing, decided to use PortraitPress theme by Magnus Jepson.

I wish i was as creative as the Visual Designers i work with, that design and build their site’s theme (mostly on blog engines like Wordpress or textpattern or Expression Engine) from scratch.

But i’m not (i’m “just” a programmer) and as long as there are kind souls like Magnus, that don’t mind sharing their beautiful work for free, i don’t mind using it either.

Take a look around and let me know what you think.

And Oh..oh… before i forget, note the clean URLs. Getting Wordpress to strip off the “index.php” was a big pain in the butt in the previous versions. For example, “http://example.com/index.php/2008/04/01/sample-post/“. And since almost all of the fixes they recommended, involved editing the .htaccess file which doesn’t apply to IIS, i never got it to work.

But this time, the site has clean URLs, for eg: http://giri.sh/contact and http://giri.sh/about, even though it is hosted on the same environment – IIS on Windows 2003 server. I’ll post a tutorial with screenshots on how to do it.

By the way, if you are reading this from your RSS reader, don’t bother updating your feed URL. I’ve been using feedburner to publish my feeds and i have updated it already. But please visit the site and lemme know what you think.

I want one !!!

More pics at flyingbeds.

My good friend and colleague Christian Bradford sent me this link earlier today and i thought it was funny.

You can judge the quality of someone’s code just by the number of times you go “WTF??” when you read through it.

Thanks to cssmania, morethan2cents has been
showcased for the first time in history. Yay!

Once again, it is not completely done. I still need to add a couple of things like “tech tips” and “what the ?” to the home page. But it is already cluttered and can’t find enough room to fit in those sections. I’ll get to it by this weekend.

By the way, recently my buddy Luis redesigned his site and got it all done, up and running in 3 days. Looked pretty cool to me until i got this email from a user that used the contact form on my site to send me this message. Here it is.

From: john@ryan.com [mailto:john@ryan.com]

Sent: Friday, August 11, 2006 11:18 PM

To:xxx@xxx.xxx

Subject: Girish Gangadharan – More than 2 cents > Inquiry

Name: John Ryan

Email: john@ryan.com

Message: I like your site but you should take lessons from the master at www.luisgarcia.com. His site rocks.

John

If you haven’t figured out by now, it was Luis the Great (alias – John Ryan) that sent that email to me about his own site(Luis, you shameless cheap ass bastard – your site doesn’t even validate sucker!).

We both were planning to re-do our sites and he beat me to it. He is a smart front-end developer. At least he used to be. Now he’s a project manager at Geniant.

Anyways…Let me know what you think about it. Constructive criticism and comments that help are most welcome.

A long time back i had uploaded a couple of videos of Mia right when Google had just released their videos program. Recently i added a few more to that list and was wondering if i could actually embed those videos on my site. I knew YouTube let you do it. Turns out that Google also offers that feature. Pretty cool.

So for starters, check out these videos of my nieces. I’m gonna embed a few more videos here later. Stay tuned…

I must admit it is a lot of fun setting up a site using textpattern. Especially when it is on a windows box and apparently, you need to install PHP and MySql before you install any php based CMS like textpattern or wordpress. Trust me. It is NOT fun at all. Convincing Windows Server 2003 that PHP is not all that harmful is a pain in the butt. But heyy…i learnt so much in the process which is awesome (as long as i don’t forget it, which i will pretty soon – all credit goes to my selective amnesia. God…not again!).

Anyways…after a lot of procrastination, i finally decide to work on my site. For those who don’t know me that well, i already had a website that i had to pull down, out of sheer embarassment after i saw my colleague Jared’s site cuz mine looked like crap! Seems like he’s changed it at least twice since the original design based on which i took mine down. Not sure if i like it though. Oh well! He seems to like it and guess that’s all that matters. Jared’s online presence is referred to as “F***ing awesome” on Garrett’s site.

Here’s Luis’s joint which was built on textpattern too just as with Garrett and Jared. He said he’d help me set mine up. Hopefully when mine is done, i don’t have to take it down for at least another year. So far so good…