the Forty-Second Parallel

Hello, I'm Matt Grayson and this is my website. Feel free to learn more about me or just browse the archives. If you feel so inclined, you can also drop me a line. Thanks for stopping by!

Archives for February 2008

4 entries were found in the archives.

On Journaling

Posted 29 FEB 2008 | Comments
On Journaling

Somewhere along the way over the past 3 or 4 years, I've accidentally started journaling. I say "accidentally" because, well, I didn't mean to - how's that for an accident? It started out just as a way for me to record thoughts and such on scripture from my morning bible readings. But over time, it's gradually transformed into a mind dump of scripture, prayers, joys, frustrations, and doodles.

I often don't feel like writing anything. Heck, I often don't feel like saying anything (which comes as no surprise to those who know me). But when I do write something down, even if it's just a couple of sentences next to the day's date, I find a certain amount of catharsis in the process.

There's something unique to cracking open my little Moleskine notebook and scratching away on the pages with a pencil in the early morning quiet. It's something you can't get from blogging and I wonder if it won't be impossible to ever achieve the same experience in a digital format.

Who Dresses Count Dracula?

Posted 27 FEB 2008 | Comments
Who Dresses Count Dracula?

Ok, Let's Go

Posted 27 FEB 2008 | Comments

Well, it's time to get things moving again around here. After we moved our sites over to SliceHost back around the end of January, my MovableType installation went wonky. So, for the last month or so, every time I thought of something I wanted to post I would think "Doh! I've gotta get that working again."

Well, that went on for about a month until finally last weekend I sat down and plugged away at things every spare moment I had. And so, here we are. The entire site has been given a nice facelift - both on the front end and the back.

I'm most excited about the backend. Tired of wrestling with the limitations of WordPress, MovableType, et. al. and inspired by the sites of people like James Bennett and Jeff Croft, the entire site is now running on top of Django. I've been using Django a lot at work the past few months and it has been a joy - both to use and deploy (unlike Rails). James Bennett's various how-to's, tutorials, and code have been an invaluable resource.

Anyways, all that to say I'm back and looking forward to blogging again.

Star Wars According to a Three-Year-Old

Posted 25 FEB 2008 | Comments

And no one's gonna buy R2 and the shiny guy - the shiny guy always worries.

via Daring Fireball.