Michaelbox

No way do you know me! Ok maybe you do. I do what I can to express a lot and always make peo­ple laugh, even in the tough­est of times. This inter­view is a spe­cial one that I decided to do back in the early days of the inter­view post idea. It’s done in con­junc­tion with my 27th birth­day today. All of the ques­tions, except one, are sub­mit­ted to me from the peo­ple you’ve already met in this blog series, as well as a small hand­ful from oth­ers on twit­ter. I appre­ci­ate all of them spend­ing some time to sug­gest one or three. Lets get to it, I’m get­ting sappy.

If Hol­ly­wood made a movie about your life, whom would you like to see play the lead role as you and why?

Michael Beck­with: Mary Eliz­a­beth Win­stead so that I’d be con­sid­ered really f’n hot for once.

Oh, I have to stick to the appro­pri­ate gen­der? OK. Hmm..Joseph Gordon-Levitt. I have always enjoyed his work, from my time in high school watch­ing 10 Things I Hate About You to my recent time real­iz­ing how great of a show 3rd Rock From The Sun was. He has also shown a lot of seri­ous act­ing chops the past num­ber of years as he’s matured. If JGL wasn’t avail­able, I’d have to go with Yahoo Seri­ous, famous Aus­tralian actor/writer/director of such films like Young Ein­stein and Reck­less Kelly. The rea­son for choos­ing Yahoo is because I recall grow­ing up at a really young age watch­ing Young Ein­stein when it came on tv. Very satir­i­cal and funny take on Einstein’s life, includ­ing split­ting a beer atom to dis­cover E=mc^2. Love it

What would I find in your refrig­er­a­tor right now?

Michael: Due to the fact that I have not really gone gro­cery shop­ping lately, espe­cially for things that need to remain cold, not much. Bit of milk, your usual condi­ments. My freezer however…a ham, some small cuts of beef, hot dogs, break­fast sausage. I used to have some bacon, but I eated it!

I should really invest in a shop­ping trip.

When it comes to build­ing Word­Press themes, what is your absolute favorite fea­ture / capa­bil­ity / tag?

Michael: I guess I don’t really have a spe­cific love of a feature/capability/whathaveyou, but I have noticed that I enjoy the chal­lenge of a client want­ing some sort of spe­cific func­tion­al­ity and me being the per­son in charge of mak­ing it work. The idea of deter­min­ing what infor­ma­tion I need, how to retrieve that infor­ma­tion, what to do with it, achiev­ing that need, and then out­putting the result. A lot of it is php and pro­gram­ming logic, but when it comes to Word­Press themes, half the work tends to be done already through the built-in func­tions, mak­ing it some­what entry level pro­gram­ming. How­ever, you still need to know what func­tions you need to achieve these results, and how to make the func­tions for­mat the infor­ma­tion to fit your need. Other than that, just see­ing all the areas of the theme work­ing the way the designer and the client envi­sioned and requested. When that is true and the code is good, then I know I did my job.

I recently had a job inter­view for a “web devel­oper” posi­tion for a local com­pany, but they told me it’d be a lot of PSD to Word­Press theme devel­op­ment. As soon as I heard that fact, I knew I wanted the posi­tion and that it’d be along my knowl­edge and cur­rent skill set. I should hear about if I landed the job or not this week, if I haven’t already by the time this post goes up.

What is one thing that you have learned in the real world that con­tra­dicts what “they” taught you in school?

Michael: Given the fact that my alum­nus was big with Microsoft and taught a lot of their stuff, prob­a­bly that Inter­net Explorer is a decent browser. Whether actu­ally spo­ken or implied, I forget.

What is the very first thing you learned in college?

Michael: While some would argue that learn­ing that at some point I’d get to use Microsoft Front­page later in my first semes­ter of Intro To Com­put­ers 101, should be the first thing I learned(and the first thing I should have wished to change), I’m going to not go with that one. Oth­ers would argue that it’d be my first chance to really learn how to live on my own and be away from my par­ents. While def­i­nitely true for a decent amount of incom­ing fresh­men, my brother and I spent the sum­mer liv­ing on our own in a (really) small apart­ment about an hour away from our home­town. It was far away enough to be “away from the par­ents” but close enough that they could eas­ily check up on us in per­son if needed.

No, none of those are the first thing that I learned in col­lege. I am going to go with what I learned in Eng­lish 101, much to the ini­tial annoy­ance to my teacher. The very first thing that I learned in col­lege is that I no longer had to ask if I could go to the bath­room. I was allowed to just go.

What is your sin­gle most desired qual­ity in a client? The sin­gle most hated?

Michael: For most desired? I won’t be alone in this one, but hav­ing the client com­pre­hend and under­stand that, unlike their nephew/son/family mem­ber offer­ing to do things for free, they hire the design­ers and devel­op­ers because those peo­ple know what they are doing and have been doing it for usu­ally many years on pro­fes­sional levels.

They need to learn to put their trust into the peo­ple they are hir­ing. Chances are the designer/developer isn’t going to try and screw the client over, because they want to earn their worth on the project as well as a decent liv­ing like every­one else. You know, one of those things called a career. Also, the designer/developer is going to want to pro­duce work that is going to, hope­fully, bring in more work in the future from either the same client(unless a really bad expe­ri­ence hap­pens), or new clients.

For most hated? Going based on a pre­vi­ous Word­Press project I was com­mis­sioned for: unavail­abil­ity. If you know you are going to be unavail­able for a period of time dur­ing the dura­tion of the hired project, let the peo­ple you hire know that it will hap­pen ahead of time. Don’t just sud­denly pick up and go for awhile, while they’re try­ing to work on the project and may need to con­tact you. Also if you know you’re going to be gone, ask ahead of time what mate­r­ial or infor­ma­tion the designers/developers need in order to get the project going steadily, and pro­vide as much as you can before you leave. It’s really dif­fi­cult to work on detailed style pre­sen­ta­tion when you have no exam­ple con­tent to put in the work-in-progress site.

What has been your biggest accomplishment?

Michael: Hope­fully some­thing not done yet! Other than that, I’m going to list being trusted my whole life to learn how to sur­vive and make my own way through it, while always hav­ing my par­ents if I need them. They have really been won­der­ful and put their trust in me at ages that most par­ents would not. For that I’m always eter­nally grate­ful for them for let­ting me become the man I am today.

How do you spend your days off?

Michael: Admit­tedly, I really lack a good solid social life. On top of that, I am cur­rently not at a point in my even­tual career that I’d like to be at. I am still try­ing to get my foot in the door on a local level. I have come to rea­son that an office-style job would not be a bad thing for me, so a lot of my off-time from my day job is spent try­ing to stay caught up in some very fast mov­ing indus­tries, and doing what I can on a free­lance level to shape and evolve my port­fo­lio. I am a pack rat when it comes to mag­a­zines, and lately you can see me some­what fre­quently at one of a small hand­ful of local cof­fee shops sit­ting there read­ing older issues of .Net Mag­a­zine or Web Designer Mag while sip­ping on a large round of roasted cof­fee. Why are all the decent web/graphic design mag­a­zines from the UK? Come on, I don’t want to have to pay $15 USD because they have to be imported!

Are there any go-to bands or artists you rely on for a long day and/or night of work­ing, cod­ing, or designing?

Michael: I don’t know if I really have any bands that I con­stantly rely on, where they’re a shoe-in. I do notice that I go through peri­ods of lis­ten­ing to cer­tain artists reg­u­larly or cer­tain styles. The Manic Street Preach­ers are one of those that I can tend to lis­ten to a lot of for a long while, but then leave alone. Right now, at least when dri­ving some­where, I’ve been lis­ten­ing to a lot of Sonic Youth. I think I have four of their albums in there right now. All the while, I also tend to have a “hot tracks” ten­dency. This is where cer­tain tracks, usu­ally from new entries into my per­sonal library, get lis­tened to fre­quently. The lat­est exam­ple would be “It’s Get­ting Bor­ing By the Sea” by Blood Red Shoes. This is one of the songs from the sound­track to Scott Pil­grim Vs. The World, and it’s the one that stood out the most to me. It’s been played quite fre­quently since then. The video is play­ing as I type this sen­tence .

See­ing as I have typed a novel that in no way relates to the actual ques­tion, usu­ally what­ever is going on in the above novel is what gets lis­tened to dur­ing my hard work­ing days and nights of coding/theming. Either that or musi­cal scores to movies!

Aside from the usual (Gmail, Twit­ter, etc), what are some of the web­sites you’re drawn to check on a daily basis?

Michael: In terms of my book­marks, my own site admin to check on spam com­ments and empty appro­pri­ately, Okcu­pid in attempts to work on my per­sonal life, as well as a small list of music group forums that I have joined over the years. After that would just be my RSS feeds includ­ing var­i­ous design/developer related blogs, Dlisted for my gos­sip and celebrity trash­ing, my favorite web comics, like XKCD and The Brads, and Digg/Reddit cat­e­gory feeds. Too many get checked too frequently.

If you could cre­ate an unique HTML tag, what would you call it and what should it accomplish?

Michael: The self clos­ing Michael tag. Insert it any­where with <michael> and have it return my name as a link to my web­site. Sure it can be done as a Word­Press short­code, but that’s not uni­ver­sal to HTML! Pure nar­cis­sism baby!

From who and where do you tend to get most of your inspiration?

Michael: For a who, I’m going to go ahead and list chriscoyier (Twit­ter) as I have sub­scribed to his blog and am con­sis­tently blown away by his sheer knowl­edge and cre­ativ­ity in both CSS as well as Word­Press meth­ods and ideas. I wish I could have as much out­put as he does.

For a more gen­er­al­ized answer, any per­son who thinks out­side the cir­cle or any result of an idea that comes from left field. I am always try­ing to come at things from new angles to see the results. While I don’t always suc­ceed with this(there are only so many angles), I do my best and am inspired by those who do succeed.

If you could ani­mate your dreams, would they be PG or R rated?

Michael: Trag­i­cally I do not remem­ber my dreams 97% of the time, and I really find that to be a shame. If you know me well or have talked with me on a per­sonal level, you know I have a healthy and some­times rather off­beat per­son­al­ity. I imag­ine my dreams would be my awake per­son­al­ity mul­ti­plied and it would be awe­some to be able to remem­ber and write down the best ideas for future use. That said, I imag­ine the dreams would be at LEAST PG-13 or worse.

What is your favorite part of the inter­view process?

Michael: While I prob­a­bly answered this in my post about how I go about con­duct­ing each one, I’ll reit­er­ate what comes to mind as my sin­gle favorite part. Read­ing the answers for the very first time and get­ting a sense of how much fun the inter­vie­wee had with the ques­tions I came up with. This round I got put in the hot seat so this is pretty fun too.

Sum up your life story in 140 characters

Michael: I was born, I’ll die. What I do with the unknown amount of time in between is up to me. You’re all wel­come to tag along as long as you want!

Bonus: What got you started in web design/development?

Michael: Angelfire and too much time on com­put­ers in the ancient days of 1998/1999. It stuck and I went with a career path.