On the heels of President Obama coming out in support of equal rights for same-sex marriage, pun intended, I must confess a growing <3 for SAM. SAM is the Sioux Area Metro, our local public transport.

I am regularly looking for ways to reduce my expenses and lead a more frugal life. So far, I’ve focused mostly on transportation expenses, especially with how gas prices regularly are. 2012 brought in myself having a membership at Meso, and with this membership, need to travel from my apartment at the southwest corner of town, to downtown Sioux Falls. Between the mentioned gas prices as well as parking fees, I knew that this was an opportune moment to cut down on my reliance on my car, and thus costs associated with traveling downtown many times a week.

Enter SAM into the picture. Bus stops couldn’t be better located. The Southwest Center stop for the bus system is approximately half a mile from my apartment complex, and the downtown bus stop is within a block of Meso. Perfect for my needs! Last thing I need to make this situation highly cost effective is a 30 day adult pass, which costs a mere $25 for unlimited use. This prevents me from having to add wear-n-tear on my vehicle and spares me from filling up my tank regularly. I still drive some places, but it is needed less and less. Driving can become dedicated more to special occasions instead of heading to work.

One of the side perks with using SAM is the fact that I’m forced to walk a little bit. I’m a web developer, I don’t succeed the best with exercise and physical activity. I’ve always found that doing things that force me to walk succeed a lot better than me trying to force myself to a gym.

All in all, I’m taking advantage of a situation that allows me to get out a bit for very low cost and many benefits, some that aren’t even mentioned in this post. If your local public transport offers convenience for you in your routine, I encourage you to try it out and see how it goes. Maybe you’ll fall for your local “SAM”, no matter the acronym.

Despite having a rundown of each day’s activities in an evernote note, I am going to get this blog post written and published before I forget any details. This may be a long post, be warned.

Introduction

As some of you may know, I was recently invited to an in-person documentation sprint with Mozilla, in their California offices. We would be spending three days together working on Mozilla Developer Network (MDN), editing, revising, and creating documentation, demos, and examples for modern web technologies. For those of you who don’t know, MDN is Mozilla’s central location for documenting all of their projects as well as as much possible about the open web. I was thrilled to be invited, but was naturally hesitant because I was not sure how I would afford to make such a trip. However, Mozilla said that they were going to cover the costs of air travel, accomodations, and hotel. Once I realized that all of that was going to be taken care of, there was little that would manage to make me say no, and after confering with my parents, I happily accepted the invite, and started preparing for the trip.

I do not get to travel very much, and when I do, it’s usually not very far, so while I would be working on “web nerd” stuff majority of the time there, I always considered this to be a vacation for myself, in a state that I had never been to. As an added bonus, my good friend and sometimes work partner Amy Crook lived in the area and I knew I’d have the chance to meet her as well. I flew out from Sioux Falls in the early afternoon of Thursday, April 26th, and arrived in San Francisco around 4pm-4:30pm Pacific Standard time. This allowed me enough time to get to the hotel that I’d be staying at, get checked and settled in, and meet up with Amy at the Ferry Building in San Francisco. This building was within a block of the hotel, meaning I was very close to the San Francisco Bay for the duration of my visit. However, I did run into some small stumbling blocks in that my debit card was not liked by the hotel’s system, and I was not going to be able to use it anywhere inside the hotel. This proved to not be an issue at all as I avoided any charges the whole time, and I was able to get some money out of the ATM, just in case I needed some. After a wonderful meal and talk time with Amy, we parted and I spent the rest of the night in the hotel, waiting to hear of official plans for the next day. I didn’t want to go wandering around quite yet because I had just gotten there and knew no one. Finally Friday’s agenda showed up via email.

Friday

Friday’s agenda had us spending time in Mozilla’s main office, located in Mountain View California. In order to get there in time to put in a good hard day’s work, we needed to leave by about 7:15am. It was at this time that I started meeting everyone I’d be spending the weekend with, and getting to know them initially. We had a group of about 10 people, from as close as Los Angeles, and as far away as Bremen Germany. From here, we all proceeded towards the local subway station and made our way south. Once we reached the end of the subway system, we transferred to Caltrain to make the rest of the trip into Mountain View. Once we arrived, we had an initial discussion about what each of us wanted to work on and quick brainstorming for topics that people could choose from.

Firefox logo on the Mozilla Mountain View office wall

This first day was a slow start for me, and I didn’t do any hugely significant contributions, but did stick to minor edits and rewrites to help make topics more clear for others. Lunch was eventually delivered and we all enjoyed some sandwiches by a local business, and was a nice break. Otherwise, beverages and snacks were available in the kitchen areas of the office. Towards the end of the day, I noticed a note in the collaborative etherpad holding the group’s notes, that there was a request for some work to be done on the “Firefox for Devs” section, and some help with docs relating to the new developer tools that are being built into Firefox. Since this is one area I have interest in, I noted that I would work on it more on Saturday. After we were done working for the day, we headed to The Cantankerous Fish for dinner. I am not a seafood fan by any means, but I was not going to make myself the sore thumb of the group, and made do with a Roasted Beet Salad. After dinner, we reversed our path and made our way back to San Francisco. If we all learned anything on our official first day, it’s to make sure that when passing out train tickets, you don’t pass out the receipt as a ticket, and leave the actual ticket behind. Thankfully the crew on the train were kind enough to not kick one of our group members off, and we were able to finish the trip. Finally we got back to the hotel and said our goodnights after working out when we were meeting the next morning. I wasn’t quite ready to retire to my room quite yet, and decided to spend an hour or so wandering around the immediate area and made it my mission to find my way to the San Francisco office a night early. I made a couple incorrect turns, but thanks to GPS, I was able to get back on the right path, and found the location before returning to the hotel for the night.

Saturday

Since we were staying in town on Saturday, we were able to sleep a bit more, and agreed to meet in the lobby around 8:30am before making our way to Mozilla’s San Francisco office. This day was much more productive for me, as I created and wrote up a lot of documentation on creating and managing Firefox profiles for various reasons including testing out Firefox’s multiple development channels. I also managed to get other quick edits in, much like I did on Friday. The work portion of the day was very much like Friday’s, and lunch was once again provided by a local company. To end the work day, we had a brief presentation showing accessability technology used on the MDN website. This proved to be surprisingly useful as together we discovered that a hidden area at the top of the page was the first thing that the tab key went to. This is not optimal for someone who is blind, and I’m sure a bug was filed. Due to our evening plans, the work day was scheduled to end an hour and a half earlier. These plans included a ferry ride up to Sausalito for dinner. This was a very exciting chance for me as I knew we would be riding past the famed Alcatraz prison as well as seeing the Golden Gate Bridge in the distance(we’d be going over the GGB later to get home). Once we reached Sausalito, we had about an hour of time available before our reservation at Poggio, so we all went our separate ways to browse the local shops. This is really the first and only time I spent any money on something other than some coffee or airport food. However, what I did buy was candy, mostly salt water taffy, but also some other hard candies, including Atomic War Heads. Dinner at Poggio was extremely nice and easily the most expensive meal we had together. I went with a very tasty Margherita pizza and beer from Drake’s Brewery. After dinner and much non-business conversation, we took a taxi ride back to the hotel. Once again, we all agreed to meet in the lobby at 8:30am to make our way to the office for our last day together.

Sunday

The last day was pretty straightforward. We kept at it, doing what we could and getting stuff done. Lunch was pizza. Early in the afternoon our first person left, but the rest of us remained. We ended the work day with one last group discussion and thanks for all of the hard work that everyone put in. We originally didn’t have a set plan for that evening, but by the time sunday afternoon came around, we were all ready to find a bar and just kick back and relax together one last time. We made our way over to 21st Amendment Brewery in San Francisco, and had dinner and beverages. This location provided what ended up being my favorite beer the entire weekend. The name was “Monk’s Blood” and I found it extremely tasty. Sadly, it is not available in South Dakota, and 21st Amendment’s website mentioned that the brew will be going into hibernation in the near future. Finally we all made our way back to the hotel for the last time. I opted to stay in my room the rest of the night due to being tired from the long but productive weekend. My flight was scheduled for 10:50am the next morning. Due to three of our group having flights near the same time, and one of us having rented a car, we traveled to the airport in the morning together.

Conclusion

Overall, I am extremely happy with how everything went and enjoyed every minute of the trip. I am appreciative and thankful that Mozilla would be willing to provide the ability for their community members to get together and help make the internet a better place. Hopefully I can participate again in person in future doc sprints. If not, then there’s always remote help. If you are curious about details regarding who worked on what, you can read the official summary of the weekend at Mozilla Hacks.

What is the GMaiOSDtMC Fund? It is the “Get Michael an iOS device that makes calls” fund. However, this is more than just a story about “fundraising” for a trendy phone. This is a story about how awesome and amazing the internet is. I will be the first to admit that it wasn’t a very serious thing, at first. I tweeted about it and wasn’t expecting much. This is especially true since I believe I first mentioned it at all on April Fool’s Day. To make sure it wasn’t instantly dismissed, I made sure to note it wasn’t a joke tweet, I just didn’t think much would ever come of it. Who would donate money to someone they barely know, for something like a phone? Right?

By Wednesday night, I had my list of people who had donated, willingly. There were 9 people in all, spanning three corners of the world, from the US to Europe to Australia. Their donations were in the range of $3, all the way up to $30, totaling $118. I meant to have a cap of $100, but the last donor decided to use playful blackmail by threatening to never play DrawSomething with me again if I sent any back. Who am I to argue? The following people are the 9 very generous donors, in no particular order. Most have twitter accounts that you can find by clicking on their name, if you want to follow them, and most are people who work to make the internet a better place, every day.

• Jacine Luisi — New York, USA
• Paul Maloney — Liverpool, UK
• Mika Epstein — Illinois, USA
• Rachel Baker — Illinois, USA
• Jonathan Dingman — California, USA
• Ryan McCue — Australia
• Tyrel Kelsey — Utah, USA
• Misty W. (e-step sister) — Minnesota, USA
• Grace Smith — Northern Ireland

I can not express exactly how humbled I am by these individuals. I am not sure why they donated what they did either. My two best guesses are that it’s because my intentions were for a iPhone, which I know has a lot of fans, and because of who I am. Someone that they’ve interacted with as best as possible can be online, and they felt was worthy of some of their hard earned money. No matter their reasons, once again I thank them. If any of you need me for a guinea pig for anything you’re working on, or need me to look things over and give critiques, do not hesitate to ask. I am in your debt.

I have seen, time and time again, especially in the past year, that the internet is full of wonderful, kind, helpful people. From this current example, all the way back to last year when I initially jumped into the freelance pool, they have been there for me, supporting me every way they can. This week is just the latest example. Hopefully I can pay it forward soon.

The sandwich is, without question, the best thing ever discovered by man (suck it, penicillin!), and bread is the most dedicated soldier in the sandwich’s army. Bread makes it possible for loose meats and stray condiments to transcend their differences, to come together and celebrate their tastiness in an organized and mutually beneficial fashion. It brings order to your fridge; without the bread’s stern but fair confines, what would keep your deli meats in line? Or your peanut butter and jelly? You’d have to just eat a spoonful of peanut butter and then desperately chase it with a shot of jelly. You’d be pounding fistfuls of various meats into your maw and chugging Grey Poupon just to feel something. Bread fixes all that and keeps your food safe and easily transportable. It’s like an edible envelope that mails food letters straight to your mouth.

Read more: 9 Ridiculous Cooking Myths You Probably Believe | Cracked.com http://www.cracked.com/article_19628_9-ridiculous-cooking-myths-you-probably-believe.html

This is an evolving list I’m sure, but I just wanted to get the initial one out the door. Feel free to add suggestions in the comments.

• Move myself up to a more competitive position in rates
• Better understand javascript and jquery
• get my finances to a point of stability and being able to afford the same perks that an traditional employer offers
• Vote in the South Dakota Primary Elections this summer, for the only candidate worth their weight in gold.
• Get at least three patches into the core code for WordPress
• Help make top-notch documentation for WordPress in their theme/plugin development areas of the Codex
• Help make top-notch documentation for the Mozilla Developer Network
• Locally network more and meet new people, both personally and professionally.
• Launch Hand.Writtentweets, my too long touted idea.
• Get this site here on an original design
• Drop support for IE7 in my freelance work
• Meet at least one of the WordPress Core commiters
• Attend a big-time WordCamp

I was curious to see what each current Presidential candidate used for their website management and which doctype they used. So I went on a little bit of view-source hunting. Candidates checked on:

• Ron Paul
• Mitt Romney
• Michele Bachmann
• Rick Santorum
• Jon Huntsman
• Newt Gingrich
• Rick Perry
• Gary Johnson

Here are the results for each:

• Ron Paul: WordPress with xhtml Strict
• Mitt Romney: Drupal with xhtml Strict
• Michele Bachmann: WordPress with xhtml Transitional
• Rick Santorum: Drupal with xhtml Strict
• Jon Huntsman: Expression Engine with xhtml Strict
• Newt Gingrich: Drupal with xhtml Transitional
• Rick Perry: WordPress with html5
• Gary Johnson: WordPress with html5

Noteworthy spots: none of them use Joomla. Huntsman dared to venture away from the WordPress/Drupal crowd. Perry and Johnson are both using both of my preferred choices.

If I was voting strictly based on CMS+Doctype, Johnson would win hands down, with WordPress and the html5 doctype. However, Johnson is in the same position that Ron Paul was in, circa 2008. Even though, from what I’ve seen of Johnson, I think he’d do a lot of good and bring a lot of sanity back to Washington, when it comes down to it, my vote is going to be for Ron Paul. Too much of me agrees with what Ron Paul has been saying, to pass up on the chance right now.

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.