May 2007

See, this is why I was putting off setting up my blog. I’ve spent all day messing around with the theme and haven’t written a line of python code. I guess that’s okay though. This is as good a time as any to spend some time re-learning CSS and copy/pasting php code (I don’t need to learn another language right now ).

Of course, I did get a chance to play around with CSSEdit. Curtis Thompson turned me on to this fantastic tool (Curt is also the person who got me to try out django when I was pounding my head against the wall with TurboGears, so I’m in deep debt to him). Essentially, if you’re working on a Mac (and really, what developer worth their salt isn’t these days) you owe it to yourself to try out CSSEdit. Especially if you’re just getting started with CSS, it helps you learn from any live stylesheet on the web, so you can examine how others (who likely have much better Kung Fu than you) have put together their presentation layers. I can’t live without it after only a day of use.

Welcome to the newest incarnation of The Gumption Blog. I figure since I’ve been personally attached to this particular word for so long (I registered the domain in 1995), I should probably post something about what “gumption” means to me.

A quote from Zen And The Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance where I originally became interested in the word:

I like the word “gumption” because it’s so homely and so forlorn and so out of style it looks as if it needs a friend and isn’t likely to reject anyone who comes along. It’s an old Scottish word, once used a lot by pioneers, but which, like “kin,” seems to have all but dropped out of use. I like it also because it describes exactly what happens to someone who connects with Quality. He gets filled with gumption.

The Greeks called it enthousiasmos, the root of “enthusiasm,” which means literally “filled with theos,” or God, or Quality. [...]

A person filled with gumption doesn’t sit around dissipating and stewing about things. He’s at the front of the train of his own awareness, watching to see what’s up the track and meeting it when it comes. That’s gumption.

I’ve got lots more to say about gumption, but that’s a good starting point.

I recently left my job as a Software Architect at a large health insurance company mainly because it was draining all my gumption. Not just gumption for my job, but my entire life’s gumption was being sucked away. For years I had been trying to work on my own hobby software projects, but night after night and weekend after weekend, I just couldn’t bring myself to work on them. The lack of Quality in my day job drained any enthusiasm I had for the rest of my life.

That’s why my wife decided that I needed to leave. So, we tightened our budget, payed off most of our debts, and I quit on March 9th, 2007. I don’t think I’ve been able to stop smiling since.

I had been planning on re-launching my blog on March 12th so that my friends and ex-coworkers could see what I was up to, but I found myself plagued with too much gumption. That is, I’ve spent most of my time actually coding! Every time I’d remember that I needed to blog about what I was doing, I’d be in the middle of some new functionality and just couldn’t bring myself to stop and install wordpress. So, to everyone I had promised this blog to, I apologize for the delay.

And don’t give me a hard time about the default wordpress look and feel. It’s on my list! Today I had wordpress gumption. CSS gumption is a whole other ballgame

For those of you that have been patiently hitting gumption.com and getting 404 after 404, here’s the project I’ve been working on to learn the awesome pythonic web-application framework, django (don’t worry, much more on that in future posts).

http://djedna.gumption.com/

Essentially, it’s an online catalog of my music collection. Yes, I know it’s plain. Remember, CSS gumption?