tyler butler

MAR
27
2012

Mies

I rarely go to the Google homepage, but I wound up there today and was surprised to see a Doodle very reminiscent of Crown Hall. Sure enough, it’s an homage to Ludwig Mies van der Rohe – or simply Mies as he was always referred to on campus while I was there1 – whose birthday was today in 1886. Very cool.

  1. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, referring to him simply as Mies is widespread. I had always assumed this was an IIT-only thing given his importance to the campus and College of Architecture there. ↩︎

MAR
24
2012

Thoughts On the New iPad

I upgraded my first-gen iPad to a third-gen just over a week ago now and by and large I’m happy with the result. There are a couple of things that I don’t like so far, though, and I think it’s worth pointing them out. If you have a use-case for the iPad that is similar to mine, then this information might be especially helpful.

With that, here are some things to note about my iPad usage.

  • I use it almost exclusively in bed, lying on my back.
  • I use it in landscape mode almost exclusively, at least when I’m in bed.
  • Given that I use it largely at home, I go with the WiFi-only 16GB models.
  • I generally use it to browse the web, read, watch movies, or play games.
  • I have a Compass stand that I use if I’m going to be typing on it for longer periods of time. (Obviously not in bed.)
  • I do not take photos, be it with an iPad, iPhone, camera, or otherwise. Ever. I am just not into photos.

Keeping in mind my usage patterns of the iPad first-gen, and the fact that I have explicitly avoided touching the iPad 2 too much because I didn’t want to be too tempted to upgrade (this is a serious problem for me) and thus am comparing almost exclusively against the iPad 1, here’s what I’ve noticed:

Read more →
MAR
23
2012
MAR
17
2012

New tylerbutler.com

I’ve just pushed out a brand new version of tylerbutler.com. It’s a completely original redesign from the ground up, and is built using a static blog engine I wrote called Engineer. I can now write posts in Markdown, save them to a folder that gets synced everywhere via Dropbox, and reap the speed and huge scale benefits that come with a static site. I’ll be posting a bit more about Engineer soon, and the source will be up on GitHub eventually as well.

One of the major goals when rebuilding the site was to encourage me to write again. My last post was in January of last year, and the last substantial post was long before that. That’s just… embarrassing…

I haven’t decided whether to migrate any of my old posts over or not. There’s frankly not a lot of it that’s relevant at this point, and the prospect of making a completely fresh start has quite a bit of appeal. We’ll see. Most likely I’ll leave them up at some archive site for my own benefit (I learn a lot from periodically going back to old stuff I wrote and reading it again with fresh eyes). The world will weep to lose them, I’m sure.

Anyway, here’s hoping I’ll be writing more often soon. I have no excuses!

JAN
01
2011

2010 Year in Review

Seems to be the trend these days to ‘review’ the year, and since I am nothing if not a trend-follower (snicker)… Here goes.

In 2010 I:

  • Got married – well, we had our official wedding, anyway
  • Shipped Office 2010 and joined a new team at work
  • Started teaching Web Design at Issaquah High School
  • Learned to write apps for Windows Phone 7
  • Moved from Mercer Island to Lynnwood
  • **Almost **downed the Lich King in Icecrown Citadel – hopefully I’ll get him during the guild run on Monday!
  • I bought an iPad
  • Gained weight
  • Grew a beard
  • Learned firsthand the challenges of living near the in-laws

In 2011, I predict the following things will happen:

  • I’ll stay married
  • I’ll keep shipping software as part of Office
  • I’ll prepare to teach another bunch of high school students the awesomeness of Web Design
  • I’ll share what I’ve learned so far from my experience teaching here on tylerbutler.com
  • I’ll re-theme/redesign tylerbutler.com
  • I’ll lose weight, then gain much of it back
  • I’ll shave my beard and vow never to grow it again
  • I’ll ship the first of what I hope will be several apps for Windows Phone 7
  • I’ll dig in and start hardcore learning HTML 5
  • I’ll speak at some conference somewhere
  • I’ll buy some new Apple gadget, but probably not a phone
  • I’ll build a new computer so I can play WoW on Ultra
  • Elizabeth will start graduate school
  • We’ll get either a second car or a second dog
  • I won’t take nearly enough vacation
  • I won’t play nearly enough video games
  • I won’t have nearly enough time to code