OlberBlog | Chris Olberding’s personal website | Thoughts on life, design, and everything! | Jacksonville, Florida |

Went out to watch the Jags training camp last night with Brandon Dyal and Sean Collins. Sean got there too late to see the Oklahoma drills, which were the highlight of the evening.

The wordpress app for the iphone is available now, though you can’t seem to access it from the app store.

Unfortunately since I happen to be writing this from my iPhone I can’t copy and paste the link. I also really wish apple would open up the horizontal key pad that you can use in Safari to apps.

The app also has built in support for taking and embedding photos from your iPhone which obviously could come in handy when blogging from an event (example below, the event being me sitting in my living room blogging on my iPhone).

Update: here’s where you can get it http://iphone.wordpress.org/

As widely reported in the news, French President Sarkozy’s reforms to the constitution were passed yesterday by one vote over the two-thirds majority required.

As a young political science undergraduate I was very interested in the structure and distribution of power in the French political system. France is a semi-presidential system, which isn’t exactly unusual but the particular constellation of political power there is unique. It is a system that I, in my more informed days, argued had a number of distinct advantages.

I felt that having a president whose primary responsible for high politics but could effectively dominate domestic politics during phases of united government (where the prime minister is from the same party) and was elected to long terms (seven years) allowed for continuation in foreign policy while providing voters the ability to ‘change direction’ mid-term.

With the changes in the current reforms it seems that Sarkozy want to take the French system closer to the American presidential system by reducing the term length (five years), increasing electoral and political pressures on the president, and also introducing a number of provisions that strengthens the parliament in a manner similar to the US system such as allowing for the French president to annually address the parliament (State of the Union-esque), giving parliament veto power of some key appointments, and giving the parliament further powers to hinder the ability of the president to push through legislation. As someone who admired the French political system from afar, I’d be interested in learning what French citizens thought of it.

At 9:45pm on Monday, June 16th Boston Tom (Thomas Provost) was shot in the doorway of Shanty Town pub up on 6th and Main in Springfield.

I was there out in the back patio area with my friends Annie, Sarah, and Steven at the time of the shooting. We heard two quick ‘pops’ and initially thought it was just some fireworks out front. Someone said we should go check it out, to which I lightheartedly replied that it probably wasn’t the best idea to run towards possible gunfire.

Shortly after, Tex, the bartender ran out back saying, “Tom’s been shot” over and over again and while everyone pulled out their cell phones to call 911, I stood up and awkwardly walked around wondering if I should go inside, was there someone with a gun still in the bar and would they come out back?

At this time someone who had gone inside briefly came back out to the patio repeating “Don’t go in there!”. At first I thought he was saying that there was someone inside with a gun but on reflection believe he was not thinking straight and frightened by the sight of Tom who he must have presumed dead.

I went inside, nervously sipping (gulping) the wine I had bought from the seat next to Tom’s only minutes before the shooting. Believing I was about to see a dead body I was relieved to see Tom conscious. Sarah was scrambling for towels behind the bar while Annie and a kid I didn’t know named Phillip were putting pressure on the wounds. I leaned around from the speaker and tried in vain to think of something I could do. Too many cooks and all.

Tom kept saying that he couldn’t feel his legs and everyone tried to assure him that he was in shock and just needed to keep still. The paramedics got there in what seemed like a couple minutes but I believe was around seven minutes from the time of the shooting.

He was shot in the neck and the stomach a few inches to the left of his belly button if I remember correctly. Never being exposed to anything of this sort I was surprised by how little blood there was. Obviously no major artery was hit with the shot to his neck and there was little to no blood coming from the shot to his stomach when the EMT cut away his shirt.

Tom was in the doorway at the time, there were two people out front, one in the bathroom, and the rest of us were out back. The only physical description I heard was ‘a skinny black guy wearing a mask’. The people out front attempted to follow the shooter in their car but lost him. A group of kids from the bike shop behind Shanty Town had seen the shooter run down Main Street and then cut over back into the neighborhoods. This was all the information I believe the police had to track the guy down. I heard varying reports on the number of people involved but obviously two were arrested.

Everyone from the bar had to stay around for a couple hours while the police canvased the area. It was interesting to see how different people, including myself, react to such surreal situations; from Annie who was the first one to rush in to assist Tom, to the guy who came out telling others to not go inside.

Later that night I saw one of the detectives at the Pearl and asked if he knew Tom’s condition. He told me that he’d live but not have the same quality of life as before. From all indications, there was some spinal damage but I do not know the specifics.

Many people are commenting on the Jacksonville.com story, which has largely turned into an ugly debate about the safeness of the Springfield area.

I created this blog largely to familiarize myself with developing custom WordPress themes and have since struggled to conceptualize what, if anything, would be appropriate to write in this space. This struggle is compounded by the fact that I own a web design company with it’s own, though neglected, blog and as a business owner I am forced to be cognizant of the nature of the information and opinions put out on the ‘interwebs’. So then, this post is an attempt to talk through and define the purpose of this space.

What Isn’t Appropriate

The role of this blog is sandwiched between what would be more appropriate for the Station Four blog, what is inappropriate to publish publicly at all, such as topics belonging more to a personal journal, and what is inappropriate to publish publicly given my role as a business owner.

Of those three categories “Publish at all” is easiest to define; no posts on personal relationships, events, etc. The line is a little more blurred concerning the Station Four blog. Tutorials on technology and design should clearly go there rather than here. Same with professional analysis of market trends or happenings in design and marketing. However I am not sure if a personal editorial on design trends or just general thoughts and ramblings on the subject would be more apropos on the OlberBlog or not.

Deciding what isn’t appropriate to publish due to my role as a business owner is still trickier. Should posts about politics be avoided. How about thoughts on larger yet still contentious issues such as religion, philosophy, and art? Should I worry that a post where I outline my thoughts and interpretations of contemporary art might later offend or alienate a current or future client?

Safe Topics

I am a pretty large consumer of entertainment. I watch a large number of movies and probably listen to ten new albums a week. However, I don’t have an interest in putting together proper reviews of these things. Perhaps lists might work “top 10 albums of the month” and the like.

I would say lists and observations about new services and sites that don’t directly overlap or have implications on design and marketing might be appropriate here but I scarcely would know what services and sites I find interested don’t.

Perhaps community events and things going on in the Jacksonville community could go here. I have a couple posts on the S4 blog that are very narrowly focused on what the company’s been up to; posts like those don’t really belong in a blog that you’d preferably want people outside of Jacksonville to consume.

So maybe any topic that involves actually knowing who I am, what Station Four is, or living in Jacksonville should go here. General topics of interest to the design/marketing community at large would be more appropriate on the S4 blog. So a post about the Jacksonville Food Fight, which we are a sponsor of, would go here even though my relationship to it is through Station Four.

At the gentle and repetitive urging of GoDaddy I renewed my personal domain names that had been sitting around unused for a little more than a year. Faced with the likelihood that if I didn’t figure out something to do with them I’d be throwing a few dozen bucks to these empty domains in another year, I decided to get out of my asp.net hole and finally play around with WordPress.

First hurdle was to come up with a design, or rather convince myself to throw something, anything, up because if I got the notion of spending time on or coming up with a design I actually thought was good for my own site, then I’d never get out of Photoshop. So found an old picture of Pinky, threw it up and Voila! Next!

Topic and Purpose

As my personal blog, I intend to use this space for posts that may not be appropriate for my business blog, S4 Blog. Music, local Jacksonville issues and events, as well as business and web design stuffs that I’d feel more comfortable being presented by the ‘me-individual’ instead of the ‘me-corporate-monster’.

Setting up and coding the theme for the OlberBlog

Setting up the blog was easier than I expected. Actual database and admin setup was easy. Took very little research to figure out how to code a template from scratch and I appreciated that some of the function calls to pull in data allowed for customization of the markup via passing arguments.

I look forward to determining where it might be appropriate to employ or suggest using WP to clients as opposed to a more robust (and .NET) blog or our in-house custom CMS. In a fast paced client environment there is a lot of pull to stick to a single framework since expertise and experience leads to faster deployment and larger margins, so it’s nice to step out and work in other frameworks, languages, libraries, or even packages like WordPress every once in a while.