Jeff Smith

Roasted Garlic Oregano Butter Allow ⅓ cup of butter to soften in...

Fri, 02 Jul 2010 10:00:00 -0400

Roasted garlic

Squeeze out roasted garlic

Roasted garlic

Add garlic & oregano to softened butter

Mix until ingredients evenly distributed

Roasted Garlic Oregano Butter

Allow ⅓ cup of butter to soften in a bowl. I usually cut it up in cubes as it’ll make it easier to “cream” the butter later on.
Take a bulb of garlic and take off as much of the outer skin/paper as you can.
With a serrated knife, cut off the very top part of the bulb to expose the inside of each clove.
Drizzle with olive oil, season with a bit of salt & pepper and wrap up in a piece of aluminum foil.
Place in a 350º oven for 45 minutes to an hour.
Remove from oven, open foil and allow garlic to cool.
“Cream” your softened butter—basically mash the hell out of it with a spoon until it’s nice and smooth.
Squeeze out the roasted garlic into a separate bowl and mash the hell out of it as well with a spoon.
Add the mashed garlic to the mashed butter and toss in a few healthy pinches of dried oregano.
Mix until everything is evenly distributed.
Store in the fridge in a plastic container. Not exactly sure how long it will keep, but probably a couple of weeks (don’t quote me on that), if it’s not all gone by then.

I use this butter on mashed potatoes or a little on the top of a freshly grilled steak.

Another great use is for making garlic bread. I buy fresh french baguette at the grocery store, cut the loaf in half, and then split each half lengthwise. Then, spread some of the butter on each of the pieces of bread, put the split halves back together, wrap each half in plastic wrap, and place in a resealable freezer bag. Toss it in the freezer and you’ve got 4 servings of ready-made garlic bread. Just take it out of the freezer, place on a cookie sheet in a 400º oven for 5-10 minutes.

Chicken Fajitas I’m not sure if these are technically...

Wed, 30 Jun 2010 10:00:00 -0400

Chicken Fajitas

I’m not sure if these are technically fajitas or not, but they’re damn good regardless. (serves 2)

Start out by making your sauce/marinade. I don’t exactly remember the ingredients I used, but it was something along the lines of:
* 1 cup ketchup
* ground cumin
* garlic powder
* fresh cracked pepper
* ancho chilli powder
* ginger powder
* dash of sriracha
* a little chicken stock to thin out the ketchup
* probably a few other items that I’m forgetting, just remember to keep tasting until you get something you like
Cut up two chicken breasts into strips. Place in a large resealable freezer bag.
Add half the marinade to the chicken and coat chicken.
Place marinade and chicken into fridge for 3 or 4 hours to allow chicken time to pick up the flavour of the marinade.
3 hours later…Cut up some vegetables e.g. peppers and onions into similar sized pieces and toss with the reserved marinade.
Fire up your grill to ~450F and get yourself a fairly large aluminum pan.
Toss the vegetables into the pan.
Remove the chicken from the marinade and toss the bag and marinade away.
Grill chicken and vegetables until cooked.
Toss a few tortillas on the grill heat them up (only a minute or so).
Throw some vegetables and a couple pieces of chicken on a tortilla along with your favourite toppings e.g. rice, cheese, sour cream, etc.

Steak, wilted spinach with garlic, and potato wedges A friday...

Mon, 28 Jun 2010 15:44:00 -0400

Steak, wilted spinach with garlic, and potato wedges

A friday evening meal:

Grilled rib steak
Fresh spinach wilted in olive oil and garlic
Grilled potato wedges seasoned with Spanish paprika, garlic, and ancho chilli powder
Sleeman No. 20 Anniversary Ale

Rice with Grilled Vegetables Another great, quick recipe to use...

Wed, 26 May 2010 09:36:33 -0400

Rice with Grilled Vegetables

Another great, quick recipe to use as a side dish, or even as a main course.

Cut up some of your favourite vegetables into large pieces, big enough so they won’t fall through the cooking grates of your grill.
Coat your cut up vegetables with a bit of light cooking oil and season with salt & pepper.
Toss them on a nice hot grill and sear until soft, flipping once half way through the grilling time. The amount of grilling time will vary based on the vegetables used. I used red and green peppers, a white onion, and cremini mushrooms. The mushrooms took about half the grilling time of the rest of the vegetables (my vegetables took about 10 minutes on a 500ºF grill). If you don’t have a grill, you could toss your vegetables on a baking sheet and roast them in the oven on a fairly high heat (~425ºF). You won’t get the nice grill flavour, but you should get some nice brown bits on the vegetables that will add to the flavour of your rice.
While your vegetables are grilling, cook up some of your favourite type of rice. I prefer to use a long, whole grain rice rather than minute rice. I usually keep a bag of Dainty Time-wise Whole Grain on hand since it’s a pretty healthy rice, but it only takes about 15 minutes for it to cook. It’s also really easy to prepare, you cook it the same as you would cook pasta.
When your vegetables are done, set them aside and allow to cool for a moment or two.
When your rice is done, cut up your vegetables in smaller, bite-size pieces and toss into your rice.
You’re done! Eat!

Easy Breakfast Scramble This is one of my favourite...

Fri, 14 May 2010 12:44:00 -0400

Easy Breakfast Scramble

This is one of my favourite breakfast/brunch meals. Mostly because it’s so easy to put together, and you can use just about any ingredients you have on hand along with a few eggs. It usually takes me about 15 minutes from prep to eating, so this is a great one to throw together when you’re running short on time. So now you don’t have any excuses to eat a junkfood-filled meal when you’re running late.

Today I made it with onion, green pepper, celery, green onion, garlic, prosciutto, cremini mushrooms, and hash browns. I cheated today and used frozen hash browns, but you could easily dice up some potatoes, season them up and bake them off in the oven to use instead.

Start off by chopping up your vegetables and prosciutto (diced very thin).
Cook off your hash browns—I chose to bake mine.
Crack and whisk some eggs (2 per person).
Add some olive oil to a hot frying pan and put in your prosciutto. You could easily substitute bacon, left over ham, sausage, pretty much any kind of meat.
When the prosciutto is crisped up a bit, throw in your vegetables and sauté until they’re soft. Make sure to season here with some salt & pepper. Just a very small pinch of salt though because the meat will add quite a bit of salt on it’s own.
Push your cooked vegetables and meat to the side of the frying pan and dump in your whisked eggs and scramble over low heat.
When your eggs are ready, dump in your cooked hash browns (or feel free to serve them on the side) and mix with everything else.

I will often top each portion with a bit of good, shredded cheese. A few other ingredients that I’ll often use here are zucchini, spinach, tomatoes (with seeds and core removed of course so things don’t get watery). Fresh dill is also a great way to season the dish.

This is a great meal to have when you have guests coming for breakfast because it’s so easy to scale. If you have a large group to cook for, it’s probably a good idea to cook your vegetables and eggs in separate pans so you don’t run out of room. You can always toss them together in a big bowl after and serve them family style at the table.

Where’s Walter?: Big Mussels in Amherst NS

Wed, 12 May 2010 08:22:00 -0400

Where’s Walter?: Big Mussels in Amherst NS:

Some local, Maritime mussels that I cooked when Travis and Rachel were here for a visit.

I know that a lot of people tend to be intimidated by cooking seafood, but these couldn’t be easier:

Gently soften some onion, celery, and garlic in a bit of butter and olive oil in a big pot.
Dump in a bottle of your favourite beer. I used a bottle of Garrison Irish Red this time around.
Bring everything up to a gentle boil.
Toss in your mussels, I used about 3.5 lbs. this time around and it handily fed the four of us for an appetizer.
When the majority of the mussel shells are open, you’re done!
Serve with melted butter and/or the broth that you cooked the mussels in.

Tuesday’s dinner: grilled pork chops, hand-cut baked...

Wed, 12 May 2010 07:30:00 -0400

Tuesday’s dinner: grilled pork chops, hand-cut baked fries, and wilted spinach with garlic. All of this washed down with a Propeller IPA.

Django 1.0 Released!

Thu, 04 Sep 2008 10:47:00 -0400

Many congratulations to the Django development team!

After over three years of development with a huge number of contributors, the Django Project Team has officially released Django 1.0 for public/production consumption.

For anyone that isn’t in the know, Django is an open-source Python framework for rapid development of web applications.

Personally, I’ve used Django to develop a number of projects and it has been amazing to watch the framework grow over the last three years. The amount of contributions by the community at large has been absolutely incredible. Not to mention that working with Django is an absolute joy and makes my life a lot easier as a developer.

I look forward to seeing the continued growth of the community and hopefully I’ll get around to contributing some code to the project at some point.

_On another note, this site should be relaunching at some point in the future on a Django-based CMS that I’m developing to run all of my sites. So I haven’t given up here completely, there’s more to come._

Command History - Another Meme

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 10:17:00 -0400

I’m not usually one to post memes on this site, but since it’s been six months to the day since I’ve posted anything here I thought this might be a good way to get the ball rolling again. Rest assured, this site isn’t dead. I’m working on a redesign and a new content management system in my spare time, which is pretty limited these days.

$ history|awk '{print $2}' | sort | uniq -c | sort -rn | head
  230	cd
  138	ls
   54	ps
   51	vi
   45	/etc/init.d/httpd
   42	svn
   38	exit
   38	apachectl
   32	stoprails
   29	thin

I found this one by way of “James Bennet’s site”:http://www.b-list.org/weblog/2008/apr/10/meme/. Feel free to post your own in the comments or link your own post up.

Follow Up: A List Apart Web Design Survey

Tue, 16 Oct 2007 18:13:00 -0400

A List Apart has released the survey results from their first annual Web Design Survey.

There’s a ton of data in the report, but I think it will be very interesting to peruse. It gives a pretty decent look at the skill levels and such in the industry today.

“Findings from the ALA Web Design Survey”:http://www.alistapart.com/articles/2007surveyresults

Designers & Developers for MDA

Wed, 29 Aug 2007 11:19:00 -0400

“We’re known as sticklers for standards, purveyors of good design and creators of beautiful things on the web, but do they know us for being supporters of a great cause?”

“Designers & Developers for MDA”:http://ryanirelan.com/donate-mda

A challenge to the web community from Ryan Irelan to raise money for the Muscular Dystrophy Association. If you have a few spare dollars, please help out this great cause and donate. If not, please at least link to “this page”:http://ryanirelan.com/donate-mda) on Ryan’s site.

Simplelog Redirection Plugin

Thu, 12 Jul 2007 09:14:00 -0400

Prior to my switch to Simplelog as my blogging platform, I had built up a decent readership at this site. After the switch, a my feed URL changed, so naturally I popped on over to Feedburner and updated my URL. In the following weeks, I noticed that the number of readers of my feed had been almost cut in half. I was pretty sure I hadn’t written anything that would have offended that many people, so I started investigating a little further. Then it hit me, there were probably a lot of people that were still subscribed to my (very old) feed URL from my Wordpress days that was being redirected toward my Feedburner URL. I just needed to find a way to graceful 301 redirect this URL to Feedburner. Since there was no way to do this (currently) in Simplelog interface, I wrote my own plugin to suit my needs. It was a relatively simple task, and using my routing method that I had used in the “Contact Mailer Plugin”:http://from-away.net/archives/2007/4/18/simplelog_contact_mailer_plugin/ made the configuration of this new plugin dead easy. This plugin is not only useful for redirecting feed urls. It can be configured to redirect any URL relative to your Simplelog domain (including files, static HTML, and PHP).

Download Simplog Redirection Plugin

Simply download, unzip this file, and drop the folder into your vendor/plugins directory and follow the instructions in the included README file.

Schedule Local Backups With iCal and Automator

Thu, 14 Jun 2007 09:30:00 -0400

A while back “Matt Brett”:http://mattbrett.com posted a “message on twitter”:http://twitter.com/mattbrett/statuses/3134673 that he was looking for a simple backup/sync solution for OSX. I dropped him an email with my backup solution and thought to myself that it would be a good idea to post it here as well. Of course, time passed and I still hadn’t gotten around to getting anything written up, until “Matt posted an article on his site”:http://mattbrett.com/archives/2007/05/the-power-of-twitter/ about the power of twitter, and mentioned my backup script. Since then I’ve had a constant stream of emails flowing into my inbox about my backup script, so finally, here it is.

The first thing to do is grab the example Automator workflow here .

Next, open the script in Automator and in Step 1, add the path to the folder that you want to back up. ’~/“Local Folder”’ is the folder that is in my home directory that I want to back up and “/Volumes/DiskName/Backup” is the back up folder on my external drive that I want to copy the files to. You can repeat that command on a new line for other folders that you want to back up and it will copy them to the Backup folder on your external drive. The particular rsync command that I’m using here will only copy over changed files so that it doesn’t have to copy every single file over to your backup every day. For more information on other rsync commands, type “man rsync” in the Terminal, or “["view the manual online”:http://everythinglinux.org/rsync/. You might want to look into the ’–delete’ parameter if you like file to be deleted on your backup drive as you delete them from your local folders.

Step 2 pops up a growl notification when the backup process is complete. If you haven’t installed growl yet, definitely give it a try, “it’s a very handy little app”:http://growl.info. You could also have the workflow send you an email when the backup is done, if you prefer. The one caveat here is that you won’t get confirmation if the backup was actually successful, this notification will display even if the rsync command fails (which it shouldn’t unless your external drive isn’t mounted, or if you have errors in some of your folder paths above). After you get that all set up, head to “File > Save As Plug-in, change the "Plug-in for” format to “iCal Alarm”, enter a name like “Local Backup” and save.

After the new plug-in is saved, iCal should open automatically and create a new calendar event on the current day in your default calendar. This part is a personal preference, but I like to keep all of my scheduled scripts in a calendar by themselves (called Backups) just for organization’s sake. Now, the choice is up to you how often you’d like your backup to run and at what time, change the repeat field to be whatever you’d like it to be (I set mine to daily), adjust the time that the script is executed (I set mine to a time I know I won’t be using my computer – 4:30am), and you should be good to go for local backups. Something else to note is that you can use this method in iCal to run just about any type of application/process/script you wish, it’s just a matter of changing the alarm time for an event to “Open file” or “Run script”. A new field right below that will appear to allow you to select the file you’d like to run. Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll show you how I use this method to back up my local files to a remote server, as well as how I grab daily MySQL backups from my webserver. Feel free to leave any questions in the comments below if I’ve left anything out, or if you get stuck with the process.

* Please note that this is vastly updated from my network backup workflow that I posted a couple of years back.

Joost Invites

Mon, 14 May 2007 14:26:00 -0400

“Joost is a new way of watching TV on the internet. With Joost, you get all the things you love about TV, including a high-quality full-screen picture, hundreds of full-length shows and easy channel-flipping.”

I’ve got a ton of Joost invites to give away (read unlimited). If you haven’t tried out the service yet and are interested in this new media phenomena, drop a line to joost@from-away.net with a quick note including the email address you’d like the invite sent to.

I Took It!

Tue, 24 Apr 2007 08:20:00 -0400

I just finished taking the First Annual A List Apart Web Design Survey.

The survey took me less than five minutes to complete, and because I offered my name and email address at the end of the survey, I’ve been entered to win a free ticket to An Event Apart event, an Apple 30GB video iPod, an Event Apart jump drive, or an A List Apart T-shirt.

Personally, I’m very curious to see the results of this survey, especially with all of the recent discussion surrounding gender diversity at web conferences, and the industry in general.

So, if you’ve got 5 spare minutes and would like the chance to win some cool prizes, make sure to take the survey.

Simplelog Contact Mailer Plugin

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 18:47:00 -0400

After following the conversation surrounding the Contact Mailer plugin offered by Harold Emsheimer at the Simplelog Forums, I decided to download and install it on my own site.

I found the plugin easy enough to install and after playing around with it for a bit, I decided to hack it apart a bit and make it even easier to install, and clean up the URL’s the plugin uses.

The first thing that I did was adding routing to the init.rb file of the plugin. Routing seemed to be the thing that people were having the biggest problem with over at the Simplelog forums. After that was taken care of, I cleaned up the routes a bit, and now we’ve got the Simplelog Contact Mailer Plugin.

Download Simplog Contact Mailer Plugin

All of the instructions for getting it set up on your own Simplelog installation are included in the README file.

Many thanks to Harold for offering this up to us over at the forums, and for giving me the go-ahead to pass along my modified version.

My Home Office

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:27:00 -0400

Seeing Garrett’s post made me realize that I haven’t posted a recent shot of my office since I started working from home either. I’m fascinated with seeing other people’s workspace as a means to add to or improve my own. So, if you’ve got a recent shot of your own home office link to it in the comments. See the photos after the jump.

As always, the larger versions of the photos are linked above and are available in my Flickr photostream.

Installing Simplelog on A Small Orange

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 08:40:00 -0400

Having recently installed Simplelog on my A Small Orange hosting account, I thought I’d go through the install process here for the benefit of those that might be running into problems getting it set up. I’ll also throw in a few other general tips and tricks for those that may be setting it up on a similar setup. First things first, you’ll need to download the latest version of Simplelog from the Simplelog website: or, if you’re feeling adventurous you can download the latest development version from Simplelog SVN: using the username and password ‘anonymous’. Next, you’ll want to set up a new database for Simplelog by logging into cPanel and creating a new database in the MySQL area. Make sure to take note of your DB name, username, and password, we’ll need these a little later on. Now we’re going to set the chmod (permissions) for a few files and configure Simplelog. Personally, I like to do both of these steps before I upload Simplelog to my server even though I have SSH access. If you have SSH access or now how to set permissions using your FTP program of choice, you could do it after uploading Simplog. For setting permissions, I’m going to use Terminal (since I’m using OSX) and navigate to the folder that I’ve downloaded/unzipped Simplelog on my local machine.


	Computer:~/Downloads/simplelog_2.0.2 username$  chmod 755 log/

	Computer:~/Downloads/simplelog_2.0.2 username$  chmod 755 theme_backup/

	Computer:~/Downloads/simplelog_2.0.2 username$  chmod 755 public/dispatch.fcgi

Input the above commands into Terminal (or your command line tool of choice) while in the unzipped Simplelog directory. Next we’re going to set up our database and configuration settings. First, open config/database.yml and edit it to match your database details (using the DB name, username, and password we set up earlier). For those that are setting up Simplelog on a host other than A Small Orange (or those wanting to use a PostgresSQL DB) there are a couple of other example database.yml files in the config directory. If your MySQL server address is anything other than 'localhost’, you’ll want to use the database_dreamhost.yml for your example. It contains a 'host’ field that will allow you to type in a named MySQL address for your server (i.e. mysql.mydomain.com). One last thing before we upload everything to our A Small Orange server, since ASO is running Rails through FCGI, we’ll need to force Simplelog to run in production mode. Running in production mode will speed things up for us and will put a lot less strain on our shared server (Rails apps should always be run in production mode on your shared server, development should be done locally or on your own development server). So to force production mode, we’re going to open up the environment.rb file in the config directory and add this line to it around line 39: ENV['RAILS_ENV'] ||= 'production'. Another step that you’ll notice that I’ve skipped (that you would normally have to take care of for most Rails apps) is opening the .htaccess file in the public folder of Simplelog to point to dispatch.fcgi instead of dispatch.cgi. The reason that I’ve skipped over this is because Simplelog is already configured this way when downloaded, so you don’t have to worry about it. Now that we’ve done all this, we’ll upload Simplelog to our server. Since this isn’t a normal HTML/PHP/etc. application, we’re going to be uploading it to our main user directory (/home/username/). I prefer to keep all my Rails applications in one directory by themselves, so I’ve created a rails folder in my home directory. Change to that folder and upload the Simplelog folder from your local machine. Once everything is finished uploading, we’re going to SSH into the server to bootstrap our database (bootstrapping includes importing the database schema and a bit of sample data). To bootstrap our database we’ll want to run these commands once we’re logged in to our server:


	username@Server [~]# cd rails/simplelog_2.0.2

	username@Server [~]#  rake simplelog:install

You should now get a message that rake tasks have been completed if the install was successful. Just one last step before we can start blogging using Simplelog. Since we’ve put Simplelog somewhere other than in our public_html folder, we need to create a symbolic link to the public folder of Simplelog so that visitors will see something when they reach our website. This next step will delete all of the data that currently resides in your public_html directory. Make sure to make a complete backup of public_html before continuing with the next step! While still logged in to our server via SSH, we’re going to cd back to our home directory:


	username@Server [~]# cd ../..

After making a complete backup of our public_html folder we’ll run the following commands:


	rm -rf ~/public_html

	ln -sf ~/rails/simplelog/public   ~/public_html

There, now we can log out of our server and visit our website (http://yourdomain.com/) to make sure that everything went as it should. The first time that you visit your Simplelog install, it will take a little longer than normal for your site to load. This is because Simplelog is running through FCGI, so the extra load time is to wait for the dispatch.fcgi process to start up. After a brief wait you should see the default template for Simplelog show up and now you can visit http://yourdomain.com/admin and log in using the default email/password for Simplelog: Email: temp@email.com/Password: !@gonow (make sure to change this when you log in for the first time). Now we’re all set to start blogging!

This article is merely a guide. If you’re having problems getting Simplelog installed properly, please visit the Simplelog Wiki or the Simplelog Forums for more help and support.

Simplelog Version: 2.0.2
Last Updated: March 26, 2007

Resume Broadcast

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 07:00:00 -0400

Well, after an absense that was entirely too long to be called temporary, From Away is back in full swing. As you can tell from this post, I was a bit disillusioned with the whole web industry and decided that I needed to give myself a bit of a break from maintaining this website and extra-curricular web work in general. But, in light of the events of the last couple of months, I’m back and quite refreshed.

The New Gig

My biggest motivating factor for getting this website back up and running again has definitely been my new job. For the last year or so, Derek Featherstone and I had been talking on and off about me doing some contract work for him during my freelance time. Timing never seemed to be quite right for either of us to jump on a project together, but around Christmas time Derek and I had a discussion about me leaving my full time job and spending my time working on projects for his company, Further Ahead. We both decided (based on Derek’s 80% rule, which I also base a lot of decisions on) that it was time. I gave my notice at my old job the first week of February and started working with Further Ahead on February 19th. I’ve really been enjoying the work that I’ve been doing so far, and hopefully before too long we’ll be able to take the wraps off some of the projects that Derek and I have been working on together the past few weeks. This job has really renewed my enthusiasm in my career, my stress levels have never been lower, and my productivity has never been higher. So many thanks to Derek, I’m very happy to be a member of the Further Ahead team!

Web Directions North

I was also lucky enough to be able to attend Web Directions North. It was quite an experience, this being my first conference. I found it a bit overwhelming at first because I knew absolutely no one there previous to the conference. But, once I got over myself, and started meeting people, I had a great time. I ran into Daniel Burka who is the designer for Digg and is also a former Islander. We got to talking about the old school music scene on the Island and found out that we knew a lot of the same people and ran in a few of the same circles of friends. I also had a great roomate in Jon Snook who I tagged along with on a couple of occasions and introduced me to lots of great folk. I met so many other people during the four days that I was in Vancouver that I had trouble remembering names, etc. So, my apologies if we me and I didn’t mention you here. Being at WDN also gave Derek and I a chance to sit down and get to know each other a bit over a few beers and some great food. After chatting with Derek and his wife for a couple of hours, I knew that had definitely made the right decision about my employment situation.

Up to Speed

So that gives kind of a whirl-wind tour of my life from the last few months. Posting will once again become a regular thing around here. I’ve got two or three posts lined up that are Mac related and I’m sure more will come along with time. Make sure to keep an eye on my Ma.gnolia feed on the front page as I post a couple of links every day via Ma.gnolia rather than reblogging them here in the main stream of consciousness.

Waivering...

Wed, 12 Jul 2006 10:07:00 -0400

I’m currently feeling very restless in my position of employment. I say currently, but I’ve had this feeling for quite a few months now. Mind you, I really like the people I work with (and I love developing websites and web apps - but every project in my current job is starting to feel the same), but I have this feeling that there are other, much more exciting projects out there that I’d love to be spending my working hours on. I’d really love to go back to freelancing which would allow me to manage my own work/hours, and would also give me more time to work on my own projects, of which I only seem to have 3 to 4 hours a week to work on now. A lot of time that I used to spend on my own projects is now being spent on more important things, like actually getting away from my desk and enjoying the summer with Krista and some friends from the Maritimes that have recently relocated to Alberta. That being said, I cannot seem to get ahead of financial roadblocks that would allow me to freelance full time. Monthly bills, wanting to buy a home, doing a bit of travelling (time allowing), and other expenses seem to prevent me from setting aside enough of a security blanket to keep us comfortable while I make the transition to freelance and do a bit of marketing for myself. I’ve spoken with a number of different companies since the start of the year regarding some new and exciting projects that I’d love to be a part of ¹, but no one seems to be able to give me any certainty on the duration of employment/contracts outside of two or three months. Two or three months would be great if I knew I’d have something else to move on to for sure at the outset. But, because of the reasons I listed above, I just don’t feel comfortable taking the chance that I could be doing this all over again when the project is completed. Maybe with this career that I’ve chosen in web development, I just need to quit whining and get used to the idea that nothing in this industry is certain or secure, and unless I switch to a different career (or take a job that is secure, but so boring and stagnant that I can hardly take it), I’m just going to have to suck it up, live with it, and take a few chances, even if it means that things could get tough for us again financially. I’d love to hear opinions from any of you, or if I’m just being a big wuss about the whole thing, just give me a swift kick in the ass!

¹ I should note that I’m also somewhat picky about team situations in these new opportunities. I don’t relish working with a large team, because in my experience, large teams often breed politics, which is something I can’t stand. I also find that the fewer cooks in the pot, the better the result. Thus, my considerations so far have been limited to smaller teams of around 5 people. Back