This clip sums up my second job

Wired tries to link bait me into "confirming" my "recent order"

Last year I purchased a subscription to Wired.  I decided to let it lapse.  I paid for it on a credit card that is not active anymore so just letting them stew on it and not replying was the easiest way for me to cancel.

Well this morning I get this alarming and frustrating email from Wired regarding my "recent" order with them.  I should "confirm" and "pay" my invoice.

To me this is sleezy and immoral.  It took me by surprise when I first read this in my inbox.  It's written to deceive and get you to think the order is already processed and that I am required to pay the bill.  I have not placed any order!

I will not be renewing and I urge others not to subscribe to Wired as well.

CPU statistics on yesterday's post

I got a little help promoting yesterday's blog post from the jQuery team.  I knew that a wave of users was coming so I let my host provider know and they gave me an extra CPU for the morning (VMWare rules).  They also sent over the CPU graph for the day.  I found it interesting.

The first spike was when John Resig posted a link on twitter for me. The second biggest spike was when Rey Bango retweeted John's tweet.

The jQuery Plugin Repository - How can it be improved?

A jQuery plugin site redesign is in the early stages of being worked on.  Now is the time to have your voice heard as a jQuery user or a plugin author.

Please leave me a comment below or send me an e-mail with what you'd like to see in a new plugin repository.  Let me know what you think works now, what doesn't work, perhaps examples of plugin sites that might be a good foundation for jQuery to build off of (i.e. Mozilla Add-ons).

All your comments will be evaluated and added to a planning document that the jQuery team will use. 

A big thank you to the jQuery community for your help.

Improving my Personal Brand

Today, I took the step to improve my personal brand on my blog.  I bought the domain ralphwhitbeck.com and am pointing damnralph.com to it.

Damn Ralph has always been an inside joke for my coworkers and when I went to start a new blog I thought it would be fun to set it up.

Now that I am trying to focus my blog on more professional topics I felt more and more weird posting a link to my blog or telling people the url to my blog.  Not to mention when Robert Scoble linked to a post on the 3rd day the blog existed.

With my name as my blog url I can improve search engine results on my name, it looks more professional when I give out the url and when people stumble onto my site I look more legit.

If you are subscribed to my feed you probably got the last 10 posts again and I apologies for the inconvenience. That was caused by the DNS change.

Let me know what you think of the change?

Where to find help for your jQuery questions?

One of the most common questions I see on twitter from people is "I need help with jQuery, any experts around?"

While this is definitely a fair use of twitter.  Being an "expert" in jQuery I don't want to reply back with "Yes, I can help" without knowing what I am getting involved in.

But not to fear there are plenty of places one can go to get help online.


My favorite place to get help is Stack Overflow (http://stackoverflow.com). Stack Overflow is the Yahoo Answers, Experts Exchange for programmers.  And the great thing for jQuery programmers is that there are a ton of jQuery experts hanging out there.  jQuery questions seem to get answered almost immediately.



For more official help try the jQuery Group on Google Groups (http://groups.google.com/group/jquery-en?hl=en).  This is a great place to get help as most of the plugin authors and jQuery core programmers are hanging out in here to help.

IRC Channels

If you require more one-on-one help you can jump in to the jQuery IRC room where at any given time there are 400+ jQuery developers hanging out and talking jQuery.  Use the following information to connect to the channel.

For general discussion and jQuery development, please visit:

Server: irc.freenode.net
Room: #jquery

For jQuery UI discussion, please visit:

Server: irc.freenode.net
Room: #jquery-ui

Good luck!

SuperBowl Sushi 2009

As what has become a SuperBowl tradition in my circle of friends I usually bring sushi to the party.  Starting last year though I started making my own sushi instead of ordering a tray and bringing it.

This year I did the same.  Although the economy being bad I limited my selection to what I could make on the cheap.  That meant Crab sticks and imitation crab meat.

This yeah I made:

• California Roll (4 rolls)
• Classic California Roll (4 rolls)
• Avacado Roll (2 rolls)

Here are some pictures of the fun...



The setting to make the delicious sushi.



The rice all smushed out on the nori with seaseme seeds sprinkled on top.



A simple crab salad mix that makes the classic california roll.



A completed roll.  Looks almost perfect.



The completed sushi tray with football shaped wasabi in the middle.

In case you Missed it: #jQuery Twitter posts

My #jQuery related twitter posts for the week of January 27th - February 2nd:

• "In case you missed it: my #jquery twitter posts from this past week" http://bit.ly/4seKq6 #jquery
• New blog post: ASP.NET MVC Release Candidate - No Codebehinds on Views http://bit.ly/ogwg #jquery
• "What You Need to Know About jQuery 1.3" http://bit.ly/Flmg #jquery
• "Building a jQuery-Powered Tag-Cloud" http://bit.ly/hEoL #jquery
• "Rotate images with Canvas jQuery plugin" http://bit.ly/2lOgwe #jquery
• "13 Excellent jQuery Animation Techniques" http://bit.ly/1493S #jquery
• "10+ Most Interesting And Useful jQuery plugins - January 2009" http://bit.ly/AMgJ #jquery
• "Building an interactive map with jQuery instead of Flash" http://bit.ly/Gydb #jquery
• "Ajaxify jQuery Plugin" http://bit.ly/LOhi #jquery #plugin
• New blog post: Building a jQuery-Powered Tag-Cloud with an ASP.NET MVC backend http://bit.ly/jw8w #jquery #aspnet-mvc
• "CSS Sprites2 - It's JavaScript Time" http://bit.ly/2TKTUd #jQuery #css #sprites
• New blog post: Using ASP.NET MVC to backend the jQuery powered Tag-Cloud http://bit.ly/jw8w #jquery #aspnet-mvc
• "Simple jQuery Delete Link For ASP.NET MVC" http://bit.ly/HujQ #aspnet-mvc #jquery
• New blog post: Selecting a ASP.NET Generated ID with jQuery http://bit.ly/3fOXaR #aspnet #jquery
• "Donate to jQuery and Open Source Software today" http://bit.ly/QOLm #jquery
• "Styling Buttons and Toolbars with the jQuery UI CSS Framework" http://bit.ly/QnrD #jquery #jqueryui
• "Interview with John Resig: Creator of jQuery Javascript Library" http://bit.ly/E1HC #jquery
• "jQuery 1.3 Aftermath" http://bit.ly/4wWNST #jquery
• "Quick Tip: Add Easing to Your Animations"http://bit.ly/is4q #jquery
• "OpenID provider suggestion with jQuery" http://bit.ly/2Ssbhn #jquery #openid
• RT @elijahmanor: "Lazy Load: Image lazy loader plugin for jQuery." by @tuupola #tech #jquery http://bit.ly/tAAQ
• "jQuery Username Availability check." http://bit.ly/Ooln #jquery