About Aaron Bull Schaefer
I’m a certifiable renaissance man, gentleman, and scholar. I have been working in the IT field since 2002 and am currently employed as a Systems Engineer at Wolfram Research, the makers of Mathematica and Wolfram|Alpha. I earned my Bachelor’s degree in Computer & Information Technology (specializing in Network Engineering) from Purdue University, graduating with highest distinction. I am passionate about security, automation, and using technology to make people’s lives better. It’s rumored that I may someday rule the world.
If you’d like to see some of the projects I’ve been involved in, take a gander at my aptly named projects page or my personal code repositories. You can easily find me all over the intertubes, but here are a few places to get you started:
Contact Me
If you’d like to reach me for any reason, send an email to aaron@elasticdog.com. I’m also constantly checking the horizon for smoke signals and carrier pigeons, if that’s your thing. If you’d prefer a more secure means of communication, keep on reading…
My GnuPG Public Key
GNU Privacy Guard (a.k.a. GnuPG or GPG) is F/OSS that allows you to easily sign and encrypt your data. This enables you to verify people’s identities and protect your privacy when communicating online. If you would like to communicate securely with me, you will need to download my public key:
pub 1024D/50EDFCCD 2008-05-31
Key fingerprint = 7074 406E 8272 D083 1E31 2845 666F D4C1 50ED FCCD
uid Aaron Bull Schaefer <aaron@elasticdog.com>
sub 2048g/388B7E9C 2008-05-31 [expires: 2012-12-21]
You can import it from any keyserver, or by downloading the ASCII-armored version manually. DO NOT forget to verify the key against the fingerprint listed above to ensure that they are the same. For more information, see The GNU Privacy Handbook.
About This Site
ElasticDog.com is not a typical blog…rather than taking a snapshot of my ideas on a particular date and leaving the entries to grow stale over time, I’ve choosen to produce a site that is always up-to-date and can evolve right along with rest of the world. The information you read here will always be an accurate reflection of my current ideas on various topics covering technology, standards-based web design, personal finance, photography, programming, unicorns, pirates, whatever. Everything I write is under version control, so you still have the ability to reference historical versions of the articles, if so desired.
I highly encourage participation through email correspondence and writing thought-out responses published via your own chosen platform; but the ability to leave comments here directly has been turned off. If you get in touch and our conversation generates any interesting dialog, there’s a good chance that I’ll add more details to the appropriate article or write something entirely new. We’ll see how this experiment goes!
Retired Articles
It’s inevitable that certain topics will fall out of favor and no longer be pertinent to myself or global citizens at large, so eventually, articles will be tagged as “retired” and de-emphasized site-wide. That way people don’t have to worry about if the information they read here is applicable now, or if it was only applicable three years ago when it was first published. The distinction will be made abundantly clear.
Colophon
ElasticDog.com is hosted on a VPS from Linode along with a number of my other sites. The server runs Nginx on top of Arch Linux and has its configuration managed via Chef using the Opscode Platform. The site itself is completely static, but uses a combination of Jekyll with RedCloth to generate the HTML, and Compass with Sass to generate the CSS. The site’s syndication feed is also generated by Jekyll, but ultimately gets distributed via FeedBurner.
It’s all tracked with Git and can be freely explored in my code repositories.
Design
Although it wasn’t my first website, I created ElasticDog.com when I began learning about web standards back in 2003. I started off using Movable Type as a blogging engine, and unfortunately neglected to convert all of my entries when I later switched to WordPress. Over the years, I’ve updated the look of this site a number of times…click a banner below to be transported into the past.
2003
2004
2006
2007
2008
The 2008 design of ElasticDog.com was not created by me, but was a highly-customized version of “Essay”, a Sandbox theme by Ian Stewart. The idea was that I could ignore the complexities of WordPress theme creation and get back to focusing on writing, but you can see how that went.
Current Design
The current design of ElasticDog.com (completed in October 2010) is another attempt at getting back to basics. I started with the idea of making the site look similar to output from Readability, but went further to enhance its typography, color palette, and structure to better represent the content I write. The design is intentially minimal, but with close attention paid to the details.
