I Eat Paint

General Questions

I Eat Paint is a part weblog, part humor site. It exists primarily for my own amusement, and for the amusement of my friends. I make no great promises about its content, only that, for whatever it's worth, I found the entry funny at the time. Also, I promise that entries will be by and large free of grammar and spelling mistakes, but I do have occasional bouts of flagrant stupidity, so one or two pop up from time to time.

Who runs 'I Eat Paint'?

This page is run by D.r. Matthew E. Poush, GmPL. I am a computer programmer for a small company in Des Moines. I hold a Bachelor of Science degree in both Mathematics and Computer Science from Drake University, and a summa cum laude Doctorate in Perpendicular Logic from the Institute for Advanced Perpedicular Logic.

Who edits 'I Eat Paint'?

Mostly, this site would suck and be full of really stupid spelling errors and bad grammar if it wasn't for our very own Editor Fairy, a professional editor. On the rare occasion I decided to throw caution to the wind and publish an unedited entry, I usually end up having to fix the entry over the next few days as people point out spelling mistakes to me. Anything good is her fault, and anything bad is mine.

Are you that girl at the top?

No. That's Katie, a friend of mine, and more or less the I Eat Paint mascot.

Jeez, I'm sorry. I thought you were a girl.

Don't worry about it. Just try not to hit on random strangers in the future.

What's with the layout?

It goes without saying that I have little to no sense of style. I dress myself purely through the aid of Esquire and Kohls salespeople. That said, I can't even begin to make a page that's aesthetically pleasing. Because of this, I turned to one of the best-looking things that I could find: Apple's Mac OS X. The whole floaty window thing with the drawer on the side is simply a screen shot that I've commandeered for my own uses.

That said, if you are Apple Computers, please don't sue me.
Thanks.

Is the old page around here somewhere?

Although it's something of an embarrasment, for posterity, you can view the old page here.

Misc

You suck, and so does your site.

Then don't read it.

How can I contact you?

Click on the word "Contact" at the top of the page.

Technical Questions about I Eat Paint

How is I Eat Paint run?

I host it on my company server as we've got bandwidth to spare. Ben makes sure Apache is running smoothly and does all the hard work of maintaning the server; I just ride on his coat-tails. That said, anything on my site that breaks is probably my fault, anything that goes smoothly is probably due to Ben. I Eat Paint is served with Apache, relies very heavily on PHP and MySQL, and is administrated with MySQL Control Center. Almost all the information from I Eat Paint (entries, comments, this faq, etc) are stored in a MySQL database and automatically generated by PHP scripts. Doing it this way makes it very easy to add new information to the site, but it makes it very hard to set up. I don't recommend doing it this way unless you're a masochist, work for a large company, plan on having a very large site, or want to learn PHP. This type of setup is refered to as LAMP among server administrators, meaning it's run with Linux, Apache, MySQL, and Php

Why did you set up I Eat Paint this way?

Partly because I'm a control freak; I want to do it myself. The original purpose of this page was as an ongoing exercise in teaching myself practical, hands-on MySQL and PHP. For that reason, I don't use any packages or pre-made software; letting someone do the work for me undermines my efforts to teach myself.

Do you have a syndicated feed?

Yes, you can find it here.

I want to set up a site. Any suggestions?

If you're not really a computer person, or you don't have your own server, I would suggest that you get an account at either LiveJournal, or Blogger. If you're more of a techie and have your own server, but don't want to mess too heavily with writing your own page-generation engine, take a look at Moveable Type.

Can you host my page?

Sorry, I'm afraid not. I don't even have my own server; I use the one at work. It's one thing to ask my boss if our company can host my site; it's a totaly different thing to ask him if we can host a complete stranger's site. He might even say yes, but it'll cost you much more than if just went to a hosting company.

Other Tech Stuff

Do you have a geek code?

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/M d-@ s+:++>+: a-- C++$ UB++++ P+ L+- E- W+++ N+ w--- M++ V Y+ PGP+ t+
X++(+) R tv-- b++ DI+ D G+ e++ h-- r y-
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------

You can decode it here.

Do you hae a PGP public key?