Adding the rest of the blog posts

It's going to take a lot of editing to get the formatting right and
move over the pictures and all that. But it's a great start.

This commit updates the default blog landing page and puts the
description field in for the "excerpt".

_config.yml

@@ -25,6 +25,7 @@ github_username:  bsclifton
 linkedin_username: bsclifton
 
 # Build settings
+show_excerpts: true
 markdown: kramdown
 theme: minima
 plugins:

_layouts/home-extended.html

@@ -0,0 +1,34 @@
+---
+layout: default
+---
+
+<div class="home">
+  {%- if page.title -%}
+    <h1 class="page-heading">{{ page.title }}</h1>
+  {%- endif -%}
+
+  {{ content }}
+
+  {%- if site.posts.size > 0 -%}
+    <h2 class="post-list-heading">{{ page.list_title | default: "Posts" }}</h2>
+    <ul class="post-list">
+      {%- for post in site.posts -%}
+      <li>
+        {%- assign date_format = site.minima.date_format | default: "%b %-d, %Y" -%}
+        <span class="post-meta">{{ post.date | date: date_format }}</span>
+        <h3>
+          <a class="post-link" href="{{ post.url | relative_url }}">
+            {{ post.title | escape }}
+          </a>
+        </h3>
+        {%- if site.show_excerpts -%}
+          {{ post.description }}
+        {%- endif -%}
+      </li>
+      {%- endfor -%}
+    </ul>
+
+    <p class="rss-subscribe">subscribe <a href="{{ "/feed.xml" | relative_url }}">via RSS</a></p>
+  {%- endif -%}
+
+</div>

_posts/2008-05-12-connecting-with-designer-of-cpp.md

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Connecting with the designer of C++"
+description: "C++ has played a huge role in my professional career. On a whim, I reached out to its creator, Bjarne Stroustrup. He replied and even sent me an autograph!"
+date: 2008-05-12 18:49:07 -0700
+categories: "c++"
+---

_posts/2009-05-23-godaddy-techfest-2009.md

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "GoDaddy TechFest 2009"
+description: "Pictures from the 2009 TechFest that GoDaddy does every year for its technical staff. This year I got to meet Candice Michelle, the original GoDaddy girl."
+date: 2009-05-23 11:59:56 -0700
+categories: "godaddy"
+---

_posts/2011-04-25-why-i-quit-drinking.md

@@ -0,0 +1,7 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Why I quit drinking"
+description: "An overview of why I quit drinking. Includes a journal of my experience in the Maricopa County "Tent City" jail back in 2005."
+date: 2011-04-25 21:33:56 -0700
+categories: "thoughts"
+---

_posts/2011-11-27-living-with-ocd-anxiety.md

@@ -0,0 +1,27 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Living with OCD and anxiety"
+description: "Reflecting back on my personal struggle with OCD and anxiety."
+date: 2011-11-27 01:44:15 -0700
+categories: "ocd"
+---
+
+I’ve always had a hard time relaxing because my brain doesn’t know how to stop working. When I was younger, I could force myself to relax by having a few beers. This worked great for me as a teenager up and through college. I built up enough of a tolerance that I could slam a 12 pack in a 3 hour span and still write complex computer code. It got to a point where I was drinking almost every day. This obviously isn’t a great way to live your life and I ended up getting a DUI in 2005 (I wrote about that experience in a previous blog entry, “Life experience: Driving under the influence”). Part of the sentence given to me was attending counseling for a few months. After talking about alcohol for so many hours, drinking lost all of its appeal and no longer helped me relax.
+
+Without a way to relax, my brain would keep spinning. It gets fixated and stuck on a subject for long periods of time, to the point where I feel physically ill. I would have an upset stomach and feel extremely fatigued all the time. I’d always feel tense and on-edge. These physical symptoms started to affect my social life. I would ditch events with my best friends because I didn’t feel good. Quite often I’d start feeling light headed out of nowhere and a few times I fainted. One day when I was working at Intel, I started having unbearable chest pains. The nurse came, checked me out, and called an ambulance for me. I really had to figure out what was happening to me. With all these physical issues, my brain is starting to second guess how I feel all the time, making the problem even worse.
+
+In 2006, I spent a lot of time and money running tests at specialty doctors. I was diagnosed by one doctor as having Celiac disease, an allergy to gluten. I switched my diet and quit eating wheat and gluten products altogether for about a year and it did help. I lost weight and started to feel better. But the problem was still there. I got retested, this time taking a biopsy, and it turns out I didn’t have Celiac disease. I did barium tests, an endoscopy, and a colonoscopy. I had CAT scans, MRIs, just about every test in the book. The only diagnosis I got was IBS (Irritable Bowel Syndrome). There was a gastrointestinal doctor I had saw and he told me straight up that the problem is in my head; there is no physical issue. I was insulted; what an idiot. I’m definitely not crazy.
+
+Sometime in 2007, I flew up to Hillsboro Oregon one time for a 3 day business trip. I’ve been there a few times, my team was actually located there. I was working on a project with a few people and really needed the face time to finish the project. The first day was really great, I had a good time and we got some good work done. I was reviewing code with a few other folks and it was really nice to see them in person. The second day I made it about halfway through the day before I started to feel ill. I excused myself towards the end of the day and went back to the hotel.
+
+I stayed in the room for a few hours, trying to sleep and relax, but this time I couldn’t handle it. Something is wrong with me. With all the tests I had done coming back with me being fine, the problem had to be in my head. That stupid doctor was right all along. This was hands down the hardest thing I’ve ever had to accept in my life. I felt like a weak piece of crap for not being able to beat this, especially considering how good my problem solving skills are. I had a break down that night and called my stepmom and let her know what was going on. I had no idea what to do with myself at this point. I ended up canceling my stay and leaving Hillsboro early the next morning.
+
+When I got back home, I started seeking out mental health experts. I met with the first person who was available, a lady named Danielle. After a few visits she diagnosed me with OCD (Obsessive Compulsive Disorder). It was great having a name for the problem and a plan for how to treat it. The really horrible feelings I have been having were called panic attacks. These are seriously the worst thing I’ve ever experienced in my life. You get pumped up with adrenaline, your muscles get all tense, you start hyperventilating. It got to the point where I was obsessing and getting scared about having panic attacks. What happens if I go out and meet with my friends and an attack happens? These attacks were happening several times a week, sometimes several times a day.
+
+I got on medicine. It took a few weeks to kick in but I started to feel better. Much better. The thing I noticed the most after taking the medicine was that I started to feel extremely happy again. After living with this problem for almost 3 years without a way to relax, I was seriously suffering from depression. It’s weird admitting that because I didn’t feel sad or anything. I guess I just didn’t feel happy.
+
+Every day since then, my life has gotten much better. Relaxing is much easier. Once I started taking that medicine, I started to feel like myself again. I started having feelings I hadn’t had in years. Things just kept getting better. I switched jobs and now I’m doing something that I love every day. I met a great girl and ended up getting married. I never pictured myself where I am today when I was struggling with those issues.
+
+I still deal with the issue, it’s just nowhere near as bad as it was. As much as I’d like it to just go away, it hasn’t. Every day I take steps to get myself in better shape. There are good days and bad days. However, like any problem out there, once you know the root cause, it’s a lot easier to solve the problem. The hardest part through it all was knowing my thoughts were irrational but just not being able to make them stop. In my case, it was not even possible for my mind to overcome the issue. I had to get medicine to get my brain up and running again.
+
+So that’s what I’ve been dealing with for the past few years. Feels really good to sit down and reflect on it. If you know me personally, you’ll know how I joke about being crazy. I’m not insane, but these are the issues I’ve been dealing with.

_posts/2014-01-03-2013-year-of-releases.md

@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "2013: A year of releases"
+description: "The past few months have been life changing in a lot of ways. In my free time over the past 2 years, a group of friends and I formed a company and have been working hard to finish creating a game that some of us had originally started in 2002. We made great progress, this …"
+date: 2014-01-03 01:18:43 -0700
+categories: "accomplishments"
+---
+
+The past few months have been life changing in a lot of ways.
+
+In my free time over the past 2 years, a group of friends and I formed a company and have been working hard to finish creating a game that some of us had originally started in 2002. We made great progress, this time targeting the Xbox 360… and then I found out my wife Margarita and were expecting our first baby. It quickly became a race to finish the game before the baby was due in September.
+
+Morgopolis Studios
+The friendly staff of Morgopolis Studios, creators of Magicians & Looters
+We put in a lot of hard work and finished our game, Magicians & Looters, in August… our first live sales day in the Xbox Live Indie Games store was actually August 23rd. Finishing this game was a huge personal accomplishment for me. Before moving to Arizona, I had never been able to talk about programming or game design with anyone before, at least face-to-face. The closest experience I had was with a great friend of mine, Bill, who I met on AOL in 1993, back when I was a HyperCard developer. We’d talk for hours long distance on the phone about code; nobody I knew in “real life” was very interested in programming. I moved to Arizona in 2001 to attend a school called UAT and this introduced me to a lot of great people that DID like writing code, many that I still talk with regularly. Two of those people are Dan and Justin. The three of us (along with a fourth member, Brad) were members of the game development club, we came up with a “simple” game project that we could all work on and (hopefully) finish. We worked on the game for a good 2 years before calling it quits. It’s not that we didn’t want to finish the game, it’s just that we needed to go out there and get jobs after graduating.
+
+Working on Magicians & Looters back in 2002 at UAT
+Working on Magicians & Looters back in 2002 at UAT
+I jumped into the business world, getting much better at what I do over the years and writing lots of great code along the way… but Magicians & Looters would pop into my head every so-often. Justin put an amazing amount of work into the art and story of the game and I always felt ashamed that we never really got to put it in front of anybody, other than our friends back in the university days. So when we FINALLY finished the game, released it, and started getting feedback… wow, it was an amazing time for me. Good or bad, I was delighted to just see people talking about our game. Luckily, it was fairly well received, which made that feeling even more warm and fuzzy.
+
+http://thexblig.com/2013/08/25/review-magicians-looters/
+http://www.fateofthegame.com/indie-review-magicians-looters/
+http://indiegamerchick.com/2013/09/11/magicians-looters/
+Not quite one month after getting our game out there, my wife Margarita and I had our first kid, a healthy baby boy named Michael. We were at the hospital for a week solid; before that time, I don’t think the reality of being a dad had really “hit me” yet. It was (and is) a really cool experience. The baby was delivered via C-section because of some complications and I got to be there with her for all of it. Me being nervous of course, I tell the doctors before they take the baby out, “Hey guys, if that baby is black, I’m leaving” and got a few laughs… and the next thing you know, I’m holding a baby. I cut the umbilical cord and basically spent every moment for the next few days with Margarita and our new baby, trying to figure out the whole dad thing. As of right now, Mikey just hit 3 months and he’s doing great; I’m really enjoying being a dad.
+
+Clifton men
+Clifton men just snoozing; the pack leader,the new baby, and the pooch
+During the whole pregnancy and also the development cycle with Magicians & Looters, work at my actual job had been extremely busy. I work in the hosting department of GoDaddy and am part of the development team which works on Plesk Hosting, Windows Server 2012 hosting using the Parallels Plesk control panel. This is a new product we created from the ground up in a matter of months and I was thrilled to be a part of this. All of our development lead up to October, when we planned to launch and start selling the product to customers. A ton of hard work went into this product by everybody on our team. 3 days after Michael was born, I was back at work, writing code and working on tasks. We hit our goal and released in October and we’ve been improving the product ever since.
+
+Plesk Hosting
+The product I worked on, Plesk Hosting
+So in retrospect, 2013 was a great year… a life changing one. I’m extremely proud of all three of my accomplishments: Releasing a video game, having a baby, and releasing a new hosting product.

_posts/2014-02-05-thinking-about-life-goals.md

@@ -0,0 +1,31 @@
+---
+layout: post
+title: "Thinking about life goals"
+description: "Reflecting on where I am now in life, what I'd like to accomplish in the years to come, and realizing I have to drop some goals in order to focus."
+date: 2014-02-05 01:51:21 -0700
+categories: "thoughts"
+---
+
+I love my life. My friends, my family… The work I do every day as a computer programmer that actually gives my life a sense of fulfillment and meaning. But I’m at a point now where I often find myself thinking in-depth about the life I’ve made for myself… asking, “What’s next?”. Projects get completed at work, paychecks come in… Personal debt goes down, balance in the retirement account goes up. When you’re a kid, you’re conditioned to think about what you want to do when you “grow up”. For me that meant figuring out what I wanted to do for my professional working life… but I don’t think I ever really put any thought into what I wanted to do with myself after I grew up.
+
+When you’re young, you have the luxury of pursuing any dreams you have and honestly just doing whatever you want. You’re like an artist with a chisel in front of a solid block of marble; you can make any kind of statue you’d like. You’ll try things… they might not turn out the way you want, but you can learn from your experiences and either get better or give up and try something else. I’m not calling myself old by any means, but each year that goes by I’ve definitely gotten wiser and at the same time more ingrained in the life I’ve created for myself as things start to take shape. Sticking with that marble statue analogy, you can keep carving pieces off as you work on this masterpiece of yours and eventually, after years of doing this, you get to a point where you’ve got a pretty solid idea of what you’re working on and you have an opportunity to pause and think about how you’d like to finish the project.
+
+It would be pretty easy at any given point to just say, “Fuck it”, and keep living life day to day, just seeing how things play out. But I personally think life is just way too short to do that. I’ve gotten this far and dammit, I want to have the best possible time on this planet that I can before I’m gone.
+
+Using this time to reflect, I’m realizing that you’re evolving with each decision you make and the experiences you have are like chipped off pieces in this statue you’re carving. Each goal you had in life adjusts itself as time goes by, getting a higher or lower priority. This crossroads is a point where you can look at all the goals you’ve came up with for your life…the priority you’ve associated with them… and then pick the ones you’re going to do, knowing very well that there are things that you’re going to die never having accomplished.
+
+For example, I’m thinking about how much I used to enjoy learning about other cultures and wanting to travel the world. I studied Japanese for about two years, Arabic and Hebrew for about a year each and I’ve always been somewhat decent at Spanish. As far as traveling, I’ve been to many of the states here in America (including Hawaii and Alaska) but internationally, I’ve only ever been to Mexico and Canada. But now I’m realizing that I’ll probably never see the world and I’m perfectly OK with that. And becoming proficient in any language other than Spanish? Not to sell myself short, but I really don’t think that’s happening. Which is hard to accept, thinking about the adventure of going to Europe and backpacking… or visiting Egypt to see the pyramids, or castles, gardens and pagodas in Japan. But at this point in my life, as much as I’d love to speak several languages fluently and be this amazing world traveler, there are ultimately other things I’d rather be doing which shove this dream further and further down the “bucket list”.
+
+I guess the overall theme I’m writing about here is focusing. When you start to realize what your favorite things in life are, what you love doing… it’s really hard to justify doing something else. There’s just not enough time, which really sucks. But I’d rather spend a lot of time doing the things I’ve loved than to spent a little time doing a whole bunch of things that I think are just “OK”. So after all this deep thought and reflection, what are some of those goals?
+
+## Making a difference in people’s lives
+Through my job I’m getting a chance to work on great products that can make a difference in people’s lives. And although it’s hard to measure, I’d like to think I’ve personally made a big impact on coworkers at every job I’ve been at. I don’t think there are many people that forget me, that’s for sure. Whether it’s kicking ass at the project I’m working on, mentoring someone, jumping in to help fire-fight issues that come up, or just trying to keep team morale high and facilitate good communication, I want to make a difference. Outside of work too, helping people work through issues and making a positive difference in their life.
+
+## Paying off all of my debt
+This is a huge one and it’s not exactly fun either. In fact, it sucks. I think anybody would rather be taking a trip overseas or buying a sports car. But the reality is, all I have left that I owe are my wife’s student loans and the mortgage on my house. After those are paid, I don’t owe anybody a penny. And that’s huge in my opinion.
+
+## Being in better shape and being there for my son
+I’m not morbidly obese but I’m not skinny. And body size aside, I’m in embarrassingly bad shape, cardio-wise. If you know me, you’ll know how I have a hard time staying away from sweets and diet soda, things that are just rotting my body away. Those things do help push me through crunch times, but I’ve got a son now and I want to be able to do an activity without falling over and having a heart attack. It would be awfully hard to be a good dad sitting on the couch.
+
+## Living in Hawaii
+I’ve only vacationed in Hawaii twice but I’ve spent almost a month and a half there total. I’ve been to Oahu, Maui, Lanai, and the big island. And later this year I’ll be going back there for my brother’s wedding, this time in Kauai. I love the beaches, the parks, and the weather. It’s really easy to idolize a place like this and think going there will “make my life complete”; but I’d honestly like to see if I could get bored of a place like this. That sounds like a great challenge to me.