About

A student at UW-Madison, podcaster on joshbetz.tv and smmas, web designer on — well, on here — and a runner.

Student

When I grow up I want to be… well that’s a good question actually. It’s going to have something to do with a computer — but then, doesn’t everything these days? I’ve been interested in how computers work forever and somewhat recently have become fascinated with graphic design. I’m specifically interested in web design with an increasing interest in typography.

At school I want to get my degree in Computer Science and/or Information Systems. I think one or both of these will really help me get to where I want to be even though I’m not sure exactly where that is yet. For a while I was pretty sure that I wanted to go the Information Systems route, but more and more I’m leaning towards Computer Science. We’ll keep everyone updated on the situation.

Podcaster

I’ve wanted to have my own podcast since late 2008/early 2009. Toward the beginning of 2010 @pathartl and I finally decided to get it in gear and started Sudo Make Me A Sandwich. In early summer 2010 I launched my joshbetz.tv website with my first video on how to setup a LAMP server. It took awhile, but I eventually got a second video up at the end of the summer.

SMMAS

Sudo Make Me A Sandwich is our show about “anything tech related”, as we’ve said in our introduction since the beginning. The first three episodes where only aired live on ustream with the fourth also being hard to find on the web. The smmas.com blog started posting the entries from blip.tv where the show is hosted at episode 5. We used google.com/wave for show notes until the announcement was made that it would be discontinued before episode 17, which is when we made the final decision to host show notes on the blog via WordPress.

The topics vary from week to week. I usually include stories about android since I got the HTC Hero on Sprint’s network just as we started recording. The beginning involved many scene changes along with changes in recording methods due to low budget and experience.

joshbetz.tv

I planned to use joshbetz.tv as a place to do video tutorials about anything that people might need help with. The first video was on a LAMP server setup with plans for tutorials on web design and other web or graphics related topics.

Web Designer

I setup my very first website in 2003. I started using WordPress in 2006 — it seem completely crazy that I’ve been using this awesome software for almost four years (back then my site was at betzster.no-ip.org, which unfortunately doesn’t go anywhere anymore). It’s only been in the past few years that I’ve really started to take my Design seriously. I recently moved my portfolio to this site because I really needed a CMS and WordPress recently added custom post types.

You can get my contact information or email straight from my contact page for inquiry. My prices are very competitive.

This Site

The current theme, assuming this page is still up-to-date, is called JB Minimal internally. I used Photoshop for the initial design mockup and Textmate for 100% of the coding. I copied a very small percentage of code from other sources and wrote it entirely in HTML5. It should be completely valid code and any error in validation are probably (hopefully) from any plugins that I’ve installed — and hopefully not any of the ones I wrote.

It’s a fairly minimalistic theme with the use of graphics kept to a minimum. I also tried to minimize the header size on internal pages with an awesome fading menu bar at the top of other pages.

Runner

After high school I’ve tried to continue running, which has proven to be difficult with a busy schedule. My favorite time to run is early in the morning as the sun is coming up, but that’s rare for me. Sometimes it’s nice to run in the summer around mid-day, but only if there’s a pool available for after.

The first race I ran after high school was a the 2010 Crazy Legs 5k in Madison, WI. I also ran the Susan G. Komen “Race for the Cure” 5k in Madison, as well as races at Miller Park in Milwaukee and Lambeau Field in Green Bay that summer.