About
JokeofAllTrades.com is hosted by the wonderful folks at Webquarry. They provide cheap hosting with virtually unrestricted CGI capability, PHP4, MySQL, PERL5, Linux shell access and just about anything else I could hope for. The coding for the site was/is all done character by character in TextPad under heavy use of caffeine and/or ethanol. I use WordPress to manage the site now. The design is my own, however, with the exception of the page tabs, which I stole from some online tutorial. Each page is coded to conform to the World Wide Web Consortium’s XHTML 1.1 Transitional recommendation and styled with valid CSS. I tried to make my pages more accessible, before I gave up making them at all. Any modern browser with a scrap of self-respect should be able to display my pages in a sensible and consistent manner.
Joke of All Trades?
I began signing e-mails with “Joke of All Trades” my junior year in college. I was feeling a bit… spread thin, trying to triple-major and participate in student government and party and play soccer and rule the world, and failing miserably at all of it. I wanted a fancy sign-off for messages I sent to a mailing list for the Trash Can Sinatras, one of the greatest pop bands the world has ever seen. It began as a whim, it stuck as an identity. I can’t explain it better than that.
As for the website, it’s pure vanity. An exercise in exercises. I wanted to learn a little HTML, so I built a website. I wanted to run some scripts, so I had to pay for hosting. It was a short jump to buying a domain name, and my name was already taken. I didn’t have any other nicknames that I wanted to perpetuate, so “Joke of All Trades” won by process of elimination, mostly.
I know I don’t have enough “content” to warrant a website. And writing is excruciatingly painful for me. I hate writing. So I figure by having a website, where the whole world can see my “blog” and watch me fail to write, would encourage me to learn to dislike writing a little less. I don’t want everyone to see what a total slacker I really am. I guess the joke’s on me?
Who of All Trades?
Joke of All Trades. Rhymes with my last name: Hoke. By the way, my name’s Michael Hoke. I was born in 1975, I have quasi-excellent taste in pop music, I love good beer and wine, I play bad chess, and I am now a first-year associate at a law firm in Boston, MA. FunFun.
The Joke’s on You
You weren’t hoping to find anything useful here, were you?
