Request: Alex King Rememberances

Dear WordPress community,

My apologies for the selfish and personal nature of this post. I hope you will forgive me given the circumstances. As most of you know, I was diagnosed with stage 4 colon cancer in 2013.

One of the things my wife and I are trying to do is put together some information about my career that will hopefully give my 6 year-old daughter a better sense of who I was as an adult. She knows me as “dad”, but when she gets older she’ll be curious about who I was to my peers and colleagues.

I’ve spent more than a decade in the WordPress community and I’d like to request that you to share a few thoughts or remembrances about me that we can compile and share with her when the time is right.

If we have crossed paths or if I have managed to do something that you found helpful, I’d love it if you would take a few minutes to write it down and send it to me or my wife: heatherkingcom@gmail.com. If you’re willing to have the story shared publicly, please indicate that accordingly. By default, we will keep everything confidential.

This post is part of the thread: Cancer – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

To: Family & Friends

Date: August 24, 2015

Subject: Cycle 1 of New Trial

This was originally an email written to my family and friends on the date above. I decided to make these public in the event they may be helpful to someone in the future who is embarking on a similar journey to mine.

Hi Everyone,

I’m nearly through my first cycle of the new clinical trial and overall I think it’s gone pretty well. I was able to get the 6 pills/day (3 in the morning, 3 in the evening) without too much concern. That said, by the end of the 5 days taking the pills I would basically sleep for the day.

During the 2 weeks off without pills (I’m currently on the second week of this) I’ve still had some fatigue and I’m still on the oxygen tank. However I’ve been able to get back to reading to Caitlin and doing Lego sets with her. The cough that I’d developed during by washout period before the trial has improved a bit and I think there has been a slight reduction in some of the visible tumor growth.

I’m still pretty limited as to what I can do physically, but I’ve enjoyed hanging out on the couch during visits from friends and family. Luckily there is plenty of golf, baseball, and now football on TV to keep me busy on the couch.

I don’t yet know when I’ll be scheduling my next CT scan to check the effectiveness of the treatment, but I’m guessing it will be in the next 4-6 weeks.

We’ve also started to try to compile a bit of information about me that Caitlin might find interesting later down the road. If you haven’t received an email about this effort, you probably will in the near future.

This post is part of the thread: Cancer – an ongoing story on this site. View the thread timeline for more context on this post.

Anker PowerPort 5 USB Charging Station

I enjoy reading posts about the tools people use. Casey recently posted about some of his travel toolkit, including a 5 USB port charger.

I can definitely see this being valuable for travel, but my current use case is my bedside table. The charger happily accommodates my iPhone, iPad, and Apple Watch charging cables, plus a micro USB cable for my Kindle and bluetooth headphones with a port to spare. A single box is much easier to manage than individual wall-to-USB warts for each cable/device.

Personal WordPress Theme

I’ve forked the FavePersonal theme to release a few changes that I’ve made to it for my own site. An improved Gallery feature, including support for WordPress shortcode galleries. If you’re uploading photos directly to your gallery post, you can use drag and drop to set the order for them now. The Post Formats admin…

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That liberating feeling when you let a domain expire for that project you never quite got around to.

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Safari vs. Chrome: Power Consumption →

I’m increasingly using Chrome because Safari can’t get the job done. I don’t know whose fault it is that these sites don’t work with Safari, but to me as a user it doesn’t really matter. Improving power efficiency is great, but it would probably save even more battery life if Safari were compatible enough that I didn’t have to keep Chrome running.

To: Family & Friends

Date: July 30, 2015

Subject: An Eventful Friday Night + New Trial

Hi Everyone, On Friday afternoon I had my initial interview for the TAS-102 trial. As is standard with these appointments, we reviewed my history, the treatment schedule, side effects (they sound relatively mild), and I signed the consent form to volunteer for the study. From there I needed to get blood work and a CT…

Continued…

Meet the New Monk: Fintan Ryan →

Beyond the technical skills, however, Fintan seems to have a knack for asking interesting questions, a trait that can be harder to find than the ability to answer them.

I’m not at all surprised at how RedMonk went about their latest round of hiring. Sounds like they have landed a great fit. Congrats all around.

You are not your company →

The idea of an entrepreneur is to ideally build a company that is bigger than the founder. In the early days you are critical, but over time your job is to build systems and hire people (or teams of people) to fill in these critical roles. In many ways the true measure of success is when you’ve managed to make yourself no longer a necessary piece.

I often said that my job at Crowd Favorite was to make myself redundant. And then to build redundancy into the team, processes, etc.