CheezyOranges

There is no such thing. At least, not one that is verbose enough to do what we need it to do. At work, we’re re-designing the Faculty Center homepage. Since I’ve got some long term projects in my lap I haven’t been delegated to it, but I’d like to help out. What we need is a system that allows us to use various types of pages without having people going directly into the html code. Too may people don’t or won’t know how to edit it and will end up messing stuff up. That’s what we’re trying to avoid.
Dreamweaver Templates is what we’re using now and its just gotten so tedious and complicated, especially with all the subsites going on inside our main site.
We’re probably going to have to write something from scratch, which is going to suck.

I’m having a hell of a time to get Rails working properly.
Rails requires a database if you plan on doing any really interactive sites, so to kill all the birds with one stone, I installed WAMP, which is a fully integrated distribution of Apache, PHP, MySQL, and some administration tools. Its convenient if you need a quick testing server up and running and don’t want to waste time setting up a bunch of infrastructure.

So, installing the server and ruby is easy – they’re both oneclick installs. Its getting them to work *together* that’s the issue.
Apache doesn’t automatically understand Ruby, and Ruby doesn’t automatically want to use Apache, so there’s a bunch of config files and settings that need to be changed. Having done that, and getting to the happy “Now you’re on Rails!” welcome page (which means server<->Ruby communications are up and running) I try to build an application.

Now, I’m met with all sorts of error messages and missing plug in warnings. And this is the 3rd time I’ve completely un-installed and re-installed the setup. Just short of re-installing windows too, just to be sure. CRAZY!

Is this stupid language worth it? It doesn’t help I can’t find any good tutorials or resources either.

http://secure.lenos.com/lenos/adobe/cs3conference/home.htm

Adobe is holding 2 conferences, one in New York and one in LA, about their new product, Creative Suite 3. It looks very informative and exciting. My employers won’t pay for me to go, but I may ask for the time off and finance it myself. Especially if Greg ends up going as well.
I know its a big hype up for you to purchase their software, but it looks like they will be talking about innovative uses and methods at the conference as well. Plus, its a chance to get to go to LA, which I’ve been wanting to do just to say “hey, I’ve been there.”

So its Thursday, the day I stay late at work and close up. I get the luxury of coming in late on Thursdays, which is nice. I always stop by Pita Pit and pick up lunch on my way into campus. And I normally have to consider where I park, because Thursdays were the nights I’d give Jason a ride back to Pegasus Landing. But, its been a week since his funeral, and the Faculty Center is still sort of reeling from the whole thing. Jason’s computer is back from the shop and we’re going to have to hire someone to take his place. We haven’t done any public memorial about him, but our 10th anniversary is coming up and we’ll probably do something for that. After all, he’s the second person (I think) to have passed away who worked here. Its still just a stunner. I keep thinking, maybe this is all a bad dream and I’ll go to work and he’ll still be here. But I know it isn’t. He was a really good friend to a lot of people, and we miss him a lot.

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About 6 months ago, I installed Ruby on Rails on one of our web servers at work. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the proper time or resources to get to know the development platform very well, and so the server fell by the wayside. I found out yesterday that it had been deleted from our virtual server repository. So it got me to thinking again on trying to learn how to use Ruby at work.
Only problem is that work won’t see it as an asset because they’ve been through the ‘application built in a language only one tech knows who then goes somewhere else and can’t maintain said application’ thing. We have an inventory system which is in need of updates and its written in C#. No one here knows anything about that language, so the system sits and breaks and we can do nothing to fix it but start from scratch.
I’d like to learn it if only for the joy of knowing another language (plus it may help me get a job someday) and it looks really cool. Especially when used in tandem with AJAX things. That looks like a lot of fun, and it looks like it could take some of my web designs from functional to really useful. Isn’t that what every web developer wants for their sites?

I found out this morning that Jason is dead. He died on Friday morning, before I even had the chance to say his name for Misheberach at services on Friday night. I’m just.. I don’t even know how to deal with this.
I’ve never faced death like this. He was my friend. He was my “closing buddy” as he put it when we worked together. He was always so kind, and so happy. He didn’t deserve to die. He was too young.

Thanks World of Warcraft. And sleeping in too much on Sunday morning, too. I didn’t wake up on Sunday until 2, so I couldn’t sleep last night. So I didn’t get to bed until 3. I hate having to wake up so damned early for work, but it beats being at the office every day until 9, I guess. Anyway, 9-5 job gotta do what you gotta do. I just wish that Greg would wake up earlier so he didn’t come home from work at 9. I feel like I see too little of him even though we live together. But, were I to change my schedule so I could go in at noon every day, we still wouldn’t see more of each other. Just we’d both wake up later, so the time to spend “together” would be spent asleep. So it doesn’t work. Though it would make things a bit easier on my brain on Monday mornings. Grah.

Friday night was spent at a Party!
Greg’s friend Charlotte threw a party on the occasion that she was back and visiting from England. She lives in a *very nice* townhome in Sanford. Though I didn’t know any of the people, save Greg, at the beginning, suprisingly I felt not too out of place. At first, I was wary. The people that were there and that showed up were not really my type of close friend person. At least on first impressions. After a while though, they all turned out to be really cool people. Especially once they all started drinking. I was Greg’s DD so I didn’t drink but one or two things early on in the evening. Unfortunately I completely ruined my diet by snacking on all the chips and chocolates. Blah.
So that was an interesting departure from the norm.
Over the weekend, I was bound and determined to ride by bike again, but I didn’t do it because Saturday it was cold and rainy and Sunday it was just cold.
Good thing is that my pants this morning weren’t *quite* as tight, so diet seems to be working, if annoyingly slowly.
Keep at it. Blah. Sleepy.

Yesterday was a fairly good day. I found out, unofficially, that my graduate application has been accepted. That is exciting! No word yet as to the fellowship or assistantship I was hoping to get. I do know, that if I continue to work for the school I can get a tuition waiver as long as I am full time. Which is cool, because I’d also be getting a $1 an hour raise (on top of the raise they’ve already given me to $12). Nice!
I spoke with Justin today about doing some work for them (basically splitting my time half and half with Faculty Center and Undergraduate Studies.) It sounds like a real opportunity. I’d be one of their web developers, and pretty much working on my own. The team they have there sounds like a good solid one – they have print people, Justin is amazing with graphic design, they just don’t have a coder. So we could all make some pretty kick ass websites.

The sad thing I discovered today is that my friend from work, Jason, is sick in the hospital with pneumonia! His parents called to let us know he’d been admitted and to ask what to do about his schooling. Poor guy is probably going to have to file medical withdrawal when he comes back, which I know is a pain in the ass. Sucks. Oh and hey, the 20th was Greg and I’s anniversary. We’re not even celebrating the monthly ones anymore.

Speaking of Greg, he’s not happy. He drinks every night. It isn’t all me, and it’s not all his work, and I guess its just a bunch of things that he feels “aren’t working out” or something. I mean, one minute he’s fine but by the time night rolls around he can be moody, depressed, and feels like going to alcohol to make himself feel better. This is bad, because he’s going to become an alcoholic.

Simply stated, I’m a PHP fanatic: I can do simple things like making a page dynamic, to the bit more difficult self-validating forms and surveys. Well, those aren’t so hard, but they can be extremely tedious business.
What saddens me, though, is that I still fail to comprehend simple things like PHP classes and the like. I just recently modified a login-script which is heavy on its class use. I was confused at first how the script even worked, but eventually I figured it out. I even had to modify the thing to work with mssql. So I’ve whetted my appetite for PHP classes. I find the best way to learn is to start something like that from scratch. After all, its how I learned PHP in the first place.
So, now I find myself unhappily using someone else’s script and only vaguely understanding how it works. Plus, I need to work on making code that is distributable. Which means over-comment the heck out of it.