supergeeky.org

N.Y. is HUGE!!! I was hoping to get to PA before I stopped driving for the day but at 1:00 I called it a night here at the lovely Best Western.

Tomorrow is another day...

Dunkirk, NY - Best Western

This second road trip to Detroit is starting out so much better than the first. I got on the pike today around 3 p.m. Aside from the usual jam up in the tunnel getting to the pike there was no traffic.

I have decided that I will not be going to Drupalcon09 in Paris. I will sit this one out and attend the state-side Drupalcon next spring. Drupalcon is fun but I have too many goals that I am working towards these days and adding the expense and time involved in attending Drupalcon is pushing it too far.

I have always held banks in contempt, my experience of the past year has intensified this view. Last July I purchased a home at what I thought may be the bottom of the housing bust. Boy was I wrong. But the upside is that I have a job (at least as of the time of this blog entry) that I can afford this house. I paid $250K/6.75int/30 yr mtg, via an FHA loan which allowed 3% down. It also added an extra $110 a month to my payment which is currently a little over $2100/month.

It's not every day a new internet protocol is invented. It's kind of like someone inventing a new element, like fire or water, not a css element.

I am really excited to integrate "bloggy" into my blog. It would be great to have a seamless way to incorporate content to and from my blog.

Of course a Drupal module for Wave would be very cool too. I hope I get a sandbox account so I can at least attempt something like this. I am sure that there are many other Drupal Developers out there with the same thought right now.

Some people may think that having catastrophic thinking is a bad thing. Actually, as a programmer it is a great strength. You have to think of every thing that can go wrong, so that when you release your code into the world, most of the possible bugs will be worked out. If you are an optimistic coder or overly confident in your methods you are sure to be surprised when things start to go wrong.

In this spirit I am composing a "worst case scenario list" for my trip to Paris this September.

One of the oldest and largest websites that my company runs is showing it's age. It looks very 1998. It's semi automated, meaning that there is a jury rigging of "template" files, php fragments, that are being hobbled together using the php output buffer class ob_start, ob_flush, etc.

Ideally, this site of over 100K pages of content should be housed in a database, and the pages rendered via a template. Sadly, that's not the reality in this case. All of the files are hand maintained html text files. They were in some sort of a proprietary content management system at one time, but due to cost cutting measures they stopped using it. The files were written out to files.

Due to layoffs at my company, I have recently inherited a task that my former co-worker was working on.

This project involves grabbing an html file and completely rearranging that page, then outputting it to the browser.

I guess I am old now, or at least not young enough to think that flip flops are a good look for the office. Whenever I see a woman wearing a business suit or a nice dress with flip flops and sans hosiery I can't help but wonder if she had to leave her house in a great hurry. Perhaps a fire or a gas leak prevented her from taking the time to put actual shoes on. I wonder if these are her shoes for the day or just for the commute to work.

Also, here's some advice for the men. Your exposed hairy hobbit feet are not sexy!