OK, as I've stated before, I build websites. Not your "I use Frontpage" kind of websites either. We're talking full-blown, database-running-the-whole-thing, e-commerce-is-easy, but-I-can-make-it-pretty-too kinds of websites.

I have a client who wanted to change an older version of a site I built her into one that had a full shopping cart. I've been working on it for a few weeks, and I finally had come down to the wire.

I spent 16 hours this weekend writing code. She now has a shopping cart, the ability to use discount codes, quantity discounts, registration for all of the products she offers, and of course, a full sales history of everything that happens on her site.

I'm actually glad to be going back to my "day job." The weekend wore me out.

I got a 640 (of 800) on the GMAT. I'm not happy with it, but it'll do. I think I was setting my sights a little high with a hope of 700+, but set your goals too low, and you'll never truly know how good you are at something.

Additionally, I got to go bowling with some friends this weekend. I haven't been bowling in many years, at least two, probably more like 3 or 4. First game, I rang up a SOLID 125. OK, maybe that's not so solid. But the second game, I rolled a 175, with 5 strikes! I think I'm ready for the PBA tour, baby! I'm excited to join the ranks of such atheletes as: D.J. Archer, Rudy Kasimakis, and Norm Duke.

Today started the beginning of my application to the ever-elusive graduate school: Fisher College of Business at The Ohio State University. Now that I've taken the test, it's just a matter of getting some transcripts from Bowling Green, filling out an online application, and getting some letters of recommendation from a few colleagues.

I'll keep y'all posted on my progress.

So, I'm taking the GMAT today. And as should be expected, Riley was up all night either crying or singing/talking.

Who needs sleep when you take a $250 exam?

Today is, without a doubt, the worst day I have had this year. It all began last night.

Yesterday, it rained all day. I'm not talking about just misty, or a light drizzle, but RAIN. So after I got home from a client meeting, around 10:00 PM, I decided to wait until this morning to take out the trash. I left my car out to make it easier for me. I can't get the garbage cans out of the garage if my car's in there. I'm usually ready to leave for work by about 8:00 AM, and the garbage truck doesn't usually roll through my neighborhood until 8:15-8:30. I know it's cutting it close, but it's usually not a problem.

January 18th, 2006 8:00 AM
I awaken to the sound of the garbage truck on my street. Great. I guess my trash will sit in my garage for another week. Why can't they be a little consistent?

8:03 AM
I rush to the window to make sure I didn't hear a noisy school bus or something, and maybe I still have time to get the trash out....Nope. Neighbor's trash is empty. Oh yeah, and the ground is covered in snow. It was 50 yesterday!!! Now we have snow. It's certainly a good thing I left my car outside last night. Grrr...

8:05 AM
Shower time. Where is all the hot water? Ow! I just dropped a full shampoo bottle on my foot! I have TWO hot water tanks...why is this water AT BEST 75 degrees?

8:10 AM
Work is starting to seep into my head. Today, I've got to finish building a reporting application, a proposal for Magic Mountain Fun Centers, some debugging for a college's website, and finally, complete an RFP (request for proposal) for an ultra-demanding client. Should be just a great day. :(

8:20 AM
OK. Wife and daughter are up, and we've all made it downstairs to the kitchen. I'm grabbing my coat, and ready to head outside to start scraping my car. My daughter yells "Hug!" as I make my way to the door. She runs over and gives me a hug and kiss goodbye. The morning's events have just been erased in my mind. She's absolutely the greatest. I walk over to Sara to kiss her, and before I can get there, the power in the whole house goes out. Welcome back, morning's events!

8:22 AM
Oh yeah, garage doors use power. Looks like I'm dragging this one open and closed this morning.

8:25 AM
Despite the fact that my refrigerator is warming, my house is cooling, and I am leaving my wife and daughter to potentially suffer in the cold, I've still gotta get to work. Scraping my car off should certainly take my mind off of everything else...

8:30 AM
Looks like the whole neighborhood is out of power. Wow. Even the grocery stores and gas stations around the corner are out of power. Oh my god, look at the traffic. Every light between my home and my office is out. Well, it's only 8 miles, how bad can it be?

9:05 AM
I finally arrived at work. 8 miles in 35 minutes. That's gotta be a record of some sort. At least I don't have a full day of work ahead of me.

9:30 AM
Ok, the work that I expected to take me 30 minutes is definitely going to take more like 2 hours. No biggie. I'll manage.

1:30 PM
Yeah, 2 hours wasn't even close. Now I'm starving, the client's waiting for me to deliver, and none of my other work has even begun.

2:00 PM
Looks like the code I wrote might have had some issues once I delivered it to the client. "It worked fine on my computer..." Heading back to the office, via Chick-Fil-A, to make some modifications before heading back to the client.

2:15 PM
Chick-Fil-A forgot my friggin fries, and a straw for my drink. Are you F'n kidding me today?

2:30 PM
OK, code's fixed. Belly's kinda full. But man am I angry they forgot my fries. It's not that I need them, it's that $6 for 12 nuggets of chicken seems like a bit of a ripoff. I'm gonna call them.

2:42 PM
Adam, the manager, was very understanding. There will be a hot, fresh new combo meal waiting for me at the drive-thru, on my way back to the client. Maybe this day is taking a turn for the better.

3:40 PM
All the code worked this time, with some on-site finagling. So I got a free combo meal, and my stuff worked in a production environment. Woo Hoo!

The day is nearly over. What else can possibly go wrong?

I wear glasses. Only when I am working on my computer. This is their story.

December 14th
I've been toting my laptop between home and work for the past few days. I need it for visiting a specific client. I have now been missing my glasses (something I always keep in my computer bag) for 3 days. The last time I remember seeing them, they were on the arm of my couch in the basement, in the computer bag, though I haven't really conducted a thorough sweep of the area yet.

December 22
It's been 11 days since I've seen my glasses, let alone through them, and I'm getting frustrated. Surely I've just misplaced them or perhaps my wife or daughter moved them to a place I wouldn't expect.

December 28
OK, this is getting ridiculous. My wife assured me she hasn't touched them. I've torn the basement apart. They're not there either.

January 3
I've torn my entire office apart at work to find these stupid glasses. They are nowhere to be found. Where could hey possibly be? Maybe I left them in my home office, or at a freelance client meeting in the evening?

January 13
It's been over a month now. I've had it. I'll probably find them in a toy box someplace, or in my trunk, or something stupid. But my eyes are exhausted, and I just can't take it anymore. It's time to just deal with the loss and purchase a new pair. I'm going out of town for the weekend, so on Monday, I'm gonna head over to LensCrafters and drop the $200.

Monday, January 16
I'm at a client site, for a meeting, and since it wrapped up early, I decided to go visit another section of the building that I used to do work for. I needed to get some screenshots of an application we built about 6 weeks ago for Quick Solution's portfolio. I stopped in and talked with the manager there, and he told me I was welcome to use the old abandoned computer in the corner to get what I needed. This was the same computer that I had used briefly at the end of the aforementioned project. As I sit down, I notice a black case sitting on the desk next to the monitor. MY GLASSES!!! Apparently I had left them there in my very last visit to make sure all of the final touches were completed.

My sincerest apologies to my wife and daughter for my accusations. I'm an idiot. It is amazing to me that it took a device meant for improving my vision to make me "see" that I wasn't able to believe that I had lost them myself. Let's just say they've improved my "focus" on life.

Radford, VA

1) Home to good friend Trampus Smerk.

2) Named after Confederate General Gabriel Wharton's (1826-1906) wife, Anne Rebecca Radford (1843-1890).

3) My destination this weekend.

Yep, it's time for a weekend with the boys. Jay Bohland is flying in from Boston. Jim Tocco is driving from Montgomery, Alabama. Greg, Colin, and Mike are driving in from Cleveland. Kevin is driving (after picking up Jay in Raleigh) from some other part of Virginia.

So there will be eight of us set loose on the unsupecting citizens of Radford, VA. I believe the plan is to head over to Blacksburg, home of Virginia Tech. I figure at the very least, we should be able to retrace the infamous steps of Marcus Vick. More likely, however, is that we will be frequenting some college watering holes, and just generally being rambunctious.

I've also been informed that he who brings poker chips will be shot, AND hanged, so my thinking is that those will be staying at my home for this trip.

I would perhaps like to see a "Village Green" style basketball game if the weather stays nice, but otherwise I have no expectations.

Greg Plantner is picking me up at 6:00 this evening. I should probably start packing.

So, I've tasked myself with creating another fantasy sports game. I just got into a group of guys that play fantasy golf. It's simple really. You pick a golfer from each week's field (you can only pick each golfer once all year) and your score is the resulting money that the golfer wins in the tournament.

The guy running it (I can't believe he's been doing it this way for a while) has been using an Excel spreadsheet to manage this group of 60 guys. Each guy emails him their pick, he verifies that the pick is actually in the field of golfers for that tournament, and then calculates everyone's score after the tournament completes. That is too much work for one person to do. Hence, I've got a task.

The biggest challenge with this, of course, is finding an automated way to gather all of the data necessary for this system to perform. This includes a list of all of the golfers, a list of the golfers in a specific tournament field, and finally, the amount of each golfer's winnings.

So I ventured out to ESPN.com to see just what I would have to work with. I have, in the past, approached them about providing raw statistics and information in XML files, but apparently they "sell" that service, and I just don't have the money to pay for it. Upon my arrival, I viewed the source of the pages that contained the information I needed. It was as if they had heard my requests, and did their best to accomodate me without actually accomodating me.

The data, in the page source, was nicely commented, formatted, and even included the ID values I would need to refer to the data at a later time. It was as good as XML, as far as I'm concerned.

So, 7 lines of code later, I now have a database full of golfers, tournaments, and the results of Week 1. Now I've just gotta build the interface to let these 60 guys start making picks!

Thank you ESPN!

It's about time I get this off my chest. I'm a web developer. I build web sites. That's what I do. These days, there's about 900 different technologies available to build a site. We're going to focus on presentation technologies, because if all we had to use was HTML, the Dreamweaver Masters of the Universe would be putting me out of work.

Anyways, I am of the opinion that web development technologies are getting more complicated, but I don't feel like things are getting better. Typically, advancements in technology such as Web standards result in faster development time (through ease of implementation), which ultimately results in lower costs for clients. To put this in more plain English, if you (the client) have $20,000 to spend on a new car, and some new automotive technology is created that makes cars $5000 cheaper, you're

1) Not going to pay $20K for a car that now costs $15K,
2) Probably not going to just buy a $15K car. You'll add XM Radio, leather seats, maybe even an XBox 360 interface to get the price up to $20K (especially when it is corporate money, and not your own personal finances...you want that same budget next year, right?)

That was quite a tangent. Anyways, back to my initial point. New technology does not always mean better, faster, cheaper. I know many a developer that will preach the use of "off-the-shelf" solution rather than custom development for a project. I can't name a time where the integration of that third party tool actually saved time. What typically happens is that it becomes a huge headache to implement, and because of it, we end up removing functionality, or using large rolls of duct tape to hold everything together afterwards.

Now that I've set up that part of my discussion, I can get to my real point. There are many technology evangelists that embrace every new thing out there, for the sole reason that it's new. I'm gonna call them the cool kids. The cool kids push the use of the new, cool technologies, and pooh-pooh whatever you were using yesterday. A good example of some cool kids are the boys over at webstandards.org. Now let me preface this discussion by saying that I use Web Standards in my development efforts, and agree with their mission. A unified set of rules for web development? I'm all for it. Browsers behaving the way you expect them to? Awesome. But to make statements such as:

[Not using or ignoring Web standards] indicates not merely unprofessional Web-development practices but outright incompetence. For if you are producing tag-soup code and using tables for layout in the 21st century, that's what you are: Incompetent.

You could at least read a [expletive removed] book and upgrade your skills to a point where you are no longer a total laughingstock.

is just elitist. I know plenty of great developers that either don't have the time to learn Web standards, or just haven't had the time to master the art that IS Web standards. It is at it's core, very simple. Seperate your content from your presentation. But we're not yet in a world where browsers work the way you would expect. Things just are different between Mozilla Firefox, IE, and the others. And when all you've got is a deadline looming, changing how you do everything, and living in a world of constant frustration is not something many are looking forward to.

New technology, new methods, new anything should not be embraced simply because it is new. It should fit your needs, your clients interests, your timeline, your budget, etc. Give me a reason to do it...and not just because the cool kids say I should.

OK, so I think this blogging thing might actually take off...so it's time for me to try it out. My life is far from interesting, but perhaps you can laugh at me, rather than with me, right?