July 4th Notes
I finished a consulting project yesterday that had been taking up most of my free time for the past couple of weeks. It has been nice to relax so far this weekend without that constant worry: “Isn’t there something else productive that I should be working on?” And for the first time in quite a while, I let myself sleep in late this morning — with the unfortunate result that I forgot to drink coffee until like two o’clock. Headache City.
Coming from an historic peace church, I’m not much for patriotism and the holidays thereof. But I’ve always liked watching the fireworks, and this afternoon I found myself — quite inspirationally, mind you — whistling *Stars & Stripes Forever*. Sometimes things just stick with you.
A family member gave us a gift card to Cracker Barrel[^1] recently, and it was a fun Fourth-y place to eat brunch, even though it’s somewhat stressful to take a 15-month-old to a sit-down restaurant. Afterwards, I picked up _Practices of an Agile Developer_ and _Dreaming in Code_ at the nearby Books-A-Million[^2], though I am now annoyed to see that it looks like I could have gotten them both for half what I paid, had I purchased them from Amazon’s Used section. I’m glad I got them, though. Hopefully I can find time to get through _Practices_ this weekend.
[^1]: Or, colloquially, *The* Cracker Barrel.
[^2]: And wow: both Cracker Barrel *and* Books-A-Million could do with a website overhaul. That’d be a fun exercise; maybe I’ll play with some ideas sometime soon.
Jennifer is sitting in her chair next to mine working mapping out our debt snowball[^3]. I’m hoping she finishes soon so we can go crash.
[^3]: In Excel, her favorite. I’ve yet to convert her to Numbers.
Oh yeah, and I hope to make this blogging thing a regular deal.
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Bring on the comments
Saturday, July 5 July 5, 2008 @ 10:03am
I like how you write blog entries with footnotes. I bet you could have a lot of fun with that. And, take my word for it, dreaming in code (not the book, but actual dreaming) is fun… you wake up and can practically write an entire application in an hour. I used to do it all the time…
Saturday, July 5 July 5, 2008 @ 11:09am
I used this plugin to make the footnotes: PHP Markdown Extra.
What languages are you versed in?
Saturday, July 5 July 5, 2008 @ 12:31pm
Let’s see… I started with BASIC (haha) back in the day but used to program daily with VisualFoxPro, T-SQL (for MS SQL), classic ASP, VB.NET, C#, C++, among others. I very much dislike PHP but hold no grudges against people that use it… I just prefer working in the .NET framework.
I did some COBOL and Java when I was in college… that was boring. I’ve done a little bit of Rails and Python. I know JavaScript pretty well. I’ve also done some ActionScript (with Adobe Flash). I tried to learn JSP when I was in high school but didn’t like it.
Before taking the job at Southside, I always figured I’d be a career programmer… now all the programming I do is occasional server-side stuff for the church website (in c#). I’ve been out of the field since the end of 2006. I still try to keep up with a general knowledge of what is out there but don’t really do that much programming work anymore.
What’s your environment/language of choice?
Saturday, July 5 July 5, 2008 @ 12:43pm
I started in BASIC too.
Also learned HyperTalk pretty well (for Apple’s HyperCard), and ended up learning PHP at my first job. I still use it pretty heavily in my current job, but consider myself equally proficient in JavaScript. I’m currently enamored with Ruby and Objective-C, but I never seem to have enough time to study them in depth.
Saturday, July 5 July 5, 2008 @ 2:46pm
We’re not quite at the debt snowball chapter yet (as far as class), but I’ve started working on it. So far, it’s both scary and frightening. Hope Jennifer is having a better time of it than I am! You should totally blog about your thoughts on FPU.
Saturday, July 5 July 5, 2008 @ 9:17pm
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