Dave's Blog

2/19/2012

3 days into the project, about 16 hours behind me, I can see it is every bit as difficult as I imagined it would be.  The only difference is in my attitude.  I'll have to make new blue buttons for changes in the navigation bar, and I'll have to find a way to make that Dreamweaver template work.  I may have to reconstruct the pages from scratch after the template is working, because of the way it mis-applies to existing pages.  I may have to tear out the PHP and write it from scratch, because it does strange things inside the template.  But ultimately, it will all be worth it, because I will have a product I can point to, and because I am learning something new every step of the way. 

2/17/2012

Well, that didn't turn out the way I expected it.  Another whole year without blogging.  Hm. 

 If you're curious about the Bay to Breakers, my 5/15/2011 chip time was  2:11:46.  I trained off and on, but not consistently.  The company actually bought Bay to Breakers tickets, and we all started together, wearing orange shirts and hats. I still wear the hat now and then, although I haven't trained at all this year.  

The past week I was encouraged, in a class called "The Essential Ernest Holmes," to do something that would be outside my comfort zone.  That something, as it turned out, will be a web site implementation, for the benefit of a church for whom I update content monthly.  I will roll out the demo at the class, and also for the board of the church.  I actually put in about 16 hours on this project since Wednesday; I haven't been this interested in web design since 2007. 

One big factor was the purchase of a new computer.  The Toshiba I used to have was just too primitive for the Norton virus scanner and the Microsoft automatic updates.  Each time I turned it on, I had to walk away for half an hour before I could start any kind of work.  Now I have a new Dell, and it is amazingly zippy!  Not only are updates and virus scans truly in the background, with four processor cores on board, but the speed at which my applications open and run is awesome!  I didn't know whether I would get good performance without an SSD, but it appears that was not an issue.  My hard drive keeps up with everything the computer wants to do. 

Another factor is a fresh look at server technologies.  I see python scripts with Django producing web pages, I see Perl producing both on the front end and the back end, and I'm seeing areas where I can improve both. I'm playing with SeaMonkey Composer, and I am truly amazed at how well my old Dreamweaver runs on my new Dell.  I am taking the courage to try things I haven't done before.