Got a decent amount of snow from the blizzard this weekend. I’d say probably around 16 inches or so, hard to tell with the wind creating drifts all over the place. But 16 is my unofficial figure for where I was.
Saturday morning I woke up to no Comcast. Meaning no TV and even worse no internet! I had planned to work on a few projects while being snowed in, but without internet access that wasn’t going to happen.
Lucky for me one of my favorite activities is shoveling snow. I really enjoy the challenge of taking on mother nature, and this storm was really bringing quite a formidable foe. I began Saturday around 8:00 AM, why I didn’t sleep in more is still a mystery to me. Suppose I was that determined to defeat the snow that the sky had the nerve to throw upon the driveway.
It was a lot and a very heavy snow that I had encountered. Arguably the heaviest snow I can recall, or perhaps I’m just getting that much older. Either way I bundled up as best I could, donned by brand new gloves, and gripped my snow shovel and walked into the windy blizzard.
Several hours later I had created a perfectly clean path for one car to leave should they be daring enough to do so. I knew that this storm was far from over, but kept reminding myself how much easier it would be to shovel just a few inches the next day versus almost 2 feet.
With all that currently could be done against this snow, I now reluctantly turned to the indoors. I wasn’t exactly snowed in with whom I’d of selected under ideal conditions, so while the shoveling was a challenge, it would truly be nothing compared with being stuck in a home with whom I was stuck there with.
With the TV still out, these people were everywhere I would normally seek solace. With internet still down as well, my options were severely limited as well. I turned to my trusty Nintendo DS to entertain me, and decided to give The Legendary Starfy a try. I had picked up this title at the huge Toys R Us in NYC after some kid highly recommended it.
I owe my sanity this weekend to the mighty snow shovel and Starfy the brave and noble starfish.
With the snow we got over the weekend I finally had a chance to beat Professor Layton and the Diabolical Box for the DS. I picked it up a few months ago, but have been too busy to really play it much.
It’s a puzzle game, and I do like the puzzles so I had to get it. The made an earlier one a few years back and I played through that one too, and this second one was just as good.
Some of the puzzles are very tough, I think there were 3 or so that I couldn’t solve. I’m very much impressed with the variety and difficulty of the puzzles. Solving a few of them did make me feel rather smart for a moment. Good stuff.
While in the process of working on some nifty mapping stuff, I wanted to produce some KML data that I could overlay onto a Google Map. I’m so glad that Google My Maps will allow you to easily export your polygons as a KML file.
So easy, just go to Google Maps, go to My Maps and then create a new map. Then use their super easy marker and polygon tools. The polygon tool works like a very primitive pen tool, but is good enough to draw most buildings on a map.
When you’re ready to export what you’ve drawn on your map as KML just click on the View in Google Earth link and it should produce a nice KML file for you.
I’ve always been a fan of the Webmaster Tools that Google offers. If you have a website, you really should make use of some of the really nice features that they offer. The crawling and indexing information found there is great.
In early December they added some new features, with the Site Performance feature being one of the more useful upgrades I’ve found in a while. It can be found under the Labs section and shares very useful info about your site’s speed as well as how well or not so well you rank in terms of load times compared with other sites.
As a guy who continually tries to squeeze each and every millisecond out of load times, this is great information to know! They also offer suggestions as to how you can improve the speed of certain pages on your site as well.
While many of these features can also be found in YSlow as well (which is another must for any developer), it also does warrant a look.
Just finished up converting Mullica Hill Skin Care’s site to be powered by Joomla. Their site was a series of basic html files setup in Dreamweaver, and the client had used a Joomla powered site in the past and wanted this site to be powered by Joomla as well.
Joomla is an open source CMS (content management system). It’s pretty awesome and has been an excellent solution for many people I’ve worked with.
The site’s design stayed the same, with barely any changes made to the existing markup with the change over. We’ve also included a blog for the client to use too.
“Let me just say thanks again for converting the site so quickly…it’s so much easier to use!!!:)”
There’s some amazing tools available now for site owners, and it’s always great when I can set them up with the right tools to make their lives easier while at the same time having a current site.
January 01st, 2010 | Category: Books
I’m a big fan of the Head First series of books by O’Reilly, and noticed that they had released one of SQL. My SQL skills are pretty solid to begin with, but you can never know too much SQL so I figured I’d have to pick up Head First SQL and give it a read.
Tech books for me almost always written for a complete beginner or an expert in the field. It’s rare that you find one written for someone who already has a basic understanding, but wants to learn a bit more. Head First SQL did a really good job of explaining the basics of SQL as well as the more complex aspects of SQL.
The chapters on subqueries and joins was great for me. Those are areas that I can always get better with. Also some of the early chapters reminded me of IN and BETWEEN both of which I’d pretty much forgotten about over the years.
Another cool thing about this book is that not only is it a guide, but it also serves pretty well as a reference as well. Explaining SQL isn’t always the easiest thing to do, but Head First SQL has done the best job that I’ve read to date.
