JoeDag32

Today was the first NFL sunday of the 2008 season.  This used to be such a major event for myself.  Usually my friends and I would all get together rig up 2 TV’s in one room and make sure one of us had the NFL Sunday Ticket and we’d watch football most of the day.  Every weekend it seemed we were greeted by some special guest appearances.

We had many stadiums (aka: a living room) over the years, some great others not so (I always left with headaches from the TV bigger than the room).  The camaraderie always kept things fun, despite how poor the game on may have been.  

Slowly but surely the past several years there has been a steady decline in faces on Sunday.  No longer must you call fives if you must get up from your couch seat if you don’t wish to be banished to the floor.  Nor any singing of the Ford Truck Man song nor the Ring of Fire (popular commercials from a few seasons ago).  Or any of the other nonsense that was to be had.

This year I went to Charlies to watch the early games with Wes and Jared.  They’re both Dolphins fans and didn’t want to miss their game.  It was cool, to see all the games on the various TVs.  While the tradition is not as strong as it once was for me, it does survive.  

With some renovations being done at work I’m not working from home for three weeks.  Right now I’m in the middle of my second week working from home.  It’s not too bad so far.  I actually find that I get more done with less interruptions at home than I usually find in the office.  Nobody asking stopping me and asking me, “This is a really dumb question, but my computer is doing…”.  While it’s cool being a nice guy and helping to figure something out, it does take time away from projects I’m usually trying to get done.

I wake up at the same time (ok I do sleep in a bit, but barely) and go through the normal morning routine.  Then I get dressed like I’m going to work (many would say it’s the same attire than if I were staying home) and have to put my sneakers on.  Not sure why, but if those sneakers are off I’m just not in that work mode.

I’ve stopped into work a couple of times to meet up with people and take care of some of the things that require being in person for.  So that’s pretty cool, I feel bad for the people who couldn’t work from home due to what they do. Everyone is crammed into the cafeteria, and with the start of classes, it’s really crazy in there.  I wouldn’t want to be working in that environment.

The fine folks at the Yahoo! Developer Network released an Astra Carousel component just recently. From what I’ve messed around with it thus far it seems pretty impressive and fairly easy to modify. It’s based on the built in List component, so populating it is easy.

They’ve got some great documentation on it and some examples to get started.  Based on what I’ve seen thus far, I think that it’ll work it’s way into a few of my upcoming projects.

Was trying to move some data from an Outlook 2003 calendar to an older calendaring app (maybe callled Calendar Creator, but not sure).  Exporting and importing data can always be a tricky task.  Luckily this app, was able to import a CSV file, but it had very limiting fields.

So I had to parse the CSV file and combine some of the fields then save it as a new CSV file.  Luckily the fgetcsv() function came to the rescue.  This handy function allows you to parse a CSV file and it returns an array.
 

Just bought a new Xbox 360 and Madden ‘09 for my brother Frank.  His house was broken into a few days ago and they made off with that amongst some other things.  Probably some stupid kids from what was taken, so hopefully they’ll get caught.  It was Anthony’s idea to buy him a new system.

It’s really ashame you can’t go Charles Bronson on them and take the law into your own hands.  Well at least we were able to replace most of the stuff that was taken.

Finally just set up an account on Facebook.  Now I can finally get my hands dirty with FBML, API, Data Store, and FQL while developing for the Facebook Platform.  If I make anything cool I’ll be sure to write about it here.  Guess it’d make some sense to have an idea for and app before developing it.