Author: Joe

Categories
Adventure Sports

Kevin’s 40th Birthday Bonanza

11+ season veteran Honey Badger Kevin always is kind enough to invite me to various activities. From Night in Venice parties, to Eagles games, etc. However unfortunately I’ve always seemed to decline such generous invitations.

Well it turns out the guy just turned 40 and was throwing quite the large party on it’s occasion. He had organized a large birthday bash in Philly including a Flyers game and other festivities afterwards as well.

He also invited Dustin and Jared from the team, but sadly they could not attend. So that meant I would be going solo into a party where I knew no one. A true adventure indeed!

So I drove up to the Holiday Inn in Philly to meet up with the crew. Amazingly I didn’t get lost nor take even the slightest of wrong turns. This is quite a feat for me.

I was interested to meet this crew. Kevin is a pretty interesting guy, and surely his close friends must be characters as well.

These folks were characters indeed. All very friendly and turns out I had many common friends with one of them. So that was interesting and gave the two of us much to talk about for a little bit.

Then we headed over to the Flyers game when Kevin had gotten a luxury box stocked with food and drink. It was a very nice setup, and a very fancy way to take in a game. Despite knowing no one, I was able to make conversation and it wasn’t too bad.

I did depart shortly after the game while the others seemed to be awaiting much more adventures. All in all it was a unique experience and fun to hang out with some complete randoms for an afternoon.

Categories
Design Development

joedag32.com 3.0 upgrades

I’ve been so busy that I keep putting off upgrades to this very blog. But I’ve finally gotten some time to get this blog with a fancy responsive design and make it a bit friendlier on tablets and larger screens too.

I looked over many CSS grids and decided that Pure would work best for me. I was very much impressed with their minimal footprint and it’s responsiveness. It was extremely easy to work with and flexible. I was very much impressed. Plus their blog layout example was almost too perfect for what I was hoping to achieve! It saved me a ridiculous amount of time!

While I mostly use jQuery for my framework of choice in most projects, I wanted to give YUI3 a crack in this one as my early roots go back to mostly YUI. It was a great working with YUI3, and I was very impressed with their TabView module. It worked great.

I really think that the new layout makes my posts much easier to read on mobile, tablets, and traditional users as well. So I’m very excited for that.

I’m still cleaning up my work section though. I’ve let that fall behind a bit, even neglecting to add many recent projects. So, that’s next on my list of things to do!

Categories
Books

Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other Musings

Let Me Off at the Top!: My Classy Life and Other MusingsWell, I really wanted something silly to read with all the recent harsh winter weather and the pretty intense books I have been reading. Let Me Offat the Top! perfectly fit that bill.

While I haven’t gotten around to seeing Anchorman 2 just yet, the Ron Burgundy character does bring some laughs from me (minus those recent Dodge commercials, they’re kinda dumb). This book was complete and total nonsense. It was borderline crazy at times.

However, since I was looking for nonsense I was happy with what I had found. There were times I was reading this doing some cardio in the gym and was laughing uncontrollably. I’m sure I must’ve looked like a fool to those around me, but a few parts were that funny to me that I just couldn’t contain myself.

His childhood really had me cracking up. That was probably my favorite part, though the majority were funny as well.

By no means would I consider this a great book, but it really does do a great job of nailing his character and doing him justice. Very funny.

Categories
Development

Drupal 7 Repeating Date Show Only Once in Views

This one had me scratching my head for a little bit. I had some events in Drupal and was using the fine Date module and had a few with repeating dates. I was able to display the repeating dates just fine, but was getting numerous entries displaying of the event itself.

Not 1 event with the various repeating dates being displayed.

After much head scratching and some digging around I found a solution.

I added a filter of Date (delta) and set equal to 0. So now I’m only grabbing on event instance.

 

Categories
Books

Doctor Sleep

Doctor SleepI’ve never read nor seen the movie the Shining, which apparently is kinda a big deal. When I tell people that I haven’t seen the movie they look at me like I’m somewhat crazy. I do know the famous lines from it, but have never seen it. However, when I saw that the fairly new sequel to the Shining, Doctor Sleep was in at the library I wanted to read it. Not only was it new, but Stephen King books are always pretty solid.

As I was expecting, it was very good. I wouldn’t say it was scary or anything like that to me, but it was pretty exciting and I found myself doing the just one more chapter thing that I do when I’m reading a really good book.

I really like how common real life things are tied into the whole fictional mental stuff. Like the weird camper folk, etc. That was pretty cool.

I guess I probably should go out of order and read the Shining at some  point now.

Categories
Adventure Sports

Honey Badger Rock Climbing Fun Day

Our Honey Badger Fun Day was originally planned to be at an indoor trampoline park. I was pretty excited, it sounded very cool to try out. Sadly as the last minute we had to change plans as it looked like we wouldn’t be able to jump that much that day. The place was all booked up.

So change of plans, we went with some indoor rock climbing at Elite Climbing. I had been there before and it was super awesome, and being Dustin’s birthday too I knew it was something that he would surely enjoy as well. He was always part monkey.

So we all met up early in the day, some of us at Joe time others on Honey Badger time (aka as late). Then rode up in 2 cars. It was pretty exciting. On the way up we stopped to get some lunch before out epic climbing at Panera. It is a fine eating establishment and all seemed please with the choice. I got a Turkey Bravo with an apple instead of chips. I would save my scrumptious apple for after/during my climbing.

We got there without getting lost like my first voyage there. What was super bizarre is that I ran into a friend from high school there who doesn’t live in that area either. What are the chances that we’d both drive all the way over there to do some indoor climbing? Surely it must be immensely miniscule.

Climbing went really well. Our trainer wasn’t nearly as helpful as Gio from the first excursion, but it still went fairly smoothly. It was really great to see everyone get up there and have a good time. I was really impressed with how well everyone had done!

Dustin was climbing all over the place, and Caitlin has an amazing climb on wall number 9. It was pretty amazing to behold, she made several key recoveries and made it over an pretty impressive incline to get all the way to the top. Amazing climb!

All in all it was a very fun day and I was able to climb for a couple of hours with some great Badgers and still make it back in time for my Mom’s birthday. I just with it was a bit closer to where I live.