Author: Joe

Categories
Sports

RunAmuck NJ

NGM and I ran in the RunAmuck NJ 5k race today, it was so awesome! He sent me a link to the site a few weeks ago, and I knew that we had to enter. We tried recruiting several others to join us on this quest, but it came down to he and I entering it as a 2 person team.

I drove over to his house in Bellmawr and didn’t get lost! This is a rather amazing feat considering my complete lack of direction as of late (I used to never ever get lost). I arrived at his place around 8:35, pretty early for a Saturday but this would be no ordinary Saturday indeed.

I got a quick tour of his fine home, then we departed on our way to Washington Crossing in Titusville. We arrived and registered for the big race, the walk from the car to to registration was a decent trek in itself.

We duct taped our shoes to our ankles so that they wouldn’t come off in the deeper mud we’d be encountering. It did actually help as there was some very deep thick mud, especially towards the end of the course, however removing the duct tape wasn’t the finest of experiences. The tape was determined to take much ankle hair and a decent amount of skin along with it’s removal. Why I removed it slowly will truly boggle the finest psychiatrists.

The course was amazing and very challenging. I knew a quarter mile in that it was going to be a rough race for me. Just didn’t feel my best, but knew this was something that we’d surely have to finish and finish well. Oh, there were some really cool dogs watching the race too.

The downpour the night before only made the course that much slippery. I nearly fell hard twice in the early going, but luckily there were some large trees nearby that I was able to Tarzan and and keep myself from falling. The course had some great obstacles throughout. Many obstacles to clear and hurdle over, balance beams, a web to weave through (which I shot through in just a few seconds somehow, so proud), and a rather large wall to scale.

The first two miles weren’t too bad, but by the last one I was just beaten down. I really had to simply will myself to the end down the stretch, my body was shot. I really hadn’t done much recently, and the terrain and obstacles really took their toll. I got the the final mud crawl but was held up because teams had to finish together. The pause was actually very much welcome, and NGM showed up in no time and me leaped into the mud and crawled our way to the finish.

I feel sorry for the poor girl to my right as NGM and I went full speed at the end and I can only imagine how much mud I must’ve sent her way. If by any chance you’re ready this, so very sorry. We had a respectable finish, and considering that neither of us had one of our finer days, were very pleased with our outcome.

If I hadn’t seen photos, I wouldn’t of believe just how covered in mud we were by the end of the race. It was in my mouth, ears, my eyes, everywhere. So much fun.

On the way home they took me to some massive Diner and I ate a ridiculously large sandwich. Apparently the waitress told them that nobody ever eats the entire sandwich. I was so proud to hear of this, another challenge conquered.

Amazing time, and I do believe we will  be entering the RunAmuck NY in June too.

Categories
Uncategorized

Birthday Kindness

Friday was my birthday and I just wanted to point out and thank all the people who were kind enough to make it such a fine day. Actually I pretty much could change my birthday into birthday week the way ti’s turned out.

Monday started off with a surprise Grow! Nyokki! Monkey on my desk. It’s really awesome and I can’t wait to grow it by my window. It’s so very cool.

I also got some Dwight Schrute stationary so that I can easily keep track of time wasters, excuses and complaints. It’s pretty funny stuff. It came with an The Office notebook and some of the heaviest crayola pens I’ve ever picked up. They’re seriously heavy.

Lunch Club got me a Star Wars Science Dagobah Frog Habitat. It’s amazing, it’s a scene of Dagoba with Yoda and you grow tadpoles into frogs with it. I can’t wait to start! I have to order the tadpoles in the mail, so will have to exercise great patience (like Yoda would want) in waiting for their arrival. They also gave me a really cool Yoda card too.

I also got a super fancy wallet, which was really thoughtful. It smells all new and leathery and I’m still trying to figure out just how a wallet works. Apparently it’s not meant to be kept in a front pocket, but wouldn’t that mean that I have to sit on it? Wouldn’t that feel weird? Either way I’m going to try and convert over to using a wallet and will have to see how that goes. The wallet also came with a little monkey who’s currently hanging out on the shifter in my car.

My department got me some really funny gifts. A card that they modified and added so many great inside joke signatures to. They even found some long lost haiku that were written about me! Very clever guys, I’m still impressed. They were authentically wrinkled as well with stick drawings. I also was lucky enough to get a custom Nomenclature t-shirt as well. It’s very cool, and I will be most very proud to wear it. The cake they treated me to was super yummy and delicious. I’m not sure what exact kind it was, but was certain that it was good.

Then my parent got me a cake and made me dinner, which was good. Honestly I was too filled from a weeks worth of treats to eat much. The cake was a carrot cake from Bake Works, they’re the finest cake in the land. My mom got me some clothes which was good. I kinda was due for some new stuff, and since she had the person working in the store pick everything out I will probably wear the stuff.

My older brother got me a assortment of stuff too. A Link wall decal, a wiffle ball bat, a growing unicorn, and a DVD of some cartoons. I even also got some ninja star tacks for my office walls.

All that and my phone buzzing all day with birthday texts and facebook postings/comments made for a very excellent birthday. Thanks so much to all!

Categories
Design Development

Landscapes & Interiors

Finishing up a website for Landscapes & Interiors. They’re a landscaping and cleaning service located in Kennett Square, Pennsylvania. The client wanted an original website that they would be able to easily maintain and have the ability to make simple edits on their own.

We decided to build the website  on the Joomla! open source CMS (content management system). I’ve built many sites with Joomla! recently and each client has been very much pleased with the rich CMS functionality that we are able to deliver to them at a very reasonable cost. It really amazes me just how much functionality they are getting from an open source project.

We also relied on the Yahoo! YUI library to build the site as well. The site makes use of the following YUI components:

  • CSS Reset
  • CSS Fonts
  • CSS Grids
  • Yahoo Global Object
  • DOM Collection
  • Event Utility

YUI really helped us to work faster and knowing that their library is used and tested by Yahoo! for A-Grade Browser support is a real time saver.

The client did an excellent job in providing and organizing content for use on the site. I cannot stress how vital it is for a client to provide appropriate content in an organized manner for a site to be successful. They are the content experts and when we can mesh our respective areas of expertise a great site is almost always the result.

Since the business is new and this is their first website, special attention was spent to make sure that there is room for growth. The content regions and navigation elements all are easy to add or edit via Joomla! with little if any CSS adjust necessary to manage additional or changed content.

There are still some further tweaks and adjustments to be made to the site, but we did go live today, so check out www.landscapesandinteriors.com and see what great services and support that they offer. Again, it was a real pleasure working with this client, I had a great deal of fun and they are very satisfied with their site and that’s always great to know.

Categories
Books

Developing Hybrid Applications for the iPhone

Developing Hybrid Applications for the iPhonePicked up a copy of Developing Hybrid Applications for the IPhone by Lee S. Barney earlier this week. Had a 33% off coupon at Borders and was itching for something new to read.

Been messing with iPhone development for a bit and since I’m a web developer figured I’d take a hard look at writing web applications for the iPhone vs going the SDK Objective-C route.

I’m really glad I picked this book up. They do an excellent job of reminding me how cool Dashcode is for developing web applications for the iPhone. My only knock on Dashcode in the past was the lack of documentation, but this book does a decent job of covering it. Still wish there was more documentation on Dashcode if anyone is reading this.

The book covers both using the QuickConnect and PhoneGap frameworks for developing hybrid iPhone apps. It’s a fairly easy read and they do cover most of the iPhone functionality that would be used in the majority of projects. While the SDK and Objective-C are still the best way to go, sometimes web applications or hybrid applications do make sense, and that’s where this book was very handy. Just for me to rediscover Dashcode alone justified the purchase.

Categories
Development

Vote My Vote

Vote My VoteI’ve been busy doing some work for a really cool site, Vote My Vote. It’s a really cool community voting site for TV’s most popular shows. You sign up and they go through the hassle of calling in your vote for you. While I rarely watch any of those type of shows, I do have to admit I think it’s a very slick idea.

I primarily assisted with some Joomla development and configuration. Someone had been doing that role before me, so coming into a project that someone had already begun had it’s challenging moments (a white error screen of death for instance). But solving their issues and helping deliver a really cool finished (or very close to being finished) product was very gratifying.

I haven’t met a single member of the team who worked on this site in person, nor even spoke on the phone. It’s really amazing how people from all over can successfully collaborate on a project. I was fortunate to work with an extremely talented bunch of individuals on this project.

The primary tasks I assisted with were:

  • setup and the automatic population of the blog. We used the CorePHP WordPress MU component to help us with this.
  • Community Builder user registration. Ummm, there were moments I despised you Community Builder, but in the end we figured you out and you are doing your job.
  • Pulling in the latest forum posts to their respective areas.
  • Good deal of assist with other Joomla odds and ends. My hands got dirty with much PHP on this project. It was lots of fun.

Check out votemyvote.com, and let anyone you know who’s addicted to those reality shows about it.

Categories
Development

WideImage

Needed to do some server side image manipulation with PHP for a custom Joomla component I was working on. Unfortunately, I was having some initial problems.

Luckily I found WideImage, and open source PHP library for image manipulation. It was great and made the whole process so much more simple for me to implement in my component.

Using it is a cinch, just check out the examples and documentation on their site. Again, this was an excellent library for me, and I highly recommend it.