Author: Joe

Categories
Adventure

AFP Seminar

Attended the AFP (Association of Fundraising Professionals) Luncheon and Meeting Seminar today.  It was at the Frog Rock in Hammonton.  Normally I wouldn’t be found at such an occasion, but the seminar was “Online Communications: Pipeline to More Revenue”, so I figured I’d check it out.  Sean and I drove over, he seemed to know who lived in every home on the way there.  I just knew that we were in Southern New Jersey.

I’m so terrible at small talk and avoid people I don’t know, so the whole networking thing was a big awkward to me.  But, everyone one there was really nice and extremely friendly.  Of course I had to be one of the first people to introduce myself to the room, but I just kept it simple and think I did an ok job of not getting myself into too much trouble while addressing the room.

The presentation was pretty good.  I thought the speaker did a really good job.  You could tell that he was comfortable with what he was presenting and not just reading a PowerPoint presentation.  Although the information that was presented was nothing new to me, it’s good to see what others are up to and any latest trends going on.  I personally don’t agree on the room’s whole capture someone’s email address approach, I think that a user should be told upfront exactly what their email address may be used for up front.  No surprise emails down the road, that doesn’t build trust with users at all.  

While I can’t say I learned anything new today, it did get me thinking to developing some projects online that I have lost track of due to a lack of time.  So that’s a good thing, and hopefully I’ll get working on those soon.

 

Categories
Sports

What happened to football Sundays?

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.  

Categories
Development

Working From Home

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.

Categories
Development

Astra Carousel

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.

Categories
Development

Parse a CSV file in PHP

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.
 

Categories
Uncategorized Video Games

Replaced Frank’s Xbox 360

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.