Alkahest my heroes have always died at the end

April 13, 2007

It’s quiet, too quiet…

Filed under: Personal,Technical,Wildlife Rehab — cec @ 9:26 am

I haven’t been so much with the blogging lately. For me, that is generally a sign that things are busy enough that I’m living life rather than blogging it [ed note: For all of you young readers, this is what is known as irony. When I have the most to say, I have the least time to say it in; conversely, when I write the most, I have the least to say].

Quick highlights of things that are going on:

  • I received an odd email two weeks ago. It was from a professor that I knew, but never worked closely with, in the ECE department. He has a research company that is gearing up for a project that is security related. He wanted to know if I knew of anyone that might be interested in either a full-time or a consulting position. There are two ways that kind of thing can go. He might be asking an honest question or he might be looking to see if I’m interested. As usual for me, it’s easier to play the straight man. I listed a few folks I knew that might be interested in positions, but included myself as one interested in consulting and maybe more. I spoke to the professor last week. The work sounds interesting. They have lots of money, so I agreed to come by in a couple of weeks to see the place, give a talk, meet some people. Or, as I put it to K, we agreed to go on a first date. Last night, K asked what happens after the first date? I told her that depending on how that goes, we might engage in heavy petting. At which point K decided that she had enough of my metaphors. 🙂
  • I think I mentioned that we were pulling wall paper off of the kitchen/breakfast room wall. The wall paper and the backing are now all off and we’ve picked a paint color. I just need to finish cleaning the paste residue off and do a skim coat of sheetrock mud and we’ll go ahead and get it painted. I’m still not certain about the color, but what the heck – paint is cheap.
  • K used some birthday money and bought a couple of day/night mini-cameras designed to go in bird houses. The plan is to run them out to the cages out back. Unfortunately, the cameras only came with 100′ of cable. When we measured off the length last weekend, we realized we needed 300′ of cable each. I volunteered to buy some generic cable and splice it in, but K is risk averse and decided to just buy the extension cables. This weekend, I’ll try to build some small boxes to house the cameras and keep them out of the rain (and away from squirrel teeth).
  • The Leadership Program I mentioned earlier did come to campus.  I was planning on reviewing the 5 minute talk I was going to give on Wednesday night since we were asked to speak on Thursday.  So, I’m sitting in my office working on the laptop when someone on my staff comes in with someone attending the program.  They were wondering where we all were?  It turns out that they (or maybe me) had the date wrong and they were hoping we could come speak to them right away.  Fortunately, I had thought a bit about what I wanted to say – I just hadn’t polished it up.  I went in and winged it from there.  Overall, I think it went pretty well.  I just wish I had the extra prep time.
  • I’m moving all of my domains off of a desktop computer and on to an ISP. Hey, $8/month, unlimited bandwidth, multiple databases, etc. is definitely worth it. I moved a friend’s site that I was hosting first: www.boxturtleheadstart.org, then K’s domain and email. fenris.org hasn’t been moved yet, I’m hoping to move the pwc patient database off of it first and on to the pwc main site. Of course, that’ll mean getting an updated version of php from our ISP. Once that’s done, I’ll move fenris.org which will make me happier than leaving it on a desktop machine (is it still a desktop if it is under my desk?).
  • Finally, I’ve spent a huge amount of time working on the Piedmont Wildlife Center’s patient database. I tried to get board members and staff to help me write the functional specifications right the first time so that the programmer we hired could actually implement what we wanted. Unfortunately, what they gave me wasn’t really what they wanted. So now I’m going back and reworking a lot of the database. Fortunately, the whole thing is written using a model/view/controller (MVC) method of programming and it’s very easy to make changes. I’m also taking this as an opportunity to learn a lot more about the w3’s document object model (DOM), how it can be manipulated with javascript, and ajax while I’m at it. So far, my favorite pieces are the ajax bit to remotely pull/post database stats on the pwc main website and the dynamic form that allows you to automatically create new rows using javascript 🙂

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