The Lengths I Go to Organize My Books
A few years ago I installed OpenBiblio on one of my websites to keep tab of all my books. I wrote a Perl script that uses a book’s ISBN number to retrieve the bibliographic information from Amazon and then enter the book into my library. I can now search all my books as well my DVDs and I have a complete list for insurance purposes. Also, now if someone wants to borrow a book, I can check it out and know who borrowed what and when.
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Coffee, Deadlines & FUD
To say the last few weeks have been stressful is an understatement. I have subsisted on 2-3 cups of coffee a day to stay focused. I am a part-time employee but it feels like I’m working full-time hours.
Last week my supervisor told me that I needed to create a site that handled event registrations and accepted ACH transactions. So I began working on this project and it needed to be done by Friday. I spent some time making sure that what I was coding would work with the current code base I had created. I was told repeatedly to not worry so much about making sure it integrated as opposed to just getting it working. That just goes against how I think. I know that Murphy’s Law will kick in at some point and I will end up wasting the “time I saved” by just hacking something together to get it working. As I came across areas of concern I expressed them. The responses I got were less than encouraging. The responses came across as “Keep quiet and do your job.” Read more
Driving & Coding… but not at the same time
Over the last two weeks I’ve done a bit of traveling. I drove to Dallas three times in a weeks time. Now, for most people in the MetroPlex that is a daily occurrence. In my case however, I have lived in Fort Worth for two years and had not been to Dallas. My first trip was to attend the Dallas Open Source Group. I found this group several months again through Meetup.com but had not been free on a Saturday to attend.
I got up early that Saturday and bought me a large coffee to get me ready for the trip. I found my way there without too much trouble. We met at Atlanta Bread Company. The management doesn’t mind the group meeting there and they have free Wi-Fi. There were about 10 of us with a range of experience and vocations, but we each had an interest in using open source software and seeing its adoption increase.
We discussed the body of software available on Windows. We would get distracted and chase rabbits but it was a fun hunting experience. Afterwards a few of us went to have BBQ and continued our conversation. It was during this trip that I was introduced to Nerdbooks.com.
Tuesday evening found me leaving Arlington for another Meetup group, DallasPHP. This group is a collection of programmers, managers and owners involved in the use of PHP & MySQL. The meeting was held at the Yahoo! offices in Richardson. Jason Ragsdale, a Yahoo! employee, gave a presentation on scalability and optimization.
This presentation was beneficial because several of the concepts I could implement immediately. I am a decent programmer but being self-taught I do not know all the best practices. I have been programming in PHP for close to four years but I have barely scratched the surface.
Finally, last Saturday, the DallasPHP group had a Q&A session at Nerdbooks. It was a smaller group and this allowed us to bring up coding problems or questions and get advice and feedback. Being my second time to Nerdbooks I couldn’t help but buy something. I picked The PHP Anthology
It occurred to me later that I had engaged in two activities that I really enjoy. I like pulling out a map, locating some obscure or interesting place and then figuring out how to get there. I also revel in programming. Coding at its simplest is stringing logic statements together to accomplish a task. The fun is piecing those logic blocks together to complete the puzzle. “Whatever you do in word or deed, do all in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks through Him to God the Father.”
