Work and Starting Down the Yellow Brick Road to PMP

Gotta hurry up and type this before I have to change the date. Another 16 hour day at work today ended with the news that another very long day was likely tomorrow. So I figured the best thing to do was to not sleep and provide some fodder for both regular visitors of my site.

I thought this rocked. WARNING: It's for the digerati so if 19th century Mennonite needlecraft is your thing, we might have a disconnect. I have no idea where I find this stuff. I should try that back button sometime, eh?.

I plan to start a section of the web site devoted to studying for the PMI exam which I need to pass this year. I figured that I would create my own informal, but complete, studyguide in HTML and then create some neato whizbang things like practice/self tests with PhP and JavaScript. I will also edit my JavaScripts to read images from all my pix on the server so that the ticker of images you see on my home page has greater breadth. And, uh, oh yeah I need a navbar on all my pages. How lame am I.

Oh well, the Tylenol PM is kicking in; that's Latin for I'll need electric shock to drag my ass outta bed tomorrow morning. Uusally it's less than 30 seconds from the time I crack my eyes open until I have toothbrush in hand. The exception is the morning after a Tylenol PM. Anyone got a defibrulator on 'em? Yes, it's that bad. Hmmm... Coin toss time. Should I a) go make a seriously strong bloody Mary and fall asleep on the couch whilst waiting for the Girls Gone Wild info-mercial and guarantee misery tomorrow or b) go straight to bed and toss and turn for several hours before realizing it's 5:00 AM which is when I usually get up. I'll letcha know tomorrow.

Slip Slidin' Sideways

Got the button working to e-mail all the Preis' with a single click; pretty happy with that. Didn't exactly implement the vision I had in my head, but it works and aesthetically, it's OK.

The trifecta of powdery snow falling on frozen road surfaces and everyone trying to get out of the park yesterday generated a drive home time for me of about an hour yesterday. I live about 16 miles from work. 16 miles... One hour... I'm starting to think about a "running shoes" solution at this point. IBM (tick-toc, tick-toc, tick-toc) opened at 10:00 AM today due to the roads still sucking. Now the weather people are calling for another 2 inches tonight. It ain't the amount of snow here that's the problem. Actually, slightly more would be better for driving. Yesterday's inch was worst case; it was just enough to create an 1/8th inch of ice on the road surface as the cars drove over it. If I didn't see 10 accidents, I didn't see one. Actually watched one in slow-mo. Some poor (not a financial reference) Hispanic dude in a utility truck, slid into the back of some white chick's Mercedes. I must admit that I was NOT able to stay on the road all the way home. Ass-end of the taco (Tacoma) got squirrelly on me on a left-hand turn over a small decline and I did a 270 degree spin and slid off onto the grass/dirt. The taco is the worst vehicle in the world to be driving on snow/ice. One, it's intrinsically light. Two, tires almost as narrow as my mind. Tres (for our Hispanic friends) it's a truck with no - and I mean no - weight over the drive wheels. Man do I miss the Rover :-(

So today is inauguration day, huh? Thank God for large volumes of alcohol.

Ta!-Da!

Check out the new Preis family directory. Kinda neato, huh? Wrote it all myself (...with a little help from a PhP genius). I'm going to tweak the output page so that it coughs back the info looking more like an address format and I'm also going to add a function to e-mail all the Preis folks that have e-mail addresses so you can shotgun out a message if and when necessary. Anyway I hope you like it. Comments and suggestions always welcome. Oh yeah, if you had the old directory book marked or stored in your favorites you'll be sent to the new page automatically. Peace.

Coding, Running and Home Sweet Home

Nothing new on the site today. Still working on the mechanism to redo the family directory. Kinda learning PhP and and SQL stuff at the same time so there's 2x the opportunity to get stumped. I know! I should run right out and buy a 694 page book from Barnes and Nobel - that usually solves everything. I must have 20 of those 694 page books of which I've read a combined 69.4 pages of. They're all good reference books and I feel smarter just having bought them (ironic, huh?)

My good friend Grant in Maryland wants to know if I wanna do a September-ish marathon. Haven't given him an answer yet. When I do it will be a strong position either way. Nothing worse than a half hearted effort at an endurance event. Did that ONCE at a triathlon back in 1998. Major suckage. Survived the swim and the bike, but nearly half way through the run I asked another runner, "How far until the turn-around?" He responded, "Don't worry. You'll never see it." Ouch!!! That hurt! He was right and ultimately that hurt more, thus my lesson has been learned.

Headed back down to New Bern this weekend to work on That Old House. This weekend's tasks are most likely upstairs windows and installation of all the insulation. I hate scraping paint. I really hate breathing in the vapors of lead based paint as I heat the paint with a heat gun, but a little lead poisoning never hurt anyone right? Oh well. The light is clearly at the end of this tunnel and hopefully we'll be done in February. Did I mention that we're looking at another house?

Cud and Run

Hey Y'all! Nothing really big and new. I have made some progress on scribbling out some PhP code. Tonight I conquered a if...else conditional thang and then populated a table cell with an e-mail address so I'm pretty happy. I would post my progress but right now the password to the database is hard coded in the PhP so we'll leave that off-line for now.

Thinking about committing to a fall marathon. In 2001 I was up to a long run of 20 miles whilst training with Karen for the Marine Corps marathon. Shoulda found one right after that one 'cause the likelihood of my fat ass slogging out 26.2 seems remote at present. There's some positivity for ya! That'll come in handy at 20 miles when I'm questioning the sanity of self-propulsion for such distances. Today is the 9th and I've only not run for 2 or 3 days this year - WHAT A STREAK!