Post #300

Well, would you look at that, I have reached the 300 post mark in my blogging career. It only took several years and several blogs to get to this point, but I got here nonetheless. In celebration I would like to share some pictures of how I get to work nowadays with my new job. Yes, my new job is that cool.

It's True, I am a ROCKSTAR!!!

This is going to seem incredibly boring to about 99% of the people who read this blog, but I simply must preserve this moment in some form because it was a significant victory for me.

On my final project for my web databases class there is a feedback page where users can send me an email using a form on the page. Previously I have asked them to add their username and email addresses to specific areas of the form so that I can then send the email properly with a PHP function.

However, this poses the problem that someone can put in anything they want as a username or email address, or even pose as someone else and then flood my email inbox with a bunch of spam or other things. I needed a way to force them to only be able to type their message and then pull their username and email from the database without them being able to alter it.

So, I wrote some new functions in my PHP objects, called some different variables, etc, etc, etc.

AND GUESS WHAT!!!

IT FREAKING WORKED!!! THE FIRST TIME!!!

HUGE VICTORY... ABSOLUTELY MONUMENTOUS!!!

This Should Make Mom Happy

No, I don't have my hip measurement yet because I have no clue how to do a hip measurement and I don't have a measuring tape or a piece of string available.

However, Mom is always on our case to make birthday and christmas lists and so forth, and thankfully, now that I've finished my mid-term for Russell's class this will be easy as pie for Mom now. Aren't you happy, Mom?

You can find the solution here: Wants & Wishes

This website will allow everyone in the family to set up an account, add whatever they want to their list with a url so Mom can see what it is, how much it costs, how bad they want it, and add descriptions and comments to help Mom out with her shopping needs.

Right now, don't go registering as I'd like to get it transferred over to my personal server first. BYU won't let me keep it on theirs beyond the last day of class, so I've got to talk to Russell about how to export my databases first. After that, Mom should never have any trouble again.

See, Mom, I do make your life easier... sometimes.

Something Finally Clicked

Russell is notorious for commenting in his class that we have to "make new pathways in our brains" in order to really understand all of this stuff he is cramming into our heads. As it turns out, new pathways are something quite difficult to achieve when you can't spend 4 or 5 hours a day working on writing PHP or mySQL queries, but Russell just keeps right on saying "Don't worry, at some point it is going to 'click' for you and you can really start moving forward."

I think last night might have been one of those moments for me. I had been working on getting the functionality to change your password or your email address for my mid-term to work for over a week, and for some reason it just wasn't working. Then, while waiting for Russell to make his way back around to me during office hours a light came on in my head and I went back to look at some of the functions we had written weeks before. All it took was one little line of code and I was off and running. I added it to the other two functions I was working on, moved a couple of other things around and suddenly passwords were changing and email addresses were updating.

I had one small glitch that Russell helped me identify (I was referring the incorrect column in one of my database queries), but for the most part I finally made the connection on how to take information and pass it into the database properly. I was really, really excited about that.

On top of all this, prior to the start of the office hours I had been working for about an hour to let the members of my website see which groups they had been invited to. I wasn't too confident in my abilities to get it right and thought I was going to need a lot of help, but after writing things out and double-checking them it all worked perfectly! Needless to say, it was another 'click' moment for me and I got up and walked down the hall to call Holly and tell her all about it. Rarely have I been able to get something to work right without some outside help, and certainly never on the first time. Talk about a confidence booster. I did have to have Russell help me with the next step in the process, but still, it was a victory nonetheless for me during a week or two when I was really starting to doubt whether or not I could figure this stuff out well enough to earn a living off of it.

Now I need to get my stuff so that a member can edit an item on their wishlist working completely. I'm close, just have to figure out how to pre-populate the form on the page with the information from the database. I've researched a thing or two, and might have it, but we'll see. I'm going to work on that this afternoon.

This Blog is Worldwide!

Okay, so it may be a bit of a stretch to say that this blog has a worldwide audience, but nonetheless, if you take a look at my FEEDJIT map over on the right hand side you can see my audience is prevalent in the United States with 5 different locations in Canada as well.

Unfortunately, due to some awkward button pushing on my part, you'll have to trust me when I say that I've had hits from all of the following areas listed below. I accidentally deleted the wrong widget from the sidebar and had to reinstall, thereby losing all of my previous red squares on the map. I'm sure I'll get them back soon enough though.

More interesting is the fact that I have two in Australia, two in India, five in England, and one each in Ireland, Thailand, Malaysia, Greece, Slovenia, Italy, Spain, and Poland.

I can't say as I have any sort of clue why people from all those locations are reading my blog, but it does make me feel sorta cool. Now, it would be nice to gather up a South American and an African hit so I can have one from each of the populated continents.

A Day with Julie

So, I took the day off of work today to just do my own thing, get some projects wrapped up, clean up the house, and generally do a few things without any other distractions. Of course, that meant I didn't need to set an alarm for this morning, so I slept until I felt like waking up, which was at about 9:00am. I got out of bed, went to the bathroom real quick, and then was about to get a drink of water when I heard a knock on the door. Turns out it was Julie looking for somewhere to hang out while she waited for her apartment to get a new paint job on the walls. Since Julie works so early in the morning she tucked herself into the bed with Gunner and went to sleep until about 2:00pm this afternoon.While she was sleeping I finished the dishes, took turns on CC for Holly, Night Strike, and myself, balanced the checkbook, finished folding all of the laundry, wrote up a massive proposal for Twill about a potential CC blog being added to the site, chatted with Holly for a few minutes on the phone, read a few chapters in my current book, cleaned up a few cupboards, and watched a little bit of Sportscenter. I would say that was a pretty productive day.When Julie woke up she made herself some lunch and since has settled in to watch Transformers. I've been watching bits and pieces of it with her while I do a few other things around the house. We've just been chillin' and taking it easy all afternoon.Hopefully I'll be able to keep up my productive streak going into the evening hours when I've finished everything else. I'm hoping to do tournament updates later this evening, but we'll see how that turns out. I've been having trouble getting to my account on Photobucket for the past two days.