Not Entirely Sure

I'm not really sure what I want to write about today even if I really shouldn't feel the need to write about anything in particular as this is my blog after all, but I want to write about something, so I think I may just ramble for a little while and see where things go.

This morning I sent of my resume and portfolio to yet another potential employer. Yesterday I followed up on other jobs that I had either applied for or saw new listings for and all of them had been "filled" so I went my merry way towards the next ones on the list. This particular job is actually here on campus in the mechanical engineering department. They are looking for what seems to be a junior-ish web developer to help with the department website. I took a look at the website and can't really see why they need someone but I'm not going to complain.

I called up the contact within the department to ask if they were still looking for someone and they said that they were, so I got a few more details and sent off my information. According to the job listing the only real requirement is that you have a proficient knowledge in at least one of the following programming languages: HTML, CSS, Javascript, PHP, or mySQL. Lucky for me they weren't another employer looking for Flash and .NET programmers, and also lucky for me that I think I could consider myself at least proficient in three or four of the languages asked for.

Seems like I fit the bill, at least at first glance. The contact in the department told me that they would review my resume and portfolio and then most likely call me to set up a preliminary interview. It's a waiting game now I guess.

I'm cruising right along in my efforts to re-read the entire Wheel of Time series by Robert Jordan before the next book comes out on November 3rd. I'm almost finished with the third book (my favorite) and will be trying to finish at least 2 per month for the next couple of months. I may want to try and cram as much in before the start of school as I can if possible because I've got a couple of literature classes, but we'll see how things turn out. There are also a lot of other things happening this summer that take up time too.

Conquer Club Trivia is doing as well as can be expected. I still haven't found a lot of time to stock the system with questions (there are only about 300 or so right now), but Russell was kind enough (and much more tolerant with me than I probably deserve) to help me find a bug in the system that was allowing repeat questions when it shouldn't have been. It turns out that I had made another what we now call "Caleb Mistake" in an entirely different place that was backing things up wrong. It's now fixed though, so that is good.

The first day the site was live I had 96 unique visitors, and the next day I had 156, but that has been the record so far. Since then things have tapered off rather dramatically and it seems there are about 25 to 30 visitors a day, which is respectable for something that only fits such a small audience anyways. If I can get more questions in I think it will help a bit, but like I've said before, I don't expect it to be anything that is wildly popular, especially since I'm not making any money off of it in the long run.

I finally broke down and asked my first every question on the BYU 100 Hour Board this week, something I've always refrained from doing on some sort of strange principle before, but I had a fun question after going to dinner with Holly the other day and figured since we personally know one of the board writers I could address it to them personally and have a little fun with it. Now I just have to wait and see how long it takes for them to find the answer I guess.

Which leads me to another thought. The BYU 100 Hour Board is old, like really, really ancient, and as far as I can tell hasn't had a proper face lift in quite some time. It has the appearance of a website built in the late 90s in my opinion and doesn't seem to function all that well according to the writer that I know. Obviously given my current area of interest this has me pondering and considering the idea of making a website with a similar approach, but in a much more aesthetically pleasing way. We'll see if anything substantial comes of the thought down the line, but it's at least something to think about.

Jack is crawling, but that certainly seems like old news at this point. He now stands up next to the furniture with only one hand and steps to the side so he is barely holding on. He also has learned to push boxes against walls and use them as step stools to get to drawer and cupboard handles that he has been a long time in pursuing. Even yesterday I found him unexpectedly hanging onto the cross-bars on the back of our kitchen chairs with both feet off the floor and on the cross-bar between the chair legs. No fear, that's my son it seems.

He is also getting a bit better at sleeping through the night. Sometimes he still wakes himself up, but now he doesn't necessarily need to be fed in order to get back to sleep. Many times I can just rock him in the rocking chair for a few minutes and he's out cold again. If he does eat, he doesn't chow down on six or eight ounces of formula like before, he's lucky if he makes it through two before nodding off. I take it as a slow and steady move towards not eating at all during the night and sleeping more soundly because of his heavily increased physical activity during the day.

Solid food have been an interesting endeavor to say the least. He loves his rice cereal, but basically refuses any sort of "baby food" that we've tried. We have gone with peas, applesauce, peaches, pears, squash, and a couple others, but his reaction is to spit it back out, clamp his mouth shut and give us a look of, "Are you seriously trying to feed me that?" So, we eat a lot of rice cereal, share Daddy's mashed potatoes from time to time, and luckily we've added oatmeal to the list of things we'll eat as well. I'm thinking he is just going to go straight from the rice cereal to the real people food, sort of like Cymbre did back in the day.

I guess that is enough rambling for one day, I'll try to get some new pictures of Jack up sometime soon for everyone who likes to see those. Maybe some from our recent trip to the zoo or something.

Conquer Club Trivia

The time has finally come! With many consultations with Russell to fix small (and sometimes large) bugs I finally managed to get my first website out to the public that isn't a personal portfolio of some kind. I'm pretty excited, and so far things have gone well for it.

I was pretty dead on in my thinking that it would have a lot of visitors the first couple days and then taper off into something much less high-traffic, but that is okay, Conquer Club Trivia is certainly not a website you are going to join unless you are a fairly serious addict of the game it was inspired by anyways.

Time for a New Look

I was tired of the boring and dull greenish look of the blog this morning, so I decided to spice it up a bit. Something a little more extreme if you will.

otissito.com

As many long time readers of my blog know, I'm trying very hard to become a web programmer as my career of choice. A while back I mentioned my personal "brand" called otissito.com but it was sort of in a fluid state while I truly decided what I wanted to do with it.

While Holly has been out of town my goal was to put the finishing touches on something like 6 or 7 different websites I had built for classes that needed some tweaks here and there, but unfortunately I have been a large pile of completed unmotivated uselessness for most of the time she's been gone.

Today I finally got otissito.com finished entirely. I settled for a simple functionality of introduction homepage, contact form, and simply designed portfolio with my most recent work listed first. I think it will do adequately to showcase my skills and allow potential employers to see what I'm capable of at this point.

Now I just need to finish the rest of my websites so the portfolio can be a little bigger, which might help me find better work a bit quicker.

Styling Form Buttons: Take Two

Alright, so when I wrote this post the first time it got rendered all sorts of crazy because I didn't realize that by inserting actual code into my post it would render it as if it were part of the actual page. So... let's try this again.

Over the past couple of days I decided that it would be nice to learn if it was possible to add styles and visual changes to the buttons used on forms in websites. Everyone has seen those buttons before. They are most common on logins, comment forms, contact information forms, or updating profiles on sites. The problem is that the default browser styling for buttons is incredibly bland and boring.

I wanted to see if I could figure out how to make them more visually appealing and exciting. As it turns out, it is entirely possible, but not as easy as you would normally think.

There are two ways of putting a button into a form. The first is by using a standard submit input and the second is to use the button tags with the appropriate attributes. If you use the first method you can do some styling, but the amount of control you have is not nearly as impressive. It is impossible to add an icon or image to a submit input (at least from what I have found so far) and the other styling options are somewhat limited.

However, if you use the button tags you can easily add an icon, adjust the margins or paddings as you wish and deal with all sorts of background colors or borders. The advantage here is that you can make some very nice looking buttons without needing to generate a truckload of "button images" in Photoshop or some other image creation software.

It was a fun experience trying to figure out how to make the buttons work the way I wanted and when I finally had some success I decided that I may try and incorporate them into the Writers Camp website I've been working on for a BYU professor by the end of the summer.

Summer Project Update

A few days ago I posted about my current summer project which is to build my personal "professional" site to begin seriously working as a web developer/programmer (albeit a very amateur one).

As of today the front page is finish. None of the links work, but I finally settled on a color scheme and main page design that I really like.

You can find it here: http://calebflanagan.com

Summer Project

I've mentioned previously that I have several website projects to put the finishing touches on over the next couple of months before school starts up again, but along with that I had been wanting to decide on another project that has not been started yet to work on that would allow me to try and reinforce current skills but also figure out some new things I haven't learned yet.

After mulling it over for a couple of weeks I've decided that the best option is to begin work on my 100% custom designed blog site. I've never been entirely satisfied with the way that Blogger or Wordpress sort of limit the way I can adjust the appearance of my blog, and I have a very specific vision for what I want it to look like. The problem is that working within those two platforms is not all that easy, so building it from scratch seems like the best idea.

Now, don't worry, I'm going to keep this personal/family blog right here, so you won't have to worry about learning a new address or finding me when I move. This new blog is going to be of a more professional nature, with posts twice weekly I think rather than every single day. I don't have a subject matter figured out yet, but it will have something to do with something, how is that for ambiguity?

Building this new site (http://calebflanagan.com) will give me the chance to practice what I already know, but also build on it by needing to figure out the storage of pictures in a database, WYSIWYG editors, tagging of posts, and some other things that will be helpful. I'm hoping I can incorporate some new javascript and perhaps even some Flash knowledge as well in some way. We'll sort of see where it takes me.

I don't have a finite timetable for it to be finished, but I'm thinking with regular work throughout the semester I can get a solid foundation finished before school begins again, and perhaps have another good website for my personal portfolio when all is said and done.

Summertime Plans

This summer will prove to be interesting for many reasons. The foremost of which is the fact that little Jack is around and he'll be learning some great new tricks in the next 3 or 4 months such as crawling, sitting up, eating solid foods, and perhaps even a smidgen of standing up or possibly walking. All of that is sure to keep me busy, but several other things will as well.

Holly is taking a jaunt back to Redlands for basically the majority of the month of June to see Carlie graduate and then spend some time showing Jack off to family and friends. I'll be staying home to work, which means I'll have a couple of weeks to myself, not a common occurance and likely time that can be spent to do some great projects of my own.

I'm not taking any classes this spring or summer so I can concentrate on earning some money to put away towards our second child due this fall, and because I can only take so much school in a row before I start to get far too stressed out and everything begins to blur together for some reason.

Some things I'm hoping to accomplish in the summer months include:

1. Finish Conquer Club Trivia
2. Finish Writers Camp
3. Upgrade Wants & Wishes
4. Redesign otissito.com
5. Read the Wheel of Time books
6. Learn Javascript
7. Read some programming books
8. Finish off my Conquer Club tournaments
9. Organize the kitchen cupboards
10. Organize the storage closet
11. See some great movies
12. Find a new project to start

CHum 489R Project: Writers Camp

Well, it is finally done. Sort of.

Tonight was the final presentation for my CHum 489R Computing Project class and I had to take my website that I had built and go present it in front of the other students from the class as well as the professor and my technical and content advisors.

My project was a website called Writers Camp which I built for Stephen Tuttle, one of the faculty members in the English Department and a teacher that I've taken a class from before. I wanted to find a teacher I felt like I would enjoy working with rather than someone who I didn't really know. As it turns out building the website for Professor Tuttle was a great experience.

I think the website turned out quite well, and it accomplishes everything that he wanted plus a little extra. As it stands right now if I never worked on it again it would serve the purpose it was built for to let Professor Tuttle manage the students in his class along with their stories, but I think there are some great things that could still be added to the site that wouldn't take much to do and that I think I can do with little to no extra help if I put my mind to it.

I'm glad the class is finished and I'm glad that I can take a week or two to relax and take a bit of a breather and enjoy some time to myself. I need to help Holly around the house with a few things and Jack is starting to learn new things all the time, so not having class for a little while will certainly be a good thing for me.

The Book Project

I suppose it is about time that I post something new so everyone stops thinking I am so depressed all the time.

For my print publishing class I need to do one final project using Adobe InDesign to finish off the work and skills we are learning this semester. The interesting thing about this class is that it is almost identical to the first print publishing class that I took, only each of the projects is a little bit longer or bigger than the last time. It sure makes for an interesting experience.

It's also strange that there are 7 people in the class. 6 girls, and me. Funny, eh?

Anyways, the final project is a book project that has to be at least 70 pages long and have at least 4 chapters when I am done. I've known about this project the entire semester and have been trying to think of something to use for me "content" but had been coming up blank until just a couple days ago. I decided that instead of being like everyone else and making a personal history or some sort of cookbook that I would write my own content that was fresh and new and then put it into a format that was more stylistic than a run of the mill 6in x 9in book.

What I decided on was a 4in tall by 10in wide book utilizing 4 columns (trust me, it looks cool) and that my subject matter would be Conquer Club. Why you ask? Well, on March 12th I had my two year anniversary as a member of Conquer Club and in that two years I climbed from a "newbie" all the way to the top of the ladder as the "admin" that I am now. I thought it might be fun to write a sort of memoir of the experiences I've had on the site and then use that for my content. Obviously it wouldn't be too serious or weighty, but it could be a fun little read if you ask me.

I'm thinking of a title something along the lines of From Newbie to Admin: My Journey Through the World of Conquer Club or something just as entertaining.

U-Haul Reserved, Now to Pack

Just got off the phone with the Provo U-Haul and it looks like they are good to go with giving me a 14' moving truck for this coming Saturday morning. I can only have it until 2:00pm however, so I will have to work fast. I don't think I'll need more than one trip though, we have already taken a bunch of stuff over to the new place, and the only thing left in the storage unit is the treadmill, which doesn't take up that much space.

With this development I think I'm going to refrain from using my car to take boxes back and forth to the new apartment because the truck will have way more than enough room. I would say that almost half of our belongings are already at the new place, so if Holly and I go over and empty a few boxes tonight to supplement the ones we've already got at home we should be able to pack just about everything and just take it in the truck on Saturday. That will be helpful with the workload of other stuff I need to get done this week.

I have a big presentation for my CHum 489R project in about 90 minutes, and I'm hoping that it goes well. I checked this morning and they only have VGA connections to the monitors in that classroom so I spent my morning transferring my database tables to my own server space so I could get to everything online and not have to use my computer. It was a hassle, but worked, so the problem is solved I guess. I could have used the time to get some other homework done I didn't do yesterday though.

Busy Week

Most of you know by now that Holly and I are moving back to Wymount this coming weekend, which means that we've been spending a lot of time packing and trying to plan things out properly. Holly packs several boxes each day, and then we take them over to the new place each evening when I get home from work. The goal is to get all of the small stuff over there without having to get a massive truck to do it. So far it is working out nicely.

On Saturday morning I'll get the smallest U-Haul available and have a few guys from the ward help me move the big furniture like the bed, couch, and crib, and then we should be mostly done. Thankfully if there are a few straggling items, Grandma Chatfield isn't going to care if we have to come back for them over a couple of days next week. That takes the edge off the stress of getting everything done right at once.

The weather has picked back up, which means I'm back on the Federation of Joy every day, which pleases me to no end. I like being able to feel like Holly has the ability to go somewhere if she needs to, and do things with her sisters or someone without needing to wait for me to get back from campus. The other plus is that by living in Wymount again I can come home for lunch if I have time between classes because the scooter makes parking next to the buildings I need to be in so convenient.

Also been working on a massive project for my CHum 489R class this past week or so. Russell is my technical advisor and has been very patient with me as I worked through a few hurdles. However, the past two days I've managed to clear the hurdles myself as I am finally understanding how a while() loop is supposed to work, and the proper ways to refer to objects and join database tables together. It is nice to feel like I'm learning something and having it stick, even if it seems like it is always a small piece each time.

I have to give a presentation on this project tomorrow morning and I'm hoping that I have enough done to keep myself from looking like a slacker/fool. Russell seems to think that I'll be much further along than anyone else, but until I see that I'm still a little bit worried. The core of the project site is working now, but I'm hoping to tack on a couple of "bells and whistles" before the presentation tomorrow to try and make it a little more complete. I do like the style that I've applied to the site though, I'm quite proud of that. It looks very modern and sleek. Once I have it up on an actual server (curse you slow BYU people) I'll post a link so people can see what it looks like so far.

Let's see, what else is going on... Oh, I was sick, then Holly was sick, and Jack wound up catching a little bit of it, but nothing too bad. He even learned how to shoot snot out of his eye the other day, which I told him was not a skill that we really needed to practice a whole lot if he didn't mind.

That's all of the big news for now, mostly just trying to get my list of things done each day and help Holly as much as I can when I get home in the evenings.

otissito.com

Today I finally put the finishing touches on otissito.com, which I hope will be a way to slowly start finding some freelance work for myself as a web programmer. I know it isn't very flashy, but that is the look I was trying to achieve. Something that was simply and elegant and presented the information in a professional manner.

I'm not sure how quickly I can get some side projects from other individuals, but I'm hoping that with my cards that Shawn Saunders made for me, and this website, as well as the couple of example websites I have in my portfolio, that I can start making some money doing this rather than just playing around in my free time.

Before I get anything started I owe Russell a great big thank you for helping me along the way the past year as I learned new skills and started to really grasp the things I was trying to do. His class is what really started to give me confidence that I could do this for work, and not just for play.

The site is ready to use, and I'm excited to see how long it takes for someone to contact me with an interest in having some work done.

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!!!

Desktop for Holly

After I posted my desktops the other day, Holly wanted one that would fit on her computer, so I made the one she liked most into a 1024x768 size just for her. Enjoy sweetheart!

Desktop Wallpapers for otissito.com

As a catch-up post because I didn't get anything up yesterday I figure I'll share my new creations with all of you. I have a big list of personal projects and endeavors, most of which aren't very difficult, but at the same time aren't very necessary to my life. They are mostly just things I'd like to do for myself (usually involving web programming of some sort), and I figure I'll get to them sooner or later.

Well, after a long week of finishing up a mid-term website, writing a big paper, and several other things for school I decided to just go ahead and do one of my projects for myself today. This project was to create some custom desktop wallpapers for otissito.com that I could place on a rotation on my computer. They aren't going to get shared with anyone, at least not anytime soon because I built them specifically to fit my monitor, but that's okay. I like them.

Two of them have white backgrounds, so they sort of blend in to the page here on the blog, but I think you get the basic idea nonetheless.

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.

Learning PHP, or at Least Trying To

Some days I'm pretty sure I'll never get down the intricacies of PHP or Javascript, and other days it makes a little more sense. One of these days I'm hoping some kind of switch is going to click inside my head and I'll finally grasp what exactly I'm supposed to be doing without looking it up seven times at each step along the road.

I think what frustrates me the most is when I can identify that I have a problem, perhaps even narrow the problem down to a specific portion of code, but then no matter how many things I switch around, double-check, or re-work it just refuses to work. If I can figure things out the right way the first time, I'm good to go, but unfortunately that rarely, if ever, happens to me.

The biggest problem I have right now is the worry that I'll get a job doing this type of stuff, and then show up the first day and not be able to keep up, do things properly, or even know what is going on. That is a scary concept to be worried about with just over 12 months to go before school is finished.

New Header

Well, at least the sabbatical from Conquer Club is starting to slowly translate into productivity in other skill sets I have. Today, I started with a small project: learn a new photoshop skill. The result... a new header for the blog here.

I think it's pretty snappy if I do say so myself.

Weekly Wanderings #2

It's that time again, time to sit down and hammer out a recap of the events of the week so that people don't think all I do is sit around and play Conquer Club all day.This week has a few more things going for it than last week. First off, I have developed a bit of a routine at work now so that I don't sit around trying to decide what to do next when none of the graduate instructors need anything. I will do the answering of emails and photocopying first thing when I get to the office in the morning, and then I'll take CC turns, and then I'll cruise around on ESPN for a little while, then and tournament updating that needs done with short reading breaks and such, and then when I have finished all of that I just kind of putter around online looking for web design tutorials and such.I didn't get much done in the way of web design practice done this week, but that is okay I suppose. I did try to work on some of the javascript exercises that Russell sent to me, but it appears my javascript skills are far below what they are supposed to be. I guess my teacher didn't cover it nearly as much as some of the others do, which is helpful for Russell to know in the end.My birthday was this week, as most of you know from the previous post. I'm 24 years old now, which doesn't feel any different from when I was 23, but I guess that isn't really news to anyone. However, by the time I get to be 25 I will have been a dad for almost 6 months, so that should prove to be the difference between 24 and 25 I guess.I also went to see Speed Racer, which was not disappointing, but not mind-blowing either. The way they made the film was certainly visually stimulating, but the races were the best part of the movie hands down. Everything else seemed to be somewhat secondary to that, and the nice part was that there was 1 more race in the movie than I had expected there to be. It was longer than most movies of its kind, but I enjoyed that I think. I don't think that Holly was particularly impressed by Speed Racer, but she did enjoy certain parts of it, so that was good.Finally, American Gladiators made its return for Season 2 this week, and I am thrilled. I loved that show as a kid in England when Dad would sit us all down to watch it, and I love it even more in its modernized version. Bringing that show back was one of the smartest moves EVER by NBC.