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.

The Job Hunt

I'm not looking for much, just a solid job for either part-time or full-time somewhere in the web programming field. I know I don't know every single programming language out there, but if I can find a few open positions that are pretty close to what I know I think I can learn whatever else is needed fairly quickly.

The one job I had hoped to get because I was pretty sure my skills were either on par with or far beyond what they needed was at Heritage Web Solutions, but they refuse to return calls and have "misplaced" my resume and application twice now. I guess that option is out. It would have been the most convenient by a long shot though.

I found a few new jobs to apply or at least research a little more yesterday, one in Sandy and one with the Provo Daily Herald that seems like it might be promising. I also put in a call in response to an advertisement on Craigslist to someone who was looking to pay to have their small business site reworked into something more professional looking. That one would be a freelance job, but could net a little bit of money and experience as well.

Mostly I wish I had time to learn new programming languages more quickly, but with school, my current job, and taking care of the family there isn't much time for that sort of thing. The catch is that without some of the new languages I worry I might not be all that marketable while looking for better employment. Steep hill to climb I guess.

If anyone has any leads on jobs or freelance projects, let me know as I'd certainly be interested.

A Brief Recap

Holly is down in Redlands with her family for the next few weeks while one of her sisters graduates from high school and several other events take place. She took Jack with her since I can't keep track of him while I'm at work all day each day.

That means I'm home alone living the bachelor life for a little bit. It's not as much fun as you would think, but I am hoping to get lots of stuff done while she is gone. I'll probably go see a couple of movies that Holly never would have wanted to see, I'll give Shawn Saunders a call and see if he wants to do something once or twice, and I'll probably do some stuff with Gerald Smith as well to pass the time, but he doesn't get back in town until the 11th.

I also want to finish off some websites, read several books, clean up some cupboards and closets in the apartment and maybe wash out the car and the FoJ if I have time. Mostly I'm just going to try and be productive but relaxed at the same time so that I can make the best use of the time I have distraction free.

Luckily with Holly's new computer she has a webcam so before she left I got her set up on Skype to video chat every couple of days so I can see Jack and her a little bit while they are gone. We did the first chat last night and now Holly is apparently addicted to Skyping.

Wish me luck in my life of bachelorhood!

CSS Positioning

I've been working with web design for almost two years now. Actually, I might have passed the two year mark, I'm not entirely sure, I should go check that sometime just to know. Anyways, one thing I've been using for a long time is CSS positioning to get things to show up where I want them on the page. You can do all sorts of nifty stuff with positioning, but here is the catch: sometimes it is just downright confusing to understand.

Sure, I've made it work just fine. I have built several websites, but to be honest there were times and still are occasionally when I truly don't entirely grasp why something I just added to my code worked to fix the problem I was having. It was more of a stab in the dark that happened to be successful.

So, this morning I set out to figure out exactly how it works. I have always understood absolute positioning as it is incredibly straightforward. You simple tell the piece of the page exactly where to go and it stays there, end of story. Floating was always pretty straightforward as well. Tell something to float either direction and it moves as far as it can to the left or right and sticks there until you tell it to do something else.

What always sort of confused me was relative positioning. I've had it explained to me many, many times with several different analogies, but it never truly made sense. So, after owning a copy of CSS Mastery for quite some time now and never actually reading the entire thing I decided to lug it to work today and see what it could help me with. As it turns out if I would have just taken the time to read the book in the first place I would have understood relative positioning the entire time.

It seems my confusion on the issue stems from the fact that somewhere in either my classwork or my own haphazard trial and error I have gotten into the habit of always applying a relative position to everything that I wanted to float. That might not make sense to a lot of people, but it did to me at the time, and I've been doing it ever since. In actuality those to properties are not required to be used together, and can be used independently for different purposes. Sometimes they have to both be used, but not always. That is what had me entirely thrown off.

Knowing now that I can float things with just the float property and in some cases a position property is entirely pointless and unnecessary has opened my eyes to some new solutions in my CSS code that I've struggled with for a long time.

Now I'm determined to read CSS Mastery from cover to cover in its entirety to make sure I don't have any other strange habits that are causing me to stumble unawares. It's quite interesting how sometimes I get myself into a rut of thinking I've got one particular part all figured out and consider it "basic" but then discover I had it a little sideways the entire time.