Ted and Amy

Ever get the feeling the world is leaving you behind? Ted, a good friend of mine, has gone and gotten engaged to a wonderful girl, Amy. She may be a bit of a technophobe, but I'm sure Ted will help her with that minor problem.

I've known Ted for, what, about 9 years now. In that time he's gotten me two jobs, one of them stealing me away from a company I really enjoyed working for, Informix. In both cases, hind-sight tells me that I should have listened to him sooner and not resisted change.

During that time he's gone from a CompUSA instructor to reporting to the CTO of Amazon. During the same period I've gone from a college part-time employee at IBM to manager of the promotion software team at Amazon.

We, mostly he with some minor sysadmin support from me, spent several hours today setting up a website for Ted and Amy to journal their new life adventure. Ted's started adding some pictures from their recent several week vacation in Eurpoe.

Seattle Pictures

I took some really interesting cloud and mountain photos the other day, they're available here:

Weekend

Well, typical lazy weekend so far. Saturday started a bit earlier than usual. Someone, potentially several someone's, decided they'd try to call my home phone 3 times. My voice mail greeting makes it very clear that I never answer it and that the caller should either call my cell phone or leave a message. Nothing. Just me being woken up early. Maybe I should turn the ringer off. The crowning blow was my doorbell being run by the postman delivering a package. At least it was a welcome package... my copies of Jackie's books, www.cgi101.com. Sunday started similarly, but without the ringing phone just a ringing doorbell. Unfortunatly whoever it was was gone before I got there.

Being the weekend, it's not too suprising that a big chunk of my time went to watching TV, clearing out my Tivo of stuff that had accumulated throughout the week. Lots of Buffy watching thanks to FX showing 2 episodes a day every day.

Journaling and Work

One of the reasons I decided to setup and start using a Journal was to help me track my time at work. As a tech lead and manager, I get pulled in many directions and end up doing an awful lot of task swapping. This makes it very hard for me to understand where my time is being spent. By having a browser window open to the New Entry page, I can fairly painlessly jot notes as to what I've been doing. It seems to hae worked well today. Time will tell how well it works in the long run, but I can readily identify 9 of the 10 hours I spent at work today, which is good.

However, it's time to head home now and see about dinner. After that I'll continue to fight with CSS to try to get the layout to be closer to what I want. Either that or adapt it to look more like the rest of my site with the grey backgrounds and blue content boxes.

The battle with CSS

It's been years since I really did much with html, and oh how it's changed.

While I was at CyberSight (now NineDots) I did quite a bit of html work. This was back in the days of netscape 2, 3, and 4. IE was just a gleem in MicroSoft's eye. Frames were the new thing. Life was simpler.

Well.. in the process of trying to configure and pretty up the layout of this journal, I had the 'pleasure' of experimenting with newer html 4.0, or is it xhtml 1.0, stuff and fighting with css (cascading style sheets). It's all so much more complicated now. I realize that with this complexity comes the benefit of separating content from layout to some degree, but I seem to have included quite a bit of layout stuff within the content still.

Anyone care to provide constructive advice on ways to cleanup the html without sacrificing the layout?

Me and my Journal

At various points in my life I've kept a journal, but every one of them has been incredibly short lived. I've decided it's time to try again and see where it leads. An awful lot has been going on in my life lately, mostly job wise, and it'll probably be interesting to come back and read these entries in a few years.