Luke ‘n’ Bill

I was working with Reid lately on some CSS issues he was having with a new blog he was creating.  It took a few days but we got through most of the issues that he wasn’t readily able to resolve.  The design is one of my favorite kinds…very simple, clean but very nice looking.  However, what struck me about working with Reid on this site was how complex CSS can really get.  We didn’t touch on any of the really advanced “concepts” you can get into, but there was still a descent amount of training on CSS and Reid was in no way a newbie to css or web development.

Coming from the application development side of Computer Science has always made me think that CSS and html for that matter were really not “programming languages”.  However, after this last week of work and just thinking about the amount of training skill it takes to go from zero to efficient with CSS, I’ve gained a new sense of respect for complexity of CSS.

Lisa and I just recently picked up some nice road bikes for getting some good exercise and just good outdoor entertainment.  At the same time Rochesterfest just had it’s first annual triathlon here in Rochester.  It got me to thinking…I’ve always wanted to try a triathlon and this triathlon here has a “sprint” version of it.  1/4 mile swim, 10 mile bike and 3 mile run.  I can “do all three” and was thinking that would be a really good way to give a triathlon a try without having to kill myself.  So I think I’m going to do a relaxed training regiment for it over the next year and give it a shot next year.   So far in the last 5 days I’ve put 49.5 miles on my bike including yesterdays 27 mile ride where I was able to average 16 mph up and down some good hills and fighting a good headwind for good portion of it.

I’ll be sure to keep an update on here about my progress.

Well being that I haven’t written in a while I figured I would update people on the recent going ons and why I’m so freakin busy.

First, at the beginning of the month I moved to Minnesota, actually back to Minnesota to be exact.  It’s been about 6 years since I lived here, but that’s still long enough for Minnesota to require me to take the written exam again.  You can read more about that craziness later on.

After that I had a busy couple of weeks doing a few things….getting moved in, getting things set up to work remotely (while working remotely) and most importantly getting things set up for the engagement.

So if you didn’t know about it already, you do now, Lisa and I are officially engaged!  I’ll let Lisa write up a quick little ditty on all the gory details, but it was a full weekend and we had a blast.

After all that excitement we had our big house warming party that went over good and now it’s finally time to relax…for a couple days.

Download Firefox 3 in late June.  Set a record!

Well, after a few months of planning and a hectic month of lining things up I’m back in Minnesota!

Overall, the move went really smooth.  After getting everything set up and slowly getting everything packed up and ready to go for the move, I started the heavy lifting on Friday (May 30th) by packing up the last of the little stuff I could in my apartment and starting to clean everything in the apartment.  After getting about 90% through the cleaning of the apartment I headed to bed around 2am and set my alarm for 7:30 the next morning.

The next morning (the 31st) I got up early and headed down to the U-haul place.  They set me up with the 17 foot truck I had reserved and I hooked up the car trailer behind it.  Although I did have to leave my car there, even though they told me that they did a ramp for loading the cars onto the trailer multiple times (right up to the point where I needed to put it on the trailer).

So anyways, I got the uhaul and started to pack up the back of it with all the little stuff before Brooks and Jill showed up to help me with the big stuff.  That part went way faster than I thought it would.  So after we got done packing up and loading my car onto the trailer, I quickly finished up the cleaning and was out of there!  (by around 2:00 pm).

This was probably the longest (in actual time) it ever took me to get to Rochester.  The longest trip (in the amount of time it felt like) was when I came over to surprise Lisa for our first date, that trip felt like 9 hours.  But this trip took me about 4 hours.  After a few stops to re-adjust the wheel straps on the trailer and figure out exactly how they went on, the trip was a little quicker.

So around 6 or 6:30 I got in to Rochester.  For the last week it has been a whirlwind of unpacking setting things up and a little bit of work spread in there too.  Now, this weekend it started to feel a little more relaxing and a little more like home.

I suppose this is enough for now.  I think I’m going to try to convince my girl to go down stairs with me and watch a movie.  Although I am kinda enjoying my entertainment now, I’m getting a very nice serenade by my girl on her guitar while I sit here and type.

One of my good friends called me the other day with an interesting problem. He has acquired the rights to work on the website www.lewisandclarktrail.com and now wants to know what he can do to it.

The site is really a gold mine of opportunity. Great domain name, great topic (not a passing fad that will be gone in 5 years), the site is overflowing with content (usually the hard part) and it already has a large amount of traffic going to it. We knew what the rough number was for unique users in a year but there had never been any analytics run on the site. So that was the first step.

After he had installed analytics on the site last Sunday the numbers started rolling in. It was really interesting to see what you can tell just by some statistics. The numbers backed up what we already knew about the site. It is visited primarily by school aged children visiting for school purposes. Here are some of the stats that really cemented that idea in my head:

• Site recieves an average of 700 unique visitors a day during the week. On the weekend, it averaged 300. Apparently these kids don’t like doing their homework on the weekends.
• The amount of visitors with high speed internet was above the average. The schools always have high speed internet even out in the sticks.
• The amount of visitors with monitors of either 1024×768 or 800×600 was staggering. There’s nothing wrong with those CRTs from 1999, so why throw them away?!

These were really quite interesting to look at and I think it really gave us a great idea of what we can do next and in addition to that, it will be interesting to see what happens to them when school is out and tourist season takes over.

Anyone feeling like doing some camping on the trail.

I read this article today about what has been caught by reading the specs on the new standard for CSS coming out.

It’s really an interesting idea.  I could definitely see myself  using them for the reasons they specify in the article but it is also interesting for the fact of what the next step might be.  I’ve always had a confused outlook on .CSS being that it’s really it’s own “language”, but it’s not really a “programming language” in the way that I usually think about it.

It’s already a very powerful tool and just recently realized I have no idea how I would build a site without the standard div/span/.css process that I use now.  (I know…cause I was asked to and had to ask another of our developers to do it instead)

Now though, the tool is getting even more powerful and it will really be interesting to see where they take it next.  In my mind, I would think the next logical step would be into logic switches and loops, but we’ll have to see.

The sad fact is you know that IE will only support 75% of this new functionality so you’ll still have to put in your IE hacks to make it work.

It may be the “punk rock” design put on the site or possibly my overly candid and risky conversation regarding RC Airplanes…or most likely my reference to a religious poop in the title of post talking about the Georgian UAV being shot down.

Whatever it was I have officially been blocked from the Skywest corporate headquarters by that handy internet filtering software.

Now lets see who else’s companies I can get red flagged from… guns, sex, drugs, communism, koala bears, terrorism.

There we go…that should about do it.  (by the way, thanks to Reid, my good friend that works at Skywest, for letting me know that I’m just too hardcore now…now quit browsing these dirty sites REID!)

The following is a very long rant on flying model aircraft…so if you’re not up for it, I’d stop here.

I started writing a little about my hobbies a while back and so I figured I would continue it on with a little about hobbies that I’ve had in the past. I’ve always been someone that gets busy with one thing or another and depending on the activity, it may just catch and turn into a hobby.
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Being the super modern and trendy shop we are, we were listening to some Skynyrd the other day at work… Well actually it was because Joe has it on his iPod and Skynyrd pretty much rocks your face off.

So when Freebird starts up I instinctively yell “Play Freebird!” and it brought up the question of where that started. For some reason I had decided to fill that corner of my mind previously with the answer by looking it up on good ol’ Wikipedia and gave the quick explanation. So here is a great bit o’ knowledge for you to nibble on and really just find a good replacement in your brain for that calculus proof you forgot from college.

It has become a popular culture cliché for the audience of almost any concert to shout “Free Bird” as a request to hear the song, regardless of the performer or style of music. … This can be traced back to Skynyrd’s first live album, 1976’s One More From The Road. Skynyrd did not play the song during the main portion of the concert, or even in the encore performance. Instead they saved it for their second encore. After leaving the stage following the first encore of the concert, the crowd was riled by the apparent omission of Skynyrd’s signature song. The crowd then began chanting “Free Bird, Free Bird …”. No one left the auditorium. The band then returned to the stage for a second encore and upon taking the microphone Van Zant asked the crowd, “What song is it that you wanna hear?”, which was immediately followed by several more shouts of “Free Bird”. This interaction is recorded as an intro to the song on the album, and the band responded with a 14-minute version of the song.