My blog. Personal thoughts, anecdotes, and musings.
Getting a job in the IT field can be really difficult unless you know people or know how to market yourself. It’s not enough just to know your stuff. The people who get the jobs are the ones who either know someone who can get them a gig or are really good at promoting themselves. You might think that promoting yourself means being a big egomaniac and bullshitting people into hiring you.
We went to the Festival in the Pines on Sunday with Dad. There were over 250 craft booths there with people selling all sorts of things from music CDs to jewelery to wooden furnture. I saw quite a bit of things that I would have loved to buy but I had no way to get them home safely. It was hard to do that festival without Mom though. For years, even when I was very little, we’d all go together and look at the exhibits, enjoy the food, and roast in the unbearable hot temperatures.
I signed the contract for my new book. It’ll be around 250 pages and I hope to have it done by January. The book will show programmers how to make things look pretty. I’m hoping to make it as easy to follow as possible for people who don’t have a formal design background so this process will be pretty interesting. I’ve got a pretty large outline done and I’ve started working on the excercises for the tutorial sections of the book.
I spend a lot of time working with the Ruby programming language and the Rails framework. There was a huge security vulnerability announced today and we were all told to apply the patch. Unfortunately we weren’t told exactly why, or what the vulnerability is. Many of us have looked at the source code and figured it out. Looks like the storm is over. The core team has patched the holes and most people are safe.
The plan was that Erich, Josh, and Carissa were going to all get up early and go decorate the reception hall at the golf course while I stayed back with the kids. Everything was going according to plan until Erich’s car got a flat tire. This just keeps getting better. Did I mention the part about the ring? He left her ring in his car at the hotel, so that’s one more stop that needs to be made.
Josh’s car broke down right before the rehearsal so he hasn’t gotten his tux yet. Mine fit but his dad’s pants needed alteration. Erich picked his up but he may need some modifications to his jacket. We didn’t get the rehearsal started until about a half-hour later and we were an hour late for the reservation at the restaurant. At least they didn’t give away our tables!
Josh organized a golf outing yesterday for anyone who was interested. We went to Wild Ridge and had a decent time despite some rather rude behavior by a certain member of the staff. I didn’t golf but I did zoom around all day in the cart. That was kinda fun, and it gave Josh a chance to relax a bit. Pictures are in the gallery.
Carissa and I went up to visit Dad yesterday. He’s doing a lot better these days. I spent a bit of time there helping him hook up some AV components so he could watch DVDs without having to jump through a lot of hoops. We then installed some more memory into his computer. Then we did some sorting of Mom’s things. That was pretty hard on everyone. We did find some cool things though, such as my baby book and my mom’s kaleidoscope.
We made it through the contest! Mike, Adam, and I submitted our final change to our program after running into some nasty last minute problems. There’s always so much to fix. I’m truly amazed at what this programming framework can do. We accomplished more in 24 hours than many people hope to accomplish in a month’s time. The three of us hammered out a fairly nice event and expense tracker. Adam and Mike would like to see it go somewhere.
We’re still going… although we’re getting slower. We’ve hit a lot of snags today because we want to implement a cool feature in our program that we really struggled with. Mike just managed to figure it out though so we’re going to hook it up.