Daily Life

I happened to stumble across this web site today while I was searching for a more accessible way to incorporate iframes into USC Upstate's web site using jQuery. Over at noupe.com they have compiled a great list of 50 jQuery resources. This makes a great addition to the list of techinques and tutorials over at www.jquery.com.

I've been blogging on and off for almost two years now and I've learned one thing from the entire experience...I'm not very good at it. Well, at least I'm not very good at making regular posts, which is one of the main ideas about blogging.  I do believe that I'd do better if it were a required part of my job, like running a corporate blog or a research blog, but as for a personal one, I just never find the time.

I've just finished wrapping up my latest website, www.ashevillehwyrentals.com and I'm quite pleased with the way it turned out. Asheville Highway Rentals is located in Spartanburg SC and provides rentals for weddings, parties, events, birthdays, construction, household projects, and heavy equipment. The hard part about building a site  that incorporates all these services is coming up with a design that  isn't too focused on any one aspect of their services. I knew that if I made a lavender and floral design that stressed their wedding services that I might scare away construction workers or if I made a site showcasing bulldozers and hammer drills that I'd scare away people planning their weddings.

Oh well, turns outs that www.burnloungeregistry.com isn't going to work out after all. Burnlounge prohibits its users from creating their own websites to promote their online stores. Too bad I found all this out after buying my domain space and domain names. But, on the brighter side, I now have a crapload of space to move this blog too. Hopefully I'll have some good content to put on their as well. If anyone would like me to host their website, just let me know.
In the meantime, I continue to mess around with CSS and ASP.NET 2.0. Both of which are turning out to be pretty impressive tools. I should have some more examples of these types of sites up shortly.

So today is Monday....
That being said, I'd like to go on to say that I miss Sunday.
Sunday was a good day.
Food was free,
I discovered water guns are hard to find in the winter,
dogs are very jealous creatures,
Sarah really likes mashed potatoes and gravy,
and the Boondocks continues to be a good show

Today starts the second week of my new job as a web developer for the State of SC. I was worried about this job before I started, but now it seems that everything is going to work out ok. The hardest part is getting used to my new schedule really. For the past year and a half I've been working on the weekends and off on the weekdays, but now that I've got a regular job, its the other way around. I think I'll take some time for me to adjust, but I don't think I'm ever going to get completely used to it. Last night, for example, I found it hard to pull myself away from the Sunday Adult swim lineup, but now that I have to be in bed around 11:00, I should just give up the notion of watching late night TV anymore.

Ahh, I finally got a new job...feels good doesn't it? Monday I attended my honors ceremony at the school since I'll be graduating this coming week with honors. There were only 8 others in the School of Sciences to graduate with honors, but there sure were a lot of people there watching the ceremony. Most everyone was dressed nicely, while I had been told "casual". My jeans and leather jacket just made me look that much cooler right?
That same day I also got a call from the University telling me that I got the web developer job I'd applied for about a month ago. Its not paying as much as most web developer jobs do, but its great experience, I get my own office (with a view), and I get State benefits. I haven't had insurance since I was 21 so dentist here I come! I'll be over the site, www.uscupstate.edu .

Of all the interesting or important stuff I could write about today, I selected this individual simply because of her incredible skill. I work a helpdesk job at a hospital and rarely do I have any problems with callers since they realize that being nice to me gets them better service and vice versa. So this call I receive today starts off simple enough, a woman is new to the hospital and needs to fax the I.S. department some paperwork so she can have access to a computer. After telling her that I only work weekends and that I don't have the access to give her what she needs, I politely tell her that she or her manager will need to fax the paperwork down during the week. She then says, "ok, well what is the fax number" and I reply back that I don't have a fax machine here in the data center so I don't know the fax number. Then, out of nowhere, in a very sincere voice she tells me, " thanks a lot, you've been a real help to me" and hangs up before I can get another word in. She should have just told me that I was a worthless and deserved to be shot in the head only to fall in my own grave from the tone she used. And all I did was try to help.....

Ok, for anyone keeping up out there..., I've finally finished up with my new design. I spent a good deal of time at work over this past weekend  throwing this website together. Getting this WordPress blog software up and running on my webserver took me a couple hours. By the way, anyone wanting to use WordPress should make sure to find a better domain host than GoDaddy.com because there are some problems with the PHP installation into the MySql server GoDaddy provides. Anyway, after I got the site setup, I started looking into how PHP works since this is the first time I've ever used it. Pretty much, it takes your HTML and breaks it up into capsules (I know there's more to it than this). The fun part was doing some research on different uses of CSS. I found a lot of nice sites, but I like www.csszengarden.com the best so far.