The Plentiful Vintage

So, the weekend. Didn't do anything other than my best impression of a turnip. This involved sitting in front of the computer playing crappy games, and watching the Dodgers take two of three from the Padres. I had hoped to go for at least one ride, but the weather was chilly and wet. So it goes.

Today was bright and sunny, but by this evening it was far to windy to ride, so I finally did some of the yard work I've been avoiding. To my utter amazement the lawnmower, which had sat dormant since October, started on the second try. Despite the blusteriness, it was really quite a pleasant evening for a mow. Now I am tired, and the plan for the rest of the evening is to stretch out on the couch, watch Heroes, and fall asleep in place.

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I was surprised to see busloads of school kids down at the airport at lunch time. Turns out one of NOAA's atmospheric research aircraft, a P-3 Orion hurricane hunter, was sitting on the tarmac for school tours. Aviation, yay!

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In programming news, I managed to successfully complete my first little bit of C# coding today. Let me 'splain. No, there is too much. Let me sum up. We launched a snazzy new .net based website in January, about a week after we fired the outside developers for being mutton-headed boobs (and bad spellers). The marketing manager, who was supposed to be overseeing the project, decided to seek other employment opportunities shortly thereafter. We hired a consultant to handle all the back-end fixes that needed to be done, whilst I spent my time changing the text color in eleventy zillion style sheets from light grey to black, and otherwise tweaking what I could in the html. Up until recently I couldn't do much more because I didn't know how.

.Net takes some getting used to. Rather than the site's pages being programmed through scripting in the pages themselves, the programming occurs in separate files that are then compiled prior to being published. For some reason the scripting language of choice appears to be C#, rather than anything I'd ever used before (you know, something simple), so now I have to learn how to program in yet another language. Today was my first baby step in that process, finally fixing something I'd complained to the original developer about several times to no avail. I gotta say, it was a lot easier and less complicated when I did the exact same tweak in VBScript on the old site. Anyway, go me!

It was 97° at lunch today, and it was still 91 in the shade when I got home. It was 88 inside the house, so I hid out in the cool of the basement until the a/c cooled down the back room a bit. No bike ride. Too damned hot.

Now that the a/c has done it's job, I'm typing this from the back room on my laptop, which is connected to the router with a very long patch cord. I've actually wired a dataport in this room, but I've never connected the other end of the cable to the router. I should do that this weekend. It'll be cool in the basement. Damn, I feel like such a wuss complaining about the heat so much...

Spent the day building an Access application to track quality system documents. As usual, I spent way too much time trying to get Access to do simple things, and failing to get the syntax right. The documentation sucks so badly (and is even wrong in some instances), and the 'how-to' books all seem contain only the simplest stuff. Feh. Still, I got most of the application up and running the way I want it to, with only one more module to go, so yay me.

Time to go to sleep.