Come Adventuring

Where we come to play

Weekend of Code

June 02, 2008 By: ScottK Category: general

Last Wednesday I accepted two new feature sets to work on that are to be delivered by this thursday. It is so nice not working only on fix tickets. It also meant that I needed to work all weekend to get ahead and ensure, at least from the backend, that the features were complete.

Friday night consisted of a quick dinner at the in-laws. Afterwhich Kel had her school play. It was the “Wizard of Oz” and her part was a munchkin. I was really beat since being up at 3:00 am that day. The play was really kinda neat.  We got homw around 9:00 pm and decided that I better get some shut eye for what was going to be a long weekend.

Up a 2:00 a.m. I got started on the feature that I planned for that day. Refactoring a bunch of python code and changing a few functionalities within SocialSpark messaging wasn’t difficult, just taking a long time. Kel has a friend over about 2:00 p.m. Subsequently it was a trip to the grocery store for me. Afterwhich I hung out with the family and watched a movie.

6:00 p.m. Kel left with her friend to stay the night over there. Back to coding for me until 9:00 p.m. Then crashed.

Midnight! Back up back to coding. I didn’t complete the feature from the prior day as I hoped since the second feature was way more complicated. I was having a strange problem where a service I was contacting wasn’t authorizing a clearly correct username/password. several hours later I figured out that a simple extra whitespace was causing the problem.

6:00 a.m. feature one complete and time for a nap! 8:00 a.m. and back up again. To my surprise the second feature was rather easy to finish and by 10:00 a.m. I had done so!! That left me time to do the household things I needed to do.

Grocery store for a full list, we now have food in the house. Laundry, I now have clean clothes too. Flushed the radiator in Rachael’s car. It had been overheating and as a temp fix I added a bunch of water the other day. Now with fresh anti-freeze it takes a lot longer to begin to overheat, something I need to explore, but only if sitting idle for like twenty minutes.

Checked the A/C in my car to figure out why it blew hot are in really hot weather. Discovered the front end had damamge and the condensor had been bent, but not leaking. Resolved myself not to worry about it for a while. Went out for Chinese with the family about 4:00 p.m. as I was starving.  

All in all it was a long weekend and I got plenty done. I really do prefer to code in the early mornings and leave the day for the family. It just makes for long days. Sleep came early at 8:00 p.m. on Sunday, yet back up at 3:00 a.m. for research on a new idea.

Abra Has Graduated

May 26, 2008 By: ScottK Category: general

Well it has finally happened, Abra has graduated high school. In a three hour ceremony that we had to sit through she finally received her diploma. I’m proud that she finally did am am relieved that the pressure is off of us as well.

Being her parents does place that pressure to make sure whe has everything to succeed. While we have tried it’s been difficult as, well, she still is a kid and thinks she knows everything.

I found it funny that while the victorians were giving their speeches about how the graduates where now entering their adulthoods, having passed the toughest years of their lives, I could only chuckle that they had no idea of what was in store for them.

It’s awesome though, Abra is working on going to Fashion college to get her Bachelors Degree and I will support her anyway I can. Her father came down for the event and at the moment they are both fighting on where they want to go to spend the day together. I’m trying my best to stay out of it.

Abras graduation pictures are here: Abra

Google Come Spank Me

May 06, 2008 By: ScottK Category: rants

Last year around what October Google introduced its rank spank to a vast amount of blogger who had supposedly had paid posts and links. I say supposedly because my original site Tech Raving got zerod in the first round of the hit.

Tech Raving had absolutely no paid posts and at the time no advertisements as well. So why did I get hit. I theorized because I work for PayPerPost / IZEA. Although after researching a great many blogs outside the PayPerPost system I don’t see where it was strictly targeted towards PayPerPost.

Fine, I got spanked. Big freaking deal as I was still indexed (without PageRank) by Google but the amount of indexing but metacrawlers and the other search engines I wasn’t even concerned about Google. Nope not in the least. Keywords were still moving me forward even if not on Google.

So I set up Come Adventuring here two weeks ago. Just to completely speak my mind outside of technology and the what not. One thing I did however was attempt to make peace with Google by asking for a re-evaluation of Tech Raving.

Funny thing that, Come Adventuring was a page rank of ZERO when I added the sitemaps and no posts. Tech Raving was spanked. Now Come Adventuring is a Page Rank of ONE and Tech Raving is still spanked. Not in the fun sort of way either.

Fine let’s test this theory. I work for IZEA, PAYPERPOST, ZOOKODA, URLBRIEF, BLOGGERS CHOICE AWARDS, IZEA RANKS. Now lets’ see how long I hold onto PageRank. If I lose it now, then yes Googles targeting certain keywords. If not then there is nothing to worry about. Other than Google is way to big for its britches and needs a spanking (stocks) of it’s own.