Fresh Code

Today was another day of running around. Lauren, Wayne and I went over to a friend’s house to get a bunch of firewood they can’t take with them when they move. We took Lauren’s truck and filled the bed but still have to go back for the rest. They had a lot! When we got home Jordan and James helped the three of us unload and stack the wood so it went pretty fast.  Wayne and I had to get the plywood and drywall we didn’t get yesterday so he can get this bathroom finished. We also looked at light fixtures and faucets but I don’t really know what I want for sure. So many decisions. When we got home I helped Jayde and Estelle with their math homework. I love math! I wish they could see how much fun it is.

Wayne, Andrew and I met our friend Vicky for dinner at Queen of Sheba Ethiopian restaurant. Dinner was fantastic and we sat and talked until they closed. It was really nice. It feels like our day was jam packed and busy but I don’t have a lot to say about it.

Today I learned about Turkish Peshtemal or Pestemal Towels. I think I am going to give one a try.

Wayne and I had a bunch of running around to do today. We needed to look for lights, faucets, glass shades, grab drywall and plywood, run by Target and Petco. We had gotten everything done except for picking up the drywall and plywood before I remembered that Natale and Jayde had doctor appointments all the way across town. We hurried home and grabbed them then took surface streets to the doctor’s office. I was positive we would be late but we made excellent time and were a few minutes early. It was dinner night so we rushed through the grocery store afterward and then headed home to make dinner. Alice had already stopped by with a bunch of garden lettuce. It was soaking in the sink so we knew she would be back soon. I helped Wayne get dinner going and soon everyone started showing up. We were making something new for dinner but it was a very simple dish and didn’t take much time at all. It was pasta, corn and grape tomatoes with an avocado, basil, lemon sauce. It looks a little odd with the green sauce but it is yummy. Everyone loved it! Tonight we had Alice, Jason, Spencer, John, Taylor, Delaney, Jordan’s friend James and the six of us. Dale, Miri and Michael haven’t been coming because they are moving soon and have a ton of packing to do.

Today I learned about these conferences we should go to. We already go to a handful but will definitely have to consider a few more.

The rain was going to return today so Wayne spent the morning working in the front yard getting stuff planted, weeding and cleaning up. It looks fantastic. We already have a ton of strawberries ripening so it is definitely going to be a busy year.

Peter looked over my pull request and had a ton of tips and suggestions. One reason things weren’t working properly was due to case sensitivity. I guess html data tags have to be lower case only. Well that’s good to know. Once I fixed those things mostly worked but not completely. The JavaScript is triggering too soon on the starred events page so none of the proper tags are loading. Everything works fine on the other pages though so I can fix that. I also knew he wasn’t going to like having the same text written in several different places so as expected he wants that changed. I just didn’t know the best way to do it but he told me to make a helpers.py and use that. Perfect!

The rain showed up so it felt like a perfect day to have chickn’ noodle soup. Wayne made a big pot and we had some warm sourdough bread. It was a great dinner. Alice had a late meeting or class so Jason joined us.

Today I learned that the Tao of Tea shop on Belmont is the same tea shop that is in the Chinese Garden. Handy!

I had a great Mother’s Day. I talked to my mom in the morning, Delaney brought me some beautiful flowers from she and Taylor, Alice and Wayne weeded and planted in the back yard,  Andrew took me to East Side Deli for a sandwich, Wayne, Andrew, Lauren, Sean and I went to see the new Avenger’s movie in 3D and IMAX, and Natale baked me two loaves of beautiful banana bread.

Today I learned that there is an upcoming Batman vs Superman movie. Whaaaaat? I definitely want to see that!

Today I got an email from another place I sent a code challenge and they liked it enough to fly someone out to interview me next week. I kinda knew they would like my submission because I know I did a great job with it. That isn’t enough to translate to a job though because I have to figure out how to get over the nervous panic that is just sitting there under the surface during interviews or I’m going to blow it every time. If I could go in with a “this is simply practice” attitude that would help me but I can’t do that when it’s not true! On the up side I only have a week to stress about it.

I spent most of the day paying bills and working on my Mozilla bug. I really didn’t want to ask Andrew for help if at all possible so I tried changing things to see what would happen. I did that until it was time to head to the monthly PLUG meeting. Tonight Michael Dexter was talking about block storage. It was actually really interesting! We stuck around and talked with people afterward and made it home for a very late dinner of leftovers.

Today I learned that hardware raid is dead, dead, dead, and about GPT vs MBR.

Today I decided to work on some long overdue things. I want to transfer the data from my old recipe site to my new recipe site. The data in the old site is in an interesting format so I’m not sure how best to do this. There are DB dumps so I’m thinking about how to extract what I need but maybe it’s best to write a script to dump the data the way I want it which I think is in JSON. I did a bit of digging around on Heroku where the new site is to see what I might need to do ahead of time and to see exactly how I get the data into the database. I also worked on writing a Python script to grab the data and give it to me in JSON. I was close to having it ready to test when Andrew let me know he had JSON dumps for me already. That works!

I did a significant amount of reading and searching for how to get this data imported to my new site but was getting frustrated. I set that project aside and pulled up a Mozilla bug I had been wanting to get to. I needed to make the tooltip say the correct thing when an event is starred. Right now it says “Save as starred event”. I was not going to let JavaScript intimidate me this time! I figured out what I needed to do and got the code written. The syntax had me struggling a bit but I screwed around with it until I got a fun error “a is undefined” in a JS file that isn’t mine. Well crap. I had to ask Andrew for some help but he was busy and it was time for dinner anyway.

Today I learned about this handy site to help ramp up on JavaScript skills.

I woke up kind of bummed about not hearing back after my interview last week but I guess that’s how some companies handle things if they don’t intend to hire you. It still sucks though. Even just a “Thanks for coming in but we have hired someone else.” or something would be great. Ah well, that’s my rant for the day.

On the other hand dinner night was GREAT! Since it’s Cinco de Mayo we made tacos, Mexican quinoa, refried beans, salad, and seasoned grilled corn on the cob. Yum! We had the six of us, Alice, Jason, Spencer, John, and Glenn. We had a ton of food.

Today I learned how to reconnect all of my irc sessions. I keep them running on a remote server and connect via tmux but the server got an upgrade and needed a reboot.

Today was a busy, busy day full of running all over the place. Wayne and I left with Lauren and dropped her off at a salon where she volunteered to be a hair model. We ran to Trader Joe’s and Hippo Hardware and then rushed back to get her, take her home, and run out to Costco before my doctor appointment. Once we were done with aaaaaaall of that it was nearly 17:00 and I was supposed to meet Alena and hang out with her before her Women Who Code meetup. I hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast though so I was really hungry. I of course had Wayne drop me off at Los Gorditos and then I walked up to the Starbucks where Alena was waiting. We sat outside while I ate and caught up on life and such. I was waiting all day to hear about a job prospect but that wasn’t happening. Soon enough it was time to walk to Portland Code School where here class was taking place. She was teaching and intro to PHP class so I followed along and it’s really not much different than any other object oriented language. It was interesting for sure. After her class Andrew came to get me. Dinner was ready when we got home but I was too full to eat so I checked over my code challenge one last time and sent it off. I had been hoping to get it sent earlier in the day but I was just too busy.

Today I learned that “We will let you know by Monday.” doesn’t mean that at all, even a little.

Wayne and I got up early so we could give my friend Virginia a ride to the airport. Andrew had made Wayne a cappuccino and made me a nice spicy chai with whipped cream and a cherry on top. That is my favorite way to start a Sunday. We took our drinks with us and headed out. I don’t really see Virginia much anymore so it was nice to catch up with her.

The three of us decided to head down to Sellwood and look for stuff for the house (more lighting, windows, etc.) It was a beautiful day and kind of a shame to spend a moment of it inside but it was fun to walk around the little shopping area down there. We completely struck out though and didn’t find a thing that was useful or reasonably priced.

I worked a bit more on the coding challenge just improving it and fixing any issues that came up. I did it all in Python since there was no language requirement but the company uses Perl. I hope they are ok with that!

We had an impromptu dinner night of sorts because we invited Jayde’s friend Estelle’s parents over to have breakfast for dinner. Alice, Jason and their friend Kevin joined us as well as did Lauren and Sean. We had sourdough waffles, tofu scramble, sausage patties, and potatoes. Afterward we went over to Alice and Jason’s and watched Walk Among the Tombstones. It was ok.

Today I learned that Sellwood is not the place to go for antiques.

I had the pleasure of accompanying Jayde’s class downtown to see Cyrano at the Armory. I knew the basic idea of the play but hadn’t ever read or watched it. There were, I think four classes in total going and each class is about 20 children. We were taking the Max and I was wondering how this would be with that many middle-schoolers but it was great. They were all really good. When we got downtown ( I guess it wasn’t technically downtown but I call anything within the circle bordered by I-5 on the east and I-405 on the west downtown. Whatever) we went to a park and ate the lunches we brought. The kids ran straight for the playground and worked off some energy and then we made our way up to the Armory. Jayde’s class and another had the entire upper balcony which had a great view! I was worried that the kids would get restless during the two hour play but they were all so good. I was impressed. The play was fantastic! It was funny and touching. I really loved going.

After the play I checked on Andrew’s status since he was working at the co-working space. He said he was about done so met us all at the train. The giant group of us piled on and made our way home. Jayde went back to school for a while to hang out with her friends so Andrew and I went home.

I spent the remainder of the afternoon and early evening panicking about my interviews tomorrow. I had to stop doing that though so we could head to BSD Pizza Night. We were meeting at Sizzle Pie on the east side of the river. The pizza was good but too spicy for me. We had a great time talking about all sorts of random stuff. Lots of it I don’t even understand but Wayne said he’d explain it to me later. Heh 🙂

Today I learned about ECC memory and bit-flipping. Fascinating!