EYEHEARTZOMBIES

Guess this is the obligatory weekly post. I swear I really was going to write more often. Who knew my life would suddenly become so boring?

Anywho, the Ruby on Rails learning is still going well. I haven’t had a lot of time to sit and work on stuff, but I’m satisifed that I have a good grasp on the simple bits of the language. Manny has bought the Agile Web Development With Rails book for me, which should get here this week. Hopefully it kickstarts me into ever expanding realms of Rails goodness.

I had a fun eye-opening experience this weekend as far as programming goes, actually. Elaine needed a todo list application that she could use at work. Well, she’s restricted to IE 5.2/Mac there, so tadalist was out. My host doesn’t support Ruby on Rails yet, so I couldn’t just move the application I had made here at home, and my ISP is an intrusive whore, so I couldn’t just open some ports and redirect her here. So what’s a geek to do?

I sat down on Friday night to write a todo list for her in PHP. I wrote some more on Sunday. I finished it on Monday. That’s three days I spent on it, writing script after script to handle pointless little functions just to give the needed functionality. I finally finished it with about twice the code of my Ruby app (counting the rhtml templates for output) but without some of the nicer functionality of the Ruby app. For example, the Ruby app features checkboxes next to each item that can be checked to mark the item as done (moving it to the done section of the page). I didn’t even want to think about doing that in PHP. So I didn’t. Twice the code, half the functionality.

I really hope my host gets Ruby on Rails installed soon, since I’d love to be able to share some of what I’m trying to make and maybe help spread the word and education of Rails.

OK, enough geek talk. My parents came up over the weekend, since it was a long holiday, and we got to spend some time with them. Don’t get to see them as often as we’d like, so it was nice to have them around. On Sunday we (my parents, Elaine, John, and I) went to the War Eagle Grist Mill and then to Eureka Springs. The Mill is a lot of fun. You can splash around in the river that powers the Mill or go inside and buy stuff. They also have two annual arts & crafts shows, if you’re into that sort of thing. So, we waded and skipped rocks (we all suck, except my dad who is an old master), then went inside and tasted samples and bought foodstuffs.

After the Mill we all drove off to Eureka Springs to eat lunch at Bubba’s, which is the absolute best barbecue place you will ever try. The best. Best, you hear. But they weren’t open, buggers, so we ended up at a catfish restaurant where John and I taught a couple of my cousins some dastardly devices (homemade blow guns and how to freeze stuff with cans of compressed air). Then everyone split up and it was just my parents and Elaine and I.

We drove around the town awhile, stopping by the Christ of the Ozarks statue and the Crescent Hotel. Neither of them really impressed Elaine. I had seen them both before as my parents rarely went anywhere other than Eureka Springs for vacation. Finally we ended up getting ice cream and then drove home. Elaine and I took my parents on a walk around the neighborhood here (right at 1.87 miles) and then everyone was tired and they went back to their hotel. They left early on Monday.

Monday saw us doing a whole lot of nothing. Mostly just getting stuff organized and taken care of around here. I fell asleep on the floor for a couple of hours. Those are some of the best naps to me. Anyway, eventually John met up with us for dinner and fireworks, which we watched on a friend’s lawn. They were really nice. We were close enough to feel the boom, but not so close as to have burning ash fall on us. Then it was home to bed.

I know a lot of you don’t like the “here’s what I did this week” posts, but that’s too bad. I don’t have anything else to write!