Development Note

Posted on by Jordan

Putting the finishing touches on the front page overhaul, and felt like I needed to make this explicit:

When you are looking for javascript documentation, Google is often going to point you to w3Schools or any number of other almost useful sites. I think those sites must put more energy into being ranked in Google than having useful information.

The place you should go, and I mean the only place, is the Mozilla Developer Network. I wish I had figured that out months ago, but at least I finally have a good reference for the javascript api (and they call out things like best-practices too!).

Anyway, I think things will be ready to push live later today, so that’s pretty exciting! **crosses fingers**

-Jordan

Another Busy Weekend

Posted on by Jordan

Disclaimer, as always I am falling behind on posting, so this may not discuss last weekend, so much as a weekend I meant to post about. 🙂

 

Friday night, Heather and I had a quiet evening at home. The evening got a lot quieter when the power failed.

I quickly discovered that Heather’s love for scented candles makes us well prepared for this kind of event. I have been careful to keep a few flashlights handy, but we only used those to get some candles lit, and then we had plenty of light.

It was a great reminder that I need to get moving on that emergency preparedness kit I have been thinking about from the day I rejoined the scouts. If I let myself get a blog post or two out of it, I might actually get it together 🙂

About the last thing I remember before falling asleep was marveling at how quiet our building was without power, and then hearing fans and motors kick in as the power came back up.

The next morning, Heather’s parents came for a short visit. We took the opportunity to teach them how to play St Petersburg; in the hopes that it was something people who weren’t already inclined to enjoy board games would have fun with. I am pleased to report that, despite our less than ideal introduction, they enjoyed the game.

Later we took advantage of the fact that it was somehow over 50 degrees in February, and headed up to the “High Trestle Bridge” trail. The bike route we take is 11 miles, but there is a nice trail-head only a little more than mile from the bridge, giving us a nice walk out to a great view of the valley.

I encourage people to come visit us, but chances are your going to be playing a board game and then walking on one of the many trails around here. It isn’t glamorous I suppose, but everybody seems to enjoy it.

We finished up the day with dinner and a movie.While we were out, Heather and her mom both managed to independently pick the phrase “it looks like a hearse” to describe a vehicle we were interested in. I still can’t explain how they arrived at that.

Sunday was more food, and more boardgames. Don’t let the lack of a long description here lead you into thinking it wasn’t enjoyed, I just don’t think I can produce interesting reading by recapping.

-Jordan

Wild At Heart, A Sort Of Review

Posted on by Jordan

This is just going to be a micro-review, but I wanted to get a few thoughts down before too much slipped out of my mind.

I finished reading Wild At Heart, by John Eldredge

I really liked the book.

The first few chapters do an amazing job of putting into words things I have known to be true but couldn’t articulate.

I am trying really hard not to say too much here, because I will ether try to say what the book said and fail, or veer into impassioned rant territory and regret having published it on the internet.

Let me just say this, Eldredge does a great job of stating the problem faced by a lot of young men in the church. The first half of the book really resonated with me; leaving me wanting to run up mountains and tackle wildlife… that might be a slight overstatement, but I did come away from every chapter excited and feeling like I had really discovered something about myself and what God has for me.

The book could have been written to address conversations Heather and I had in the weeks prior to my reading the book where I was trying to express to Heather this almost despair I was feeling: That there were so few young men in the church because “the church” has nothing to offer young men.  To read that there might be a place for passion and even *gasp* aggression in a man’s pursuit of Christ was exhilarating.

And then we come to the back half of the book. I remember reading Wild At Heart when I was in college, and I know the second half of the book is why I had written it off as “not for me.”

I still come away feeling like the book cannot answer the question “Ok this is amazing, I am ready to do this! Now what?”

In my second read-through, almost ten years later I have to admit that whatever is there has to be better than not having talked about the issue at all.

I suppose the book can’t possibly say what to do next, because in talking about the wild nature of God (as often expressed in nature) formulas and step-by-step plans aren’t going to explain what is there.

And now, suddenly, I am back where I started when I picked up the book again. I cannot properly express the ideas I am trying to express, but I know there is a book that did a really good job of stating the case.

Anyway… Glad that is written down, even if it isn’t coherent to anyone else… We shall resume stories of day to day life of Heather and Jordan shortly 🙂

 

-Jordan

Valentine’s 2012

Posted on by Jordan

Heather and I might not be exciting people. I say this, because it is the only conclusion I can really draw when faced with the events of Valentine’s day this year. That being said, it was a good day… Just not terribly exciting.

The day started off with Heather giving me Saint Petersburg the board game. We discovered this game over the weekend, at the West Des Moines Board Game Club. It isn’t the sort of game that ether of us would initially be drawn too, but thanks to the people at the game night, once we learned it, it was really enjoyable.

Before we got a chance to actually play the game, I tried out a new recipe: Stuffed Panko Crusted Chicken. I think it went rather well, and Heather stated that I should take a picture of it, so I must not be the only one who thought it came out ok.

We then played a lovingly contested game of St Petersburg… Pretty good for a work night 😉

-Jordan

Weekend Thoughts

Posted on by Jordan

Not a whole lot to say this week.

It feels like winter is finally here. Heather has worked hard to fight off any sign of cabin fever by inviting people over at every opportunity.

She entertained a group of women from her office, and then the next night we had a group over from church.

I had hoped to be able to post the updated build of the heatherandjordan.com front page, but I discovered again that CSS hacking is not my calling. I say hacking because my attempts at starting from scratch quickly reminded me that I don’t really have an eye for that kind of design. After having drop[ed back through plan ‘B’ and on to ‘C’ I have managed to hack up a template into something I like. There are just a few more touches I would like to incorporate before it goes live.

In somewhat related news I have had the chance to be part of a team conducting technical interviews at work. I wouldn’t say I am great at it, but it’s nice to feel like I can provide some guidance as to who might be joining my team. At the very least this gets me thinking about my own skill-set. It would appear that I have a very solid technical understanding of my little corner of the IT world. On the other hand, I am painfully aware that I haven’t really done anything interesting for a while.

In theory I can and should be doing a little bit of hobby programming just to keep learning new things, but it takes time and energy that I don’t always want to devote to the task. I think I start to understand why people work on open-source projects though, it lets you poke at problems wildly different than the ones at work.

This kind of loops back around to the web site overhaul, as the hold up is trying to something interesting with an image loading script project, but I spent way too much time in the CSS weeds over the weekend. Hopefully with that done I can dive back into java script and PHP to pound out the rest of this arguably simple feature.

If you have any great ideas for a little programming project that wouldn’t require a thousand hours of developer I might be interested… most of my project ideas suffer death from scope-creep before I have the first line of code saved. 🙂

-Jordan

Dallas

Posted on by Jordan

In a trip in part to celebrate our third wedding anniversary and in part to visit Heather’s sister now that she has had a few months to settle into her new job, we went to Dallas.

Technically, we went to Fort Worth, but as we soon discovered there isn’t really a break between the two cities. We forgot to pack a camera, so this post will be light on pictures.

Our first day there we had a lazy morning and played Ticket to Ride while waiting for Kelsey’s boyfriend to arrive. Heather and I are getting rather proficient at teaching the game, or at least that is my opinion… maybe the new players don’t agree. After our little group went out to lunch and did a little driving around, we headed back to the apartment to play more Ticket to Ride.

That evening, we headed over to Fort Worth’s stock yard area. I don’t really know what I was expecting, but I found the endless line of gift shops packed with people dressed up as if they were cowboys a little jarring. I should point out that being able to walk around without a coat was novel in itself, so maybe my impression the afternoon was overly positive, but we had fun just wandering around.

At some point, we found this:

 

After a nice dinner and a movie, we called it a night.

The next morning, Kelsey had to work, so Heather drove her to the hospital leaving us with a car for the day. We headed into Dallas to meet up with Heather’s friend Taryn.

This is as good a time as any to throw in a sideline about the traffic in the Dallas area. GOOD GRIEF there are a lot of cars moving around down there. It didn’t seem to matter what time or where we were going, there was ample competition for the road. I really can’t imagine getting ourselves to the places we went without GPS. The abundance of options sometimes when trying to figure out where to go made every trip a little intense, but we never got irrecoverably lost 🙂

Taryn gave us a little tour of her end of town, complete with a long walk around the local lake (have I mentioned the weather being warmer yet?). Later that day we went through the Dallas Aquarium. It turns out to be almost as much a zoo as aquarium, containing monkeys, snakes, alligators, penguins, and then lots of fish.

That night we met up with Kelsey and her boyfriend, Taryn and her boyfriend and Heather and I at a place in downtown Fort Worth. My estimation biased on the people there and the music they were playing is that it was way cooler than anywhere Heather and I would normally go. We had great time getting to talk to everyone, and the food was amazing, so I guess there isn’t any reason to complain 🙂

The next morning we went out for breakfast with Taryn and then she dropped us off at the airport on her way to church. We got back into Kansas City with plenty of time to stop in and check on our nephew, and his parents. Holden is just starting to talk, and after an initial bout of shyness was more than happy to give aunt Heather a tour of his domain.

We got back to Des Moines to find that the weather was nearly as nice as what we had left in Texas. Everyone tried to take advantage of it while they could. I probably heard this sentiment every day it was nice “This weather is amazing! … but we are going to pay for it soon.”  Given that I was running in shorts on Tuesday, the fact that we only have four inches of snow on the ground today seems less dire than I was expecting. I suppose there is still time for the blizzard everyone seems to think we have earned to arrive.

-Jordan

Three Years

Posted on by Jordan

This post is a few days late… but that doesn’t change the fact that the date seems worth noting.

(Roughly) Three years ago:

 

We took a basic photography class on the actual day of our anniversary. Perhaps not the most romantic thing we could do, but we both learned a lot and enjoyed the class. I may expand on this later, but while I am thinking about it, it was somewhat embarrassing how little we knew about our camera. On the other hand, Heather is able to turn out amazing pictures just by letting the camera automatically configure it’s own settings, so maybe it wasn’t that much of a detriment.

Three years… A lot has changed in that time. I don’t think Heather and I could have ever guessed we would be where we are, doing what we are doing today three years ago. Makes thinking about the future seem both exciting, and futile as we aren’t going to see the interesting stuff coming anyway 🙂

To put it simply we have had a great three years, and can’t wait to find out what the next has in store 🙂

 

-Jordan

Winter Weekend Inside

Posted on by Jordan

We had the kind of grey, hard, cold, cloudy, weekends that makes you want to stay inside forever. Fortunately, Heather had invited a friend over for the weekend, so we still had something to brighten the day.

Given the options, Heather and Elise decided to work up some new head-shots that Elise would use to help promote her vocal music aspirations. After a fair amount of re-arranging furniture and trying different  approaches, they managed to pull together a studio of sorts.

We are really lacking when it comes to indoor lighting for photography, but even on a grey day, the south-facing windows pick up enough to let Heather get something done. While we don’t have lighting, we have sheets and a fan…apparently all vital equipment.

As funny as the makeshift studio looked, it’s hard to argue with the results:

And what was I doing throughout all this you ask?

Well, a week or so back I broke down and ordered a desktop computer from the Dell factory outlet. It was really rough on my pride to buy a pre-built machine, but I just couldn’t match the price they were offering. So, I spent most of the day setting up the new machine and fussing with it.

I think everyone had a good day 🙂

 

-Jordan

Family And A Warning

Posted on by Jordan

We had a busy weekend (like most it would seem)

A bunch of my family was in town to attend a gymnastics event that three of my cousins were competing in.

I am continually impressed by the feats they are able to perform, and by the extent to which they more or less shrug off the ability to do said feats.

We didn’t take any pictures. Primarily because we just looked like we had been siting in bleachers for eight hours, and the events were too far away and moving too fast for our gear to capture. Also, I don’t think I would want to be holding a camera with that many pre-teen girls in leotards running around… It just seems like asking for misunderstandings that involve addressing someone as officer.

Speaking rule enforcement, I now think of our new building as the “see no evil” condos. Exhibit one:

Perhaps the building manager intended a different meaning than the one I read. Just to be safe I don’t look at the neighbors dogs. Probably shouldn’t have a camera in hand ether, who knows what kind of penalties that might entail. 🙂

 

-Jordan

Feeling Patriotic

Posted on by Jordan

Like I mentioned before, Heather and I had planned to attend the Iowa caucus.
It ended up being a little difficult to find where we were suppose to be, thanks to the last census having provoked redistricting of our area. I don’t really know the details except to say all the automatic tools that used to exist to tell you where your location is have been turned off on the state website until they get the new districts figured out. I am sure I wasn’t the only person to send an e-mail to the county clerk’s office last week, but they were quick to respond and we finally knew where to go.

Jump ahead to Tuesday night, and it turns out we weren’t the only people who wanted to participate. We got there 30 minutes early, and still had to walk in from a neighboring parking lot. After having our IDs checked against the voter registration logs we managed to find a seat in the arena type place hosting our caucus. By the time they have everyone checked in, we were 20 minutes late starting the caucus.

The time between our arrival and the actual start was spent setting quietly, trying not to gawk at the rapidly filling room. By the time everybody got inside I am told there were 3,000 voters attending. Typically I am not too shy about gawking at a big crowd, but in addition to the voters there were a good one hundred press type people with cameras roaming around looking to interview the unwary. Well, I don’t know if that’s how it worked, but I had no intention of being caught 🙂

After they got everyone inside we kicked off the proceedings. My impression is that the caucusing idea does not scale well… In a room of 25-30 people (a size I am told is more typical) having any old member of the community stand up and say a few words in support of his or her candidate wouldn’t seem out of place. When it’s a packed house like we had, it was clearly intimating for the speakers. Most of the speakers anyway, our last “speaker on behalf of the candidate” turned out to be the candidate.

Rick Perry got the same five minute window everyone else got, and managed to look a lot more comfortable doing it. Heather maintains he looked a little silly, and I don’t think there is any question he was more excited than anyone else in the room was in that moment.

After we heard a short pitch for all the candidates we were instructed to use the paper ballot we had been given to, well, vote. It’s at this point that we discovered we had been somewhat misinformed. Heather and I both thought we were going to have to re-vote and then re-vote again until our district managed a consensus for one candidate. Instead we just dropped our ballot in the box and went home. We later found out the “stay until there is a consensus” thing only applies to the Democrat party caucus.

When we woke up Wednesday morning to find that in the final count, only eight votes separated the winner from the second place candidate it really made the whole thing feel significant. To quote Heather “it makes me feel really patriotic, like we really had a say in something”

Speaking of having a say in things… and I hope this post is the one and only political post I have this year (there are plenty of places for that if you want to read it) I have added a badge off to the right side of the blog for the EFF. I just renewed my membership today, and think what they are doing is important.

Tune in next time where we will be back to cooking and adventures with Heather and Jordan 🙂

-Jordan