ace’s blog

Have a few tree limbs!

My reaction to my first Memphis in May: eh.

That’s the best, and nicest, way I can put it. I’m not sure what else goes on besides the two events that Meri, Aaron and I participated in went to. We went downtown to see the BBQ festival and two weeks later we went to the Sunset Symphony.

We were pretty excited to go to all of the offerings of the “international” even. When we got to the there, we wondered what all the excitement was about. The BBQ fest was especially crappy, from our perspective anyway. We found a babysitter ($25), bought our tickets online ($6 each), drove downtown ($gas), found someplace to park ($10), walked the entire BBQ area ($sweat) for 40 minutes, got a fresh sqeezed lemonade ($6) then looked at each other and said “um, now what?!”. So then we left and went to Bealle street to get Meri’s dad another t-shirt ($20) from the BB King store and then ate at Ponchos ($25). All in all, the best part of that was going to Ponchos and sitting in the air conditioning. I’ve been told that the only good reason to go is if you know someone down there and can get into one of the booths. Well that sucks a big one!

The Sunset Symphony was actually kind of cool, with one exception: the music. We got there at 2pm, expecting to spend an hour or so there since it was so hot. We packed a big cooler with drinks and food and stuff for Aaron. We went out there and found a place to sit and sat and played. Aaron was the life of the area, literally running circles around us; pushing his umbrella stroller around; walking away from us, turning around and telling us “bye bye” while waving his hand; playing with some other kids and attempting to hijack their hula hoop. Some people actually came up to us and told us that we have the cutest little boy. I tend to agree, Aaron’s the bestest kid ever! But anyway, back to the music. One thing that I did not realize was that the Memphis Symphony didn’t actually start playing till 6 or 7pm (I forget exactly). But up until they started playing, the event had a different name: Praise in the Park. That’s right, it was a whole lot of praise and worship music for a very long time. Now don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with praise music, but the groups they had up there weren’t exactly “singing” as much as they were screaming! It was pretty fun though. Aaron got to get out and romp around and we all had a little picnic. I would do that again except next year, we’ll go later so that we can actually hear the Memphis Symphony.

So this Memorial Day weekend will be remembered by me not for the awesomely cooked food that Meri or I made (cuz we didn’t make any); not for all of the family and friends we got to see (cuz we didn’t do any of that crap either); it will be remembered as the weekend that I was told NOT to build a roof over our patio, which is 12′ x 22′ in case you were wondering. I was told not to build a roof because it was going to be too expensive! BAH…money, there will be plenty of that in the future…right? Ahem. Anyway (this is my paragraph transition)

I have all these wonderful tools that were just begging to be used so I wanted to build something! I wanted to build a damn roof for my patio area, which Meri turned into a full-fledged structure with walls and a door and some screen too! I was just thinking a couple of 4×4 posts, some 8′ 2x4s, a handful of plywood, some nails, some beer, power tools and a much happier and prouder Pete. No. Not this year. *sigh* Did that make a sad face where you are?

Anyway, I still had the “I wanna build something awesome” bug (and those begging-to-be-used power tools, don’t forget about those!). So I settled on this and this. You can see that Carly (forcibly) loves it!

So how long do you think it took to build this doghouse! Wow, you’re good! 4 hours is the correct answer in case you got it wrong. The doghouse cost about $60 after the paint and wood and nails. It will be painted and will also have shingles on the roof when it is ready for the yard.

I made a DVD case that we are going to screw onto the wall to help keep Aaron’s grubby paws off of every single DVD we own (which is becoming an everyday event…he likes to open up ALL of them).

Maybe someday, someday soon(er than next year), I’ll get to build my patio. But for now, I’ve got a doghouse and a DVD wall case. Yay me and my power tools!

My two big projects are going to make me gray. The Damage Claims (DC) stuff is easy enough but the problem with it are that there are a bunch of little gotchas all over it. DC is a relatively new process so there is zero chance that I’m going to break anything that is currently working in production.

My biggest issue is the replacement of the revenue file. DC is my stuff and I’m sure I’ll be branded as the “DC guy” since I wrote it from the beginning. I’ve been so busy trying to fix the “small” DC issues that I’ve been doing shitty analysis for the replacement of the revenue file. Last night I worked on stuff for about 3 hours after Aaron went to bed and got here at 6:20 this morning so that I could focus on the revenue file thing and hopefully put that to bed. It actually isn’t a tough change, it’s just sitting down and identifying everywhere that needs to be changed.

Couple those two projects with my new guarantee letter/renewal billing responsibilities, month end reporting, (poorly performed) basketball, a new workout regime (low weight, much higher reps) PLUS a website idea that I just can’t seem to stop thinking about (peoplearray.com) and you’ve got one insomniatic, stressed out kid (well, kid in as much as a 26 year old can be considered a kid).

Ugh, I can’t wait until the first week in September when Meri and I get on a big ass ship and float around some islands (Aaron-less) for a week. I’m not sure if being without Aaron for a week is a good or a bad thing. Probably better for Meri and more difficult for me since she is around him about 24 hours a day.

In a previous post, I was getting a couple of odd errors in FF 1.5.0.3 but not from IE7 beta2 whenever I would click on a contact and then try to delete another contact. I solved the errors by added a separate request object for deleting a contact. So now my little contact list uses multiple request objects. I figured that out by surfing the web (read: googling) and also by reading a book called Head Rush Ajax by Brett McLaughlin. It’s a pretty good beginner AJAX book that explains a lot of the basics, including a rough overview of DOM (which I needed).

Sunday afternoon, Meri, Aaron and I went to a Memphis Redbirds game at Autozone Park. We got some free tickets from Servicemaster. We got there about an hour into the game because the whole family was snoozin for a bit. The seats we had were nice. We were in the upper deck over-looking the firstbase line. We had the entire section to ourselves. There were a bunch of foul fly balls in neighboring sections. Well one of the fly balls actually came into our section and being the only occupants of the section, I went down and got the ball. Well Aaron was just walking around the section and happened to be on the bottom row when I picked up the ball. I knelt down and showed him the ball and he came running up to me, excitedly screaming the entire way. Since he was so very excited to see the baseball, I handed it to him and then it happened: he threw the ball over the edge! I didn’t make any move simply because I was so stunned. When I got the ball and temporarily handed it to Aaron, the people in the club house above us applauded. When Aaron threw the ball over the edge, all of 20 or 30 people in the club house went “awwwww”. I just sat there. I think I laughed. I think I shed a tear inside. One thing that I do remember doing is teaching Aaron how to throw that fateful day at the duck pond. I remember him mockingly saying “good throw” everytime he would throw a piece of bread for the ducks. I remember Meri saying “Do we really want to teach him how to throw?” and I replied “Of course! He’s a little boy and boys have to learn how to throw!”. Well there we were, sitting at the baseball game, foul ball-less with a whole lot of people saying “awwwww” as my son tossed the ball over the edge. All that was missing from that moment was him saying “good throw!” in his high-pitched very excited voice.
I know he wanted that ball as much as I did. After being back at our seat for about 10 or 15 minutes, he physically moved Meri and I and said “ball back”. We just told him that the ball was gone and he seemed content with that fact. Oh well. It would have been an awesome souvenir. We had a lot of fun. Aaron was great at the game. He got to eat a snowcone and had one hell of a sugar high! It was pretty funny.

The memory of losing that ball will probably stand out more than actually having been able to keep the ball. I’ll just keep telling myself that at night before bed .

Aaron no longer drinks out of a bottle! Not because he doesn’t want to, he just doesn’t require it like he used to. We cut out his bottle feeding about 90% but were having issues with his bottle before bed. We used to give him 4 ounces, then we cut it to 3 ounces and then finally 2. We were stuck there for about 3 months and finally we tried something very, very strange: Meri suggested me not giving him the bottle on some random night and instead read with him.  So now our nightly routine is bath, change for bed, sit in the rocking chair and read 14 books!  They are tiny books but Aaron loves them.  He loves his “Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?” book.  There is a sequel to that called “Polar Bear, Polar Bear, What Do You Hear?“.  Both of those books are by Bill Martin Jr. and (illustrated by) Eric Carle Another one of his favorite night-time books is a Dr. Seuss book called “Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?“.  At the end of each of those books is a recap of all of the sights and sounds.  I really feel like Aaron has started to speak more clearly since I have been reading these books to him at night.  Meri reads the same books to him during the day whenever he wants (and he wants that a lot!).

Oh yeah baby, I got my trial index page utilizing the XML being created on-the-fly from a server-side PHP script. The XML is generated whenever a user clicks on a contact in their list. In getting the XML stuff working, I somehow broke the deletion of a contact. I have been getting these errors:

Error: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0x80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.status]” nsresult: “0×80040111 (NS_ERROR_NOT_AVAILABLE)” location: “JS frame :: http://www.peoplearray.com/index2.php :: parseXML :: line 87″ data: no]
Source File: http://www.peoplearray.com/index2.php
Line: 87

and

Error: uncaught exception: [Exception... "Component returned failure code: 0xc1f30001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED) [nsIXMLHttpRequest.send]” nsresult: “0xc1f30001 (NS_ERROR_NOT_INITIALIZED)” location: “JS frame :: http://www.peoplearray.com/index2.php :: deleteContact :: line 36″ data: no]

After a little searching, I found a website that goes into what this error means and a way to fix it. I haven’t implemented any fix for this yet so there is no way to delete a contact (from the trial index page anyway) once it has been added. If you want to delete a contact, go here.

In a previous post, I was having issues reading the XML file produced. I fixed that by added the following js code:

<br /> for(var i=0; i<br /> var element = x[i].nodeName;<br /> if(element != undefined && element != ‘#text’ && xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName(element)[0].firstChild.nodeValue != undefined) {<br /> switch(element) {<br /> case ‘firstname’:<br /> firstName = xmlDoc.getElementsByTagName(element)[0].firstChild.nodeValue;<br /> break;<br /> .<br /> .<br /> .<br /> } //switch<br /> }//if<br /> }//for Update: The trial index page has become the contactList.php page. I added an explanation as to what the hell peoplearray.com is all about as the index page.

Update (7.10.06): This was resolved by added another request object for the second request.� See my post here.

I got my dual screens up.  I’m a power user baby!  Yay me and my never settle attitude!