ace’s blog

I just registered a new domain, LansaDocs.com. I registered it because the current Lansa documentation is somewhat lacking and needs some tender loving care that only the users (developers) of Lansa can provide. I have installed a Wiki (MediaWiki to be exact) so that the users can modify or add notes as they see fit.

It is my hope that the Lansa developers will begin to use and help maintain the site so that the Lansa documentation can be a bit more user-friendly and contain some very useful information. My target audience can currently be found at the Lansa Yahoo Group, which is currently the most useful Lansa help facility available.

I have been contacted by David Chartier of the blog DownloadSquad.com and was inquiring about writing a post there about the WordPress plugin I created to crosspost WordPress posts to Vox (I dubbed it the Vox Crossposter, pretty ingenious huh??)! That’s pretty damned exciting I think.

He also inquired about whether or not I would accept donations in order to help encourage me to further the development of my plugin. It was a difficult decision but I told him that I could indeed accept donations to continue doing what I really like to do: web development.

It is nice to get some recognition about the plugin. When I first started developing the plugin and posted it to the WordPress plugins page, I helped a few people install it and get it running. Occasionally, I will hear from a user of the plugin about a feature request. It’s nice to hear about people using the plugin, makes me feel like I can actually create usable things.

If there is a write-up regarding my plugin, I will post a link to it here.

If you are a user of the plugin, send me an email and tell me what you think, even if you hate it!

Yay, someone sent us a contract on our house! They are offering $235k, which is only $4,900 less than we are asking. Ok, enough good news, now for the bad.

They have a house to sell…a house that was just put on the market yesterday (1/5/07). This is the third time this couple has looked at our house so I’m confident so say that they are interested. Ready for another kick in the balls? They asked for us to pay ALL closing costs, up to 6% of the selling (which, if we paid all of that, would amount to $14,100). In the contract, it says that we can still market the house like there was not a contract on it and if we did get another offer, they would have 48 hours to give us a firm closing date or get financing or whatever. Interesting huh? We have to counter sometime soon; we’re going to have to figure out how we are going to counter this offer.

In other news, we bought Aaron a 12′ trampoline, with an enclosure off of Craigslist.com for $70! Amazing deal I think! We bought it last night and we’ve been putting it together all morning. We had to got to Home Depot to get some new u-bolts to replace the original ones since they were rusty. Everytime Aaron sees it, he says “JUMP!” in a very excited voice. He is going to love that thing!
My sister-in-law is in town for the next week. She is going to watch Aaron tonight so that Meri and I can go see a movie. I think we’re going to see Eragon.

In work news, we blew through our 12/23 deadline, then through our 1/2 deadline and now we are working getting 90% done by 1/9 and then 99% done by the 1/31. It is a major system re-write and update. We are incorporating all kinds of AJAXy wonderfulness, throwing in a lot of JSON for communication of data, and of course, the base programming language is Lansa for the web. I’m gaining all kinds of great experience and knowledge and I will make a great web consultant someday (soon).

Meri, Aaron and I celebrated New Years day by taking Aaron to see the new Charlotte’s Web movie at the Pleasure Island AMC. He lasted about an hour into the movie and then he and I walked around for a bit. We went back into the theatre and watched about 15 more minutes of the movie and then told us that he wanted to leave. We walked around Downtown Disney for about 30 minutes, saw some awesome Lego sculptures. Aaron was being very good until we walked out of the Disney store and then he lost it. He was very overtired from a long night of firework induced awakenings; they seemed to be in our backyard and right under our windows! It was a good day. We went home and Aaron and I played for a while. He was standing on my stomach and chest, would say “here’s a big one!” and jump up, spread his legs and land on me! It was fun. He got very tired and sweaty after that.

Having my family here has been awesome! Every time I come home, Aaron screams “daddy! daddy!” and runs up to me as fast as he can and hugs me. When he wakes up in the mornings and I’m not there, he says to Meri “where’s daddy?” very nervous-like. Meri tells him that I’m at work but I’ll be home “later today”. Saying that I’m at work a bad thing to tell Aaron since our 3 month separation. He gets very worried that I’m going to be gone for a long time.

Well anyway, I’ve got a system to get off the ground so I should probably get my happy ass back to work. Happy New Year’s everybody.