All Done Here

I am OFFICIALLY an Auburn University Alumnus — ain’t no way they’re ripping that diploma out of my hands now.

More importantly, big decision bout the future coming down by Tuesday. Watch this space, and try not to pee yourself with anticipation.

Posted on May 11th, 2008 at 10am under General | 1 Comment »

Horizontal Communication

I recently switched to auto-pay with my ISP, Charter. Beloved Charter Communications sends me a letter, notifying me of my balance, and that it will be automatically paid out on the 28th. Perfect.

Two days later, I get a letter in the mail alerting me that my account has a balance due, and that I should pay to avoid service interruption. No worries, I’m slated for auto-pay; the letter even says so. Perfect.

Two days later, I receive a phone call from Charter Communcations. “No worries!” I crow, “I’m slated for auto-pay!” The kind lady responds, “Oh, perfect! I’ll mark your account for auto-pay!” Perfect.

Two days later I get another letter making mention of interrupted service if this thing doesn’t get paid. No worries; auto-pay! “Total Due via Auto EFTS:” it even says. Perfect?

Two days later — twenty minutes ago — my internet service is cut.

It’s not a huge deal. I spoke with Jack at Charter and he got it all squared away quickly. But it’s things like this that make me want to go into consulting. “It’s all automated by computers,” Jack explains. And it’s true that computers never make mistakes, per sé. But if we could expend just a little more effort here and there in telling computers exactly what to do, computers could better communicate with those of us who do have souls, reasoning skills, et cetera. Charter could save lots of money in wasted phone calls, paper, postage, billing, customer service…

And I could be at work, saving the world from other such tragedies.

Posted on April 24th, 2008 at 12pm under General | No Comments »

‘Easy’ is a Loaded Term

I find it so difficult to do easy things. Never was particularly good at them. I always skipped the first chapter or two of my programming books. My mind’s hungry, folks. I’m not here for tapas, give me your 32oz sirloin.

Want to see me shine? Give me a challenge. Set Everest in front of me and ask me to move it six inches to the left. Better yet, tell me I can’t do it. I am ready to do incredible things — particularly if that first step involves learning how.

And logically of course, it can’t all be so glamorous. Heck, at least half of being a true web dude extraordinarie is quite the opposite. Mundane updates, maintenance on things you created months, if not years ago. Updating contact information of now former employees, catering to the design compulsions of nit picky clients, ‘fixing’ beautiful, clean code to work in broken browsers, or vice-versa.

But who wants to do that? There’s oceans, far away lands… worlds out there to explore. I can’t be bothered with this boring every day life you speak of. Momma said shoot for the stars, so I dreamed of being an astronaut. Now where’s my rocket ship?

I suppose the important lesson here is, keep dreaming. Goals are everything in life. Make absolutely sure that what you’re doing now is a) what you want to be doing, and b) going to get you where you want to be later on down the road.

Lately I’ve been refining those rough sketches of the future into something more detailed. And actionable. I had to say no to an incredible opportunity several months back, because it wasn’t aligned with what I want to do in life. My friends laugh, call me insane. My parents still joke about how sheepish I’ll be feeling if this or that doesn’t work out… I scratch my head now and again, but I have no regrets about it.

I’ll confess, this whole post came from me trying to justify studying for this silly little exam in the morning. Fighting those urges to focus on those big, shiny challenges in the sky. Sometimes the biggest battles are those small, painfully necessary bridges to cross, right in front of your face.

Posted on at 1am under General | No Comments »

Yeah JeffNat!

I worked at Jefferson National several winters and summers during school breaks in the past couple years. Recently, JeffNat launched their tax deferral comparison calculator — and just in time, too. A week ago, The Courier-Journal ran a great article on the company’s recent success.

I spent a lot of time on this project during my tenure at JeffNat. My efforts here were mostly in design and the business side of development. Originally, the calculator was presented to me as an elaborate Excel file, which needed to be translated into something more web- and user-friendly. Once these plans were laid, it was presentation time: Powerpoints and conference calls abound. Lucky me, the higher-ups would instantly recognize greatness when they see it.

From there, I crafted the inputs page to be intuitive and easy-to-use. I added a healthy dose of DOM-savvy JavaScript to validate the user’s data client-side. Try changing Portfolio Type to Custom, and enter some of your own numbers, you’ll see what I mean.

This is the second tier of Monument Advisor Xpress, the first being their annuity comparison tool. I contributed a good bit to this project as well, but also borrowed lots of elements of it for the tax deferral tool.

Admittedly, my work stands on the shoulders of giants: the Oracle & ColdFusion brilliance of Frank Wheatley and the gorgeous styles and copy by notorious ladies man Mark Forman. While it was me that coded other nice features, like the Print/Edit/Email buttons, it was entirely Mark’s genius thinking and Frank’s coding methodology that enabled such. Generous tip of the hat in their direction.

And uh.. I am no financial adviser, but from what I hear, Monument Advisor ain’t too shabby if you’re in the market for a nice annuity ;D

On the side, apologies to my visitors for the recent blankouts on here. Somewhere I’ve got a bug in my PHP that causes WordPress to run to the corner and cry. Perfect timing, too, after I’ve been showering it with praises for the past week. Talk about misbehaving in front of guests…

Posted on April 21st, 2008 at 1am under General | No Comments »

New Skin

It’s time. It’s long been time.

I installed MovableType long ago to try something different. WordPress was something I’d used several times in the past, and generally happy with, but eager to really be wowed by something else. Plenty of sites I read use MT. Perhaps the old, more established Perl engine knew a thing or two WordPress didn’t.

Reminds me of the age old argument of Linux over Windows — XP Professional still runs on my primary computer if that tells you anything.

And it was fairly powerful, but sometimes easy things seemed more difficult than they had to be. Adding elements to the sidebar. Disabling your stylesheet for a day. It felt like MT was capable of much more than I cared to learn how to do.

So I dumped it to try out the new WordPress. Man. Talk about having power at your fingertips. Most everything has a template tag making it easy-yet-customizable to do your every bidding. Simple, semantic tags like wp_get_posts() make templating a breeze. The recent facelift for the Administrative Panel smoothed a lot of the sometimes awkward edges in running your site.

I’m also glad to be coding Brilla in PHP again. I still consider this site something of a hobby rather than a professional portfolio (though that’s slated to change before too long). So being able to learn so much in a “fun” environment provokes challenge and curiosity, rather than stress in deadlines and just getting it done. I can then take this knowledge and apply it to my jobs and gigs. We’ve installed WP on a number of sites at work, and I’m never looking back.

The layout could use some work, but it will suffice for now. Other recent additions to this site include sIFR, Twitter integration, and some other knick-knacks on the way.

Two weeks til finals! Oh man.. I’ll be home this weekend, Louisville.

Posted on April 16th, 2008 at 1pm under General | 3 Comments »