May 26, 2008
This weekend, I once again trekked to the annual meeting of London Conference. This year, the event was in Aylmer, and I was attending as a YATS participant, but also had been asked to be part of the tech team, comprised of myself, Chris and Gord.
I’m simply going to make my comments as bullets, I don’t have a lot of insight into the theme and such.
- Presentation software: One person did all the worship slides in Corel Presentations, an uncompatible piece of software. It was a pain, because her computer didn’t take to projectors as well as the other laptops we had on hand, and we didn’t have time to re-do all those slides.
- Presentations in general: People need to stop using ridiculous text and transition effects in PowerPoint, or anything else. They detract from your message. Also, they often don’t port well to OpenOffice
- Our unwillingness to use Office: Bad idea. Sometimes you can’t fight the system. Open source rocks, but most people have yet to join the revolution.
- The theme: Enh. Good in theory, didn’t really translate into awesomeness unfortunately
- The facility: Really nice but didn’t work. The lighting was too dark and put us to sleep, the arena was too large for the plenary. Food was awesome.
- The music: I didn’t feel it. The songs were fine but weren’t delivered with enthusiasm. Music breaks were used by the delegates as coffee breaks and everyone just walked out in the middle of them
- The overall mood: People are scared of the future. Churches closing and numbers shrinking. It’s sad.
- YATS: We had new people this year which was cool. I’m not sure if we were welcoming or not, and I’m not sure if we’ve gotten too serious over the years.
- YATS II: I’m not feeling the leadership the last couple of years. They’re sweet people but don’t really know what to do with the group. I’m not sure if WE know, either.
- The Kairos Video: I’m so sick of seeing it that I walked out while it was playing. Was apparently well-received. I’m not sure we did a good enough job being enthusiastic about the event.
More to come possibly…
Shannon Patterson, filed under Life |
May 17, 2008
Yesterday I wrote the database schema for the recipe app I’m working on. The files only come inserting recipes; I will add more files as I progress into other parts of the project.
Tables:
- Recipe
- Category
- Nutritional_Info
- Ingredient
- Directions
- Comments
Read more of this article »
Shannon Patterson, filed under Projects |
May 14, 2008
Since moving in October for my job, I have found myself driving a significant distance daily. My commute often involves stops at whatever fast food joint is on my way, as the evening drive starts at 5:30, just when I’m really hungry. I rarely feel like waiting until a quarter to seven when I get home to even start making dinner. As such, and more importantly due to my sedentary lifestyle, I have found that I’ve packed on a significant number of pounds onto my already too-large frame.
Which brings me to my newest project. I have found a number of great recipe sharing sites, and a number of terrible diet-tracking sites, but nothing that mixes the two ideas together into one package. The ultimate goal is for me to have the ultimate dietary database.
The features I would like to ultimately include are:
- Recipes, with nutritional information, scalability with regards to serving sizes and a rating system
- Food Journal, to keep track of previous day’s eating
- Menu Planning, with requirements for a week or what have you
- Shopping Lists, from the pre-planned menus
I’m starting with one of the smaller and simpler modules, recipes. I will be using symfony as a development framework. We use symfony at work and I have been quite impressed by its versatility and want to do something that is all my own with it.
Today I spent a couple of hours setting up a development environment on my home server. Downloaded and installed postgres 8.3, php5, symfony, and some development applications. I have a database model in my head and want to get it down on paper shortly. Will post the table definitions when I blog next.
Comments and suggestions are always appreciated.
Shannon Patterson, filed under Projects |