Things I Loved Last Week: Week #3

January 11, 2009 – January 17, 2009

Dinner With The Parentses
On Sunday, Alan and I went to London and had dinner with my parents and Alan’s mom. My mom really wanted to meet Alan’s parents. Alan’s dad was unable to come, but half is better than nobody. We went to a place called Bernie’s Bar & Grill, and the food was excellent. It was a good day for driving, and everyone got there and back safely. I had been a little apprehensive about the meal but it turns out my concerns were unfounded.

Showing JavaScript who’s boss.
On Tuesday at work, I kicked JavaScript ass. Spending all day on JavaScript code often makes me want to throw our test laptop across the room, but on Tuesday, I made JavaScript my bitch. In general, I’m finding JavaScript easier to write, with the exception of browser irregularities, which are the bane of all of us who make our money in web design. Not that I consider myself a web designer, I am totally a PHP programmer. There’s a huge difference. Sometimes I wish I was more graphically capable, but you can’t be everything to everyone. Charming, beautiful and awesome at PHP is enough for me…

Making it to the gym every day.
Most work days, I wake up at 5 am with the intent of leaving around 5:30 so I can be in Guelph in time to do an early morning workout. That rarely happens. This week, however, I made it to the gym before work every day. In addition to that, I also went after work on Monday and Wednesday. Right now, I’m only doing 45 minutes of cardio on an elliptical machine, but it’s a good start.

Finishing the first chapter of the Zend book
I have been inching my way through the Zend PHP 5 Certification Study Guide, and it is very dull. I didn’t really learn much in the first chapter, but I know I need to go back later and look at error reporting and handling in PHP 4. It’s something I’ve never really used, and because I develop in PHP 5 now, I use Java-style exceptions and use try/catch blocks instead. The next chapter is on arrays, which are both awesome and terrible in PHP. Awesome, because you can use any random string as a key, and terrible for the same reason.

The Emm Gryner concert
I already blogged about it, but I just wanted to reiterate that it was indeed awesome. Also awesome was hanging out with Courtney. We talked for like 30 minutes about the badness that is IE 6, and about how engineers shouldn’t design websites, and just in general talked shop. It’s nice to have someone around who feels your pain every once in a while.

This has been a pretty good week. It feels like I was really busy, but I managed to get everything done that I wanted to. In addition, I had a lot of fun and feel like I had a lot of energy, especially after the previous week’s head cold badness. And I got to go to a fun concert, and hang out with good friends.