Guess how many quilt blocks I finished this week?
none! How awesome is that? Not very? Yeah! I know!
But I have a wedding coming up and apparently that means I use by time to worry about stuff related to it instead of making pretty things.
It’s a really good thing Isaac isn’t relying on me to keep him warm.
First off, did you realize that it’s 62 days until march 13th? That’s really soon.
So I thought I should let you all know how wedding plans are going. Mostly cause I want to know if I’m forgetting about something.
This weekend we got a lot accomplished. We printed out the address labels and put together and sent out most of the addresses, I got my shoes, and we also picked out our rings. We also managed to get most of the missing pieces in addresses filled in by calling the relatives who are good at organizing and have things like address books. This week I need to confirm that the person who was going to do makeup is on board and talk to our photographer. On Saturday I’m going for another dress fitting.
What do you think? Am I forgetting about something?
Yesterday, I went shoe shopping with Kat and Courtney. I don’t like shoe shopping, or most other types of shopping in any way. However, I do like Kay and Courtney, so I had my hopes up that shoe shopping with Kat and Courtney would be at least tolerable, and hopefully even fun.
It started off promising. We met at Chapters, where I looked for the Javascript book and everyone else generally browsed. The book I was looking for wasn’t in stock, but that’s okay, because I probably won’t have time to read it for a while and I there’s a store in Hamilton that has it in stock.
So then we went to the Shoe store, which has a name but I forget what it is. I don’t care at all about fashion, so it’s always a good idea to have these two on hand when it comes to any types of purchases. Kat declared that if I were to wear black shoes, she would not come to my wedding, which I thought was really really funny. Courtney went into former shoe store employee mode and directed us and made me try on shoes, and they picked out a pair of 1-inch sandal shoes with sparkly things on them, and also a pair of satiny slippers. It took a total of half an hour and was relatively painless.
Afterwards, we were all like ‘What should we do now?” and somebody[1] suggested that we go get manicures, and that sounded like more fun than going shopping or simply going to Kat’s apartment, and it was too early for dinner, so off we went to get manicures. There we discussed completely inappropriate things in not very well veiled terms quite loudly, and laughed a lot. It was fun.
These were our colour chocies. I was hooker red, Kat was subtle pink, and Courtney was the maroonish colour
Then somebody was all like, “Let’s go get some cheesecake”[2] and we were off to the cheesecake factory. Kat wanted to show us a girl she’s into in a way that wasn’t all “hey, look at that hot girl over there”, so she told us that she would tell us about the lovely piece of cheesecake when she walked by. This devolved into hilariousness and innuendo and now I can never think of cheesecake without thinking of Kat saying “maybe its the kind of cheesecake that will allow me to eat it”
Then we went to a Thai place for dinner.
Then we forced some person who just had eye surgury and couldn't really see to take our picture
And then we went back to Kat’s place and did the elevator dance, and then Courtney and I forced Kat to sign up for Twitter, and then we talked some more about cheesecake and other randomness.
And then this morning, I got this comment from the lem and then about half an hour ago I got this picture from the lem, who loves ‘shopping things into other things.
the file name originally was 'poke me and die android.jpg'
And that’s it.
1: Some will suggest that “somebody” was me. I will deny this forever, regardless of the facts.
2: This was not me. Honestly.
January 3-9, 2010
This picture has nothing to do with the post. I just liked it.
Work
Work is going okay. Right now they have me working on modifications to an existing system. It is written in what I consider to be a very old style of PHP, and to me it feels very spaghetti-like. I’m used to using frameworks now, and having scripts included and required all over the place seems really… amateurish to me. It probably executes a little faster than if it were built with a framework, but you know what else would make the scripts run faster? Database indexes. There were a grand total of three indexes on the database tables when I arrived.
One of the first things I worked on when I arrived last month was making a particular report faster. What I found was that to draw a table with about six columns and about 300 rows, the script was hitting the database over 1000 times. When I was done, I’d added a number of database indexes and decreased the number of hits on the database to less than 15 queries. Sure, those queries took longer than the original ones, but the overall effect was a serious speedup in the script.
Developing in Windows for IE8 makes my soul die a little bit more each day.
Fitness
I didn’t make it to the gym at all this week. This is bad. I wanted to go Monday, Tuesday and Thursday nights after work for group ex classes. Because of the persistent headaches, every night I opted out of going. I did stay on track with eating, though. I went to Wal-Mart and purchased the cutest little food scale, and I’m already finding it helps me really understand how much of something I am eating. I am down about five pounds from my baseline weight (measured on Dec. 28), so that’s great. I’m attributing most of that to holiday overeating than to anything I’ve done this week, though. Hopefully I can lose one or two pounds a week. From everything I’ve read and everyone I’ve talked to, that is a reasonable expectation for healthy weight loss.
Stay on the Weight Watchers plan so far hasn’t been that bad. Some of it doesn’t make sense. For instance, a can of Coke is 3 points, and a Nature Valley granola bar is 4 points. That doesn’t make sense. Coke is definitely worse for me than a granola bar. Regardless of the occasional instance of points weirdness, I think the act of keeping track of what I’m eating is actually what’s making the difference, not what system I’m participating in. I’m using the Weight Watchers online tool, and it’s quite well built. From a UI perspective, there are a few things I would like to change. I wonder if there’s a way to contribute suggestions to their IT department. Going to look into that.
Adventures
I haven’t really gone on any real adventures yet this week. Today I am going to hang out with Kat and Courtney. We’re going shoe shopping. I’m not seriously excited about the shoe shopping, but the hanging out I am excited about. We always have a good time when we hang out, and that is great.
Overall, it was a good week. I’m looking forward to the rest of the weekend, hanging with my friends today and Alan tomorrow. Will be good.
First off, I must say I’m truly touched by the feedback I got on my last post, I must say that my friends seriously kick ass. I always knew that, but it’s nice to get reminder every now and then.
Now on to the pretties. These are the blocks I have finished since New Year’s Eve, as well as all of the blocks laid out on the floor.
I have a total of 20 quilt blocks done. This includes two that aren’t actually square or eight inches in any direction and will probably need to be redone. Overall the blocks look totally cool. I’m sort of envious of young Isaac, who gets such a kick-ass blanket just for existing and being associated with my Lemmers.
In the comments from my last post, Lemmers said I didn’t have to have the blanket done before the wedding, but I still think that’s a fair goal. I usually get two or three blocks done per week, and that means I should be done the blocks by the first week of February. Also, I sort of find working on the blanket relaxing. I put on some TV show and for about an hour, I cut up fabric, sew it all together, and when I’m done, I have something pretty. It’s nice. Most of my other projects don’t have something you can hold in your hands after such a short time.
Alan and I have talked about wanting a similar quilt, so I may start work on another similar quilt for us when I finish up this one. This always happens. The first blanket I made was a rag quilt we made for a friend’s wedding, and by the time we finished it, I didn’t want to give it away. That’s what actually made me work on the quilt that was finished last year. That one took me almost two years, because I sometimes didn’t touch it for months at a time. Maybe that will be a pattern: one to give away, then one to keep. I’d be okay with that.
Over Christmas, Alan bought himself a pair of old servers so that he can do some playing with clusters, database servers and the like. I’m going to put a Windows Server up there with IIS so that I can do some playing. I want to see if I can get the symfony framework working in IIS. The development procedures at work could use some help, and I think using a framework to assist with development and testing would be a wonderful place to start. As such, I need to prove that I can make symfony work in IIS. The Internets says it’s possible, but I need to verify. Maybe next week, I can get the Windows Server VM up and running.
Also, Lemmers wants to know how hard it is to set up a blog. I’m assuming she wants something free and hosted by someone else. I am going to suggest WordPress or Blogger, but I’d be interested to see if anyone else has any suggestions. Livejournal? Comment below! I’m mostly interested in the experience of novices who have only a little HTML and design experience.
I'm reading books this year based off your suggestions. I'll pick five or six books from my To Read list and you vote in the comments section.
