Strangely-Normal.com

My father’s day weekend started off quite sadly, with the loss of neighbour who was more than a neighbour. Marg and Claire Sutton have lived next door to our family for over fifty years. Marg and my grandmother were best friends, and Claire was the closest thing to a gandfather I’ve ever had, as both of mine were gone before I was born. My dad grew up with Marg and Claire’s kids, and my brother and I grew up with their grandkids. She was a strong and witty woman, who was always there for you, and at times knew more of what was going on at my high school than I did. I have very fond memories of sitting around the round kitchen table where Marg would hold courth.

She will be missed greatly by my family and remembered fondly forever. I always considered Marg my extra grandma, and every time I went home to see my family, I made sure to visit Marg as well.

But in happier news, my cousin Laurie had a baby boy yesterday, and Leanna is about to have a baby as well. I got to visit with my aunt Annetta, my uncle Dougald and my cousins Frankee and Leanna and her husband Everett yesterday at lunch. Since I left my car in Guelph on Friday and carpooled with Dennis, we also got to visit with my cousin Robin and her husband Paul, as well as my aunt Linda and uncle Gordon. It was a busy family weekend and I’m quite tired.

It’s hard to think of Marg not being next door, but I feel extremely blessed to have had her in my life for 28 years, and I’m excited to meet my cousin’s kids.

The Globe And Mail - Sick School Syndrome

My mom is one of the “friendly teachers who had a long history with the school”. This is a big problem considering how many schools were all built around the same time as hers, and how there is a chronic problem regarding underfunding our education facilities.

Since my mom is under a gag order, I’m thinking I should be, too, so that is all I will say on this subject.

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…

The Category screen. Rather than having a separate create/edit screen, I’ve added the form to the bottom of the category list page. Using the Ajax edit in place functionality that Scriptaculous provides, users are able to click on the category name if a spelling mistake is made. The checkmarks and Xs are links which toggle the activation and deactivation of that category.

The create a recipe screen. Gives instructions for the format of the recipe and then a textarea to paste that direction into.

I then go through the text provided and attempt to fill in the blanks in this form. Recipes will have a few different sections:

• Header: Provide the name of the recipe, cooking and prep times, number of servings as well as blurb about the recipe if so desired. Can also put the nutritional information on a single line (because one of the cookbooks I have does that)
• Nutritional Information: Optional. Format: {name}: {measure}{unit}
• Ingredients: A list of the ingredients as well as preparation instructions such as ‘thinly sliced’ or ‘diced’ or whatever. Format: {measurement}{unit} {item}, {preparation instruction}
• Directions: A list of directions, one per line. Splits on a newline character.

Anything the parser doesn’t know what to do with will be shown as an unprocessed line. Currently working on making the process a little more robust, but it’s a good first step.

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.