Halloween is an interesting day isn't it? Can you guess who I am...

Today at OSAF there are some people dressed up.. I am one of them and apparently they are having some sort of competition at lunch, which should be interesting.

I think I'm going to commute up to Chico tonight to see Miss Megan and work from there tomorrow. It looks like the latest release of Cosmo 0.5 will be available starting tomorrow which will be cool. Grampa George just came by the office to hangout and check his email. Tonight he needs a ride up to Chico so he's going to come along, always much more fun to have some company.

By the end of the week I plan to have a write up done for Ruby on Rails Deployment and Testing strategies, and the AJAX implementation to talk to a mySQL server for the small js calendar app. This I think should be the most interesting part as I will be doing the AJAX calls with XHR and the db queries with PHP scripts that return XML representations of my data im using to store the events and what not.

This weekend holds a lot of code writing, some business stuff I'm working on and a trip to Mavericks on the coast to see where all the serious big wave surfing happened through out the last 20 years, anyone wanting to join me is welcome!

I will start off with a cool little JS application that I have been working on.. well today and some last night. It is pretty amazing what you can do with JavaScript now-a-days and I decided to see how far I could get on a functional calendar.. and partially to give myself some scope as to what Matt Eernisse (our UI web developer at OSAF) has to deal with on a daily basis. Since this is the kind of work I would like to get into I gave it a stab. Be nice as this is about 2 hours of toying around: On The Grid JS Calendar App .

Anywhoo, there was another bit of interestingness in my apartment over the last couple weeks. Last weekend I skinned a few potatoes that were on their way to being mashed, and decided that it made sense to put the skins down the drain and grind them up using the garbage disposal. I was later informed that this was a bad idea, as I left the disposal grinding them for about 20 minutes before the fuse blew and killed the thing. Ever since water has been taking an exceedingly long time to go down the drain. Yesterday I was doing some dishes and after I had finished it all I opened the drain, and a few seconds later I heard rushing water in the bathroom... actually my cousin Jillian was there to witness this. I ran into the bathroom to see the sink flowing water onto the floor and out into the hallway. The best solution I could think of was to grab a giant bowl and start to take the water from the sink and put it in the toilate.. which eventually became a viable solution. Unfortunately after I got the horrible mess cleaned up etc, I still have to wait 5 minutes for a sink full of water to drain enough to keep washing my hands. I put down two bottles of draino and the potatoe skins are still coming up to remind of my that bad decision. Anyone out there a plumber?

This week I discovered "The Patio", a cool little resteraunt in Berkeley. Apparently they have been struggling to stay afloat so I suggest everyone go have one of their delicious burgers. When I first wondered in there it was too late to get any food but I was starving and the cool gray bearded hippie that owns the place gave me a burrito on the house. I had to return to see what all the fuss was about their 6 dollar giant burger and a beer deal. This is probably not something you would want to eat on a regular basis for the old physique, but once in a while it can really hit the spot. I am giving the place two thumbs up for atmosphere, food, character and friendlyness.

On to web development techniques, I was talking to a friend in New York today who had some questions about efficiency and general design for image driven menus. Back a few years ago, one would make a big huge banner and then use x,y coords to map a box corresponding to the link, lighting up that piece of the image. Later we discovered the mouseover events and started replacing the image with another creating the rollover effect. Is the new technique in our DOM driven development world to create layers of divs then control mouseover by manipulating style properties, visibility, innerHTML etc? I know which one I would prefer just out of pure slickness.. but what is the best way to turn your images into slick functional menus?

I have been enlightened today by a documentary about white sharks off of Isla Guadalupe, and was a little disturbed at the fact that they give birth off the tip of Marin.. which is about 30 minutes away, so I guess I wont be doing much swimming on the coast here! However I do think it would be very cool to see those sharks in person. I guess I will be adding it to my to do list, along with Grizz photography in Alaska and camping adventures in Glacier Park Montana. Anyone up for some adventures?

In the last month I have:
Traveled to Pullman
Checked out WWDC
Sailed and Beach walked in Bellingham
Partied at Mog.com
Partied in Sacramento
Seen Journey and Def Leppard in concert
Seen football games at both Cal Stadium and McAfee Arena.

This past weekend I saw washington loose to Cal in overtime
Matt Lineart get CRUSHED by the Raiders defense

and now it is time to spend a couple weeks concentrating on my programming projects.

It's about that time of year where everyone needs to get their boards and wax out and prepare to get excited for SKI SEASON! Warren Miller is making his annual rounds with a new movie called "Off the grid" and the trailer is SICK. Tomorrow Washington is coming to Berkeley to loose to CAL. Of course I got some tickets because since CAL beat us 28-3 and UW lost their QB it's about time for them to get CREAMED.

So there are a few trips in progress, one is a January trip to Hawaii... anyone who wants to meet up please send me an email. Also skiing in Utah is out there somewhere.. I know Jeff Olds is down, anyone else want to go find some powder?

Alright, so in the Saga of the loud TV keeping me up all night- its smashed and no longer an issue. This morning I was awakened at 8:15am by Mr. Rogers and dropped him off at the Oakland airport for his trip to the northwest.

Today I had 3 phone interviews, Lucas Entertainment, Mozilla, and Ebay. All of them went relatively well.. I wish I had more of the javascript syntax memorized but for now I will clutch on the quick ref guides. As of now Mozilla appears to be the most interesting as it is an open source culture. However there is one other possibility that I am not yet going to mention, but its possibly the most interesting and exciting of them all if it pans out.

In the meantime, Rails Rails Rails and the new "Saga of Selenium". This will be explained in more depth at a later time, but for now I will just say that the project lacks a responsive community and every time I try to use a new snapshot the functions I want to use are broken. The RC does not operate as we had hoped so we are going to branch and build a proxy server in Python and probably use twisted web, anyone interested..? Until next time.