Your guide to the perilous waters of the internet

2-22-09

Things are finally starting to slow down. I launched my facelift of a large commercial website Thursday evening so most of the pressure is off. It seems to have been a great success based on the congratulatory emails and phone calls I've been getting from people on campus.

Because I'd not been able to test my modifications on the ASP pages live, I had no idea if it would work once the 200+ page site went live. I thought it would, but I knew there are always unanticipated bugs that even the most careful programmer can't predict, and sure enough, I was unable to get the rollovers working for about an hour until I tracked it down to a snippet of dynamically generated slideshow code. I'd removed the old slideshow, but left the ASP call to the JavaScript in the page as I wasn't 100% sure what it did. It was no longer running the old slide show, but it was breaking the rollovers. Once I deleted that my page was basically working.

Because the Content Management System (CMS) was designed for a secretary to upload simple words to 4 different areas of the index page, and the client wanted the index page content areas overhauled, I had to nullify those 4 ASP includes. To do this, I went into the CMS, pretended I was a secretary and deleted the code in the code view. In it's place, I wrote a placeholder comment tag: <!-- **** placeholder ***-->.

What that did was to cut the head off the CMS on the index page, and that allowed me to yank everything around to make the client happy.

Today I'm planning to shoot some more water drop photography. I want to try to capture cream. I've seen some amazing shots of cream splashes...something about the all white effect makes them cooler than water drops.

Yesterday I climbed at exit 32 (outside of North Bend at Mt. Si) with Bobby. We've climbed in the gym a bunch of times, and outside once before. He's taking a climbing class at the gym and has some hard core attitudes about climbing that rubbed me the wrong way yesterday. For example, I was leading up an overhanging bolted route with frozen fingers (wind was howling) and needed to rest on a bolt. I asked Bobby to "take", meaning that he should take up all the slack in 50 feet of rope between me up on the cliff, and he down on the ground belaying me. Then he should have jumped up in the air to remove any extra slack and locked off his belay device. Since I was right at a safety bolt, this would have the affect of pulling me into the bolt so that I could simply hang on the rope and rest for a few minutes.

He said no, he wasn't going to "take", and that I should stop being a pussy and just fall, that the rope was going to catch me. I was out of power and had no choice but to simply let go. Instead of a short little 6 inch drop onto the bolt, I fell through the air about 8 feet, bouncing gently on the overhanging wall about 150 off the ground. Now, I know what he was doing was good for me. I did need to take some leader falls to learn to trust the rope more, and in a way I was glad he forced me to take a longer fall, but I was also a little pissed at him for forcing me to do it his way.

I continued up the route after a rest. Later I followed his lead up "Son of Jesus", an overhanging open book stem fest. This was a very hard route for me as I don't generally climb at that level. Once again, I ran out of power and asked him to take so I could rest. He refused again and I dropped much further than I should have. That time I blew up at him, telling him he was a bit of an _ _ _ hole. Again, I knew why he was doing it, but I had reached the point where I didn't care if it made me a better climber, I was gripped out of my gourd and simply wanted a tight rope, to hell with improving my skills, or trusting the rope more, I just wanted to be held there tightly as I rested...but no, there I went, free falling 14 feet like a stone until all the slack and stretch was pulled out of the system. I don't know if I'll climb with him again. I don't need that kind of abuse.

It's true that it would make me a better climber, but maybe I don't want to be "improved". I'm ok with my grandma style of climbing, I have no need to impress anyone, or climb higher grades. I did finish that top rope route, and led a nice 5.9 afterward, but when we walked down to a 5.8 on blackstone wall, I had to back off...my nerves were completely shot. When Bobby lowered me off I was totally disgusted with myself and didn't even follow it. I think I'm done with climbing until it warms up and I can climb with someone who doesn't push me, like Sue or Christine, or my kids...anyone but one of these young hardcore single guys full of hormones.

2-14-09

Sue and I skiied at Paradise today. The snow was really bad, and the sun was playing hide and seek, mostly hide. Still, we had some laughs together zooming down the rut and crashing and burning. I had my new canon 50d, but the light was so bad I couldn't get any pictures.

This is my second 50d, the first one was defective and went right back to B&H. I've had this one for one day now and no problems. I've not taken enough pictures with it to know if the quality is markedly better than my rebel xt. I do notice that it is a much better built camera. Everything is vastly improved in the hardware, the menu system and the speed of the shutter. It's a big step up. Not that there was anything wrong with my rebel, but I needed to reward myself for the 67 hours of ot last month, or I would have gone crazy. Well, it might just be that I like toys, hard to say for sure.

The website I've been working on is making great progress. That is just the mockup of how the facelift will work. This is probably one of the bigger cans of worms I've stepped into during my long and illustrious web career. It's an existing asp site with a huge back end featuring a fully fledged content management system. There are 14 central asp pages that generate content based on what has been entered into the database from the content management system (CMS).

To do the facelift, I had to build it in illustrator and photoshop, then slice it up. Because I didn't want to be limited to the gif color palette, I converted all of the images to jpg's. This meant that I had to edit all 14 of the ASP pages because they had gif's hard coded into the html. These ASP pages have a lot of asp code in them that is very tricky to work around without breaking it. There are includes, js files and "for" loops that can not be broken.

Even worse, I have no testing server, so I was working blind and I have no idea if I've broken any of the asp code. I won't know until I post the pages live on the clients server and start the debugging process. This is a very bad way to work, but it is the best we can do in this situation where no one understands the asp based cms system, and I simply have to do perfect work, or perfect debugging...live. It will be challenging but fun. I like working under pressure. Reminds me of printing.

So that's my excuse for not writing here in the journal. I've been working up to 18 hours a weekend, plus up to 3 weekdays, two to 4 hours a day either at school after work, or here at the house. It's been brutal, but the pay is decent, not good, but decent, and the facelift should make the site a lot more attactive, especially after I've had time to tune up the chaotic css. The cms system writes old school font tags almost as badly as frontpage, truly a nightmare to edit.

I have to replace the alternator on the 91 corolla tomorrow, then fix a leaky faucett, and maybe I'll have time to tinker with my new camera. I'd like to try to shoot water droplets falling into a dish...sort of the "freeze frame" look. With my quality canon lens, and this new camera, I might get some fabulous shots. Tons of them on dpchallenge.com.

I was supposed to go to smith this weekend (pres day) but the weather was highs of 39, with cloudy skies and 30 percent precip. I would still have gone, but Paul B. bailed, and know one else was nuts enough to risk it. The silver lining is that it forced me to take Sue skiing. She was overdue for some fun, and I needed to work on some stuff around here instead of climbing 2 weekends in a row. Christine and Paul and I climbed at Vantage last weekend. It was good on Saturday, but crazy cold on Sunday and we bailed at noon. I'm finally getting stronger at the gym, weird how it took 6 weeks to recover my strength after jtree. Real climbing damages your gym power, unless you can hit the gym while you are climbing real rock. Well, crack climbing damages your gym power. Face climbing would keep you up to speed, but I've never like steep sport. Friction I like, but not steep sport..

 

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