… and I finally got a picture I could post. Having worked in usability testing for about a year I found this really funny from the first time I saw it.

TNAuctioneer gets my first entry as my favorite tweet of the week:

TNAuctioneer: just watched Dirty Jobs and poo eating Talapia! then wife tells me we are having Talapia for dinner! can you say loss of appetite?

My mom sent this to me. If you live or have lived in Colorado it will either make you laugh or smile too:

A winter statistic:

98% of Americans scream before going in the ditch on a slippery road. The other 2% are from Colorado and they say, “Hold my soda and watch this”.

NOW:

You’re from Colorado if You’ll eat ice cream in the winter.

When the weather report says it’s going to be 65 degrees, you shave your legs and wear a skirt.

It snows 5 inches and you don’t expect school to be canceled.

You’ll wear flip flops every day of the year, regardless of temperature.

You have no accent at all, but can hear other people’s. And then you make fun of them.

‘Humid’ is over 25%.

Your sense of direction is: Toward the mountains and Away from the mountains.

You say ‘the interstate’ and everybody knows which one.

You think that May is a totally normal month for a blizzard.

You buy your flowers to set out on Mother’s day, but try and hold off planting them until just before Father’s day.

You grew up planning your Halloween costumes around your coat.

You know what the Continental Divide is.

You went to Casa Bonita as a kid, and as an adult.

You’ve gone off-roading in a vehicle that was never intended for such activities.

You always know the elevation of where you are.

You wake up to a beautiful, 80 degree day and you wonder if it’s going to snow tomorrow.

You don’t care that some company renamed it, the Broncos still play at Mile High.

Every movie theater has military and student discounts.

Everybody wears jeans to church.

You actually know that ** South Park ** is a real place not just a show on TV.

You know what a ‘trust fund hippy’ is, and you know its natural habitat is Boulder

You know you’re talking to a fellow Coloradoan when they call it Elitches, not Six Flags.

A bear on your front porch doesn’t bother you.

Your two favorite teams are the Broncos and whoever is beating the crap out of the Raiders.

When people out East tell you they have mountains in their state too, you just laugh.

You go anywhere else on the planet and the air feels ’sticky’ and you notice the sky is no longer blue.

Slideshow via Flickr

Video via YouTube

So last night, Dan of vendorHIPPO.com, Adam (AK my son), and I went to the IgniteBoulder event in Boulder CO. It was a blast! We hooked up with Ryan Wanger (of The Reluctant Eater) before the event began and got acquainted. Ryan and Dan had hooked up via Dan’s new interest in blogging and Ryan may be a food reviewer for Dan’s vendorHIPPO.com site.

Perhaps the most fun of the night was the look on Dan’s face from about the third presentation on… (wish I had a picture) but it’s that blank stare you see when it’s obvious someone has been drinking from a fire hose of info. But he did great.

We heard/saw 20 slide (timed automatically at 15 second intervals) presentations on everything from what soap bubbles have in common with yoga (really a bizarre presentation, seriously), to info about Lucid Dreaming (maybe more bizarre than the yoga/soap), to instructions on branding yourself, perception possibility, what angel investors are thinking, and more.

Maybe next time I’ll live blog the event. A video of the event is in process. I’ll edit and post a link here when it’s available for anyone interested.

Overall a great evening of branching out and exploring new stuff. There are Ignite events occurring all over the country (world?) and you should definitely check for one in your area and go if can.

Thanks to Andrew Hyde of Boulder for coordinating this event! Let’s do another!

The whole social media thing is a very interesting and inexact science. While I’m certain I was and continue to be on many people’s “lists” from work over the years, every now and then you’ll get random emails and tweets you were never expecting and you end up on someone’s list. Todays came from twitter nflscore:

Last Friday, October 3, Julie, our house guest Chris Papetti, and I took our two HD video cameras for a ride in the Rockies to see the Fall color. We ended up putting one of the cameras on the tripod bungied in between the front seats with the top down. We shot video for most of our trip through the mountains to Estes Park via Golden. We wish we could share GORGEOUS Colorado with all our friends, but since so many live in other parts of the country and don’t get to enjoy it, I thought I’d share a little taste here with you. Since you probably don’t want to watch 30 minutes of video I increased the velocity of the playback so 30 minutes is condensed down to about 7. Enjoy!

(this is the super high bandwidth version… which will take a little longer to load - see below for lower)
http://craigkendall.com/media/2008FallColors_1600.flv

(a little lower bandwidth version)
http://craigkendall.com/media/2008FallColors.flv

Web commercials, web-mercials as I like to call them, are becoming very popular with the explosion of video on the web. Today, I finished editing one for a local Greek food service. Here’s a link: (click on Giggling Greek to view just that video)

So today in class our instructor led us in an activity where we group coded a web version of the classic game Rock, Paper, Scissors. It was a very interesting exercise and very educational to work as a team. I kept up with most of what we did, tweaking it a little on the way, and then massively tweaking it when I got home this evening. So, if you want to take a look go play Rock, Paper, Scissors online (WARNING: It’s a little addictive.)

So, assignment #2 for my PHP/mySQL class was to create a page that will convert a numeric value from Celsius to Fahrenheit or vice versa. I started out this morning writing on my big marker board to write out all the stuff I had to have and process.

That part went pretty smoothly so I sat down to start coding the stuff on the board. But, when I uploaded the file I was in dismay as the calculation functions were obviously doing something, just not the right thing. After a couple of hours on and off it (doing other stuff that actually paid) I finally realized I had left the “$” off of a variable in both calculation functions… AMAZING! No telling how many sets of working code I had been through before discovering that.

So I finally got it working… or so I thought. The page is supposed to issue a error message if the input field is blank or if it has non-numeric input. Mine did that, but it also issued the warning when you loaded the page before any input. UGH! Back to debugging. I finally figured that out and all was going very well… or so I thought…

So when I tried to convert “0″ from either F to C or C to F the page just kind of stared back at me with nothing. I looked over the formulas and saw nothing that could be wrong so I emailed my professor about it. He was kind enough to tell me I had discovered a nuisance in PHP. It seems that “0″ is considered empty by PHP. So, there was nothing to convert, and it was neither empty or non-numeric so it did nothing. First he told me to play with using the === operator (which I had done early on when I was missing the $ in the variables) and then he suggested the is_null() fucntion. Shazaam! Put that on in and all was great… problem solved!

Or, so I thought. Another problem which had always been there, it just was not till now I could test to see it. When you enter 32 F to convert to C the result is seen as… you guessed it… empty by PHP. Now I have that conundrum to solve. Oops.. solved it by using the same is_null() instead of empty() again in the output.

YAY! Done. Here’s the page. Now, wonder if I can give a visual diagram of this output like last week?

But, I don’t care! I’m stoked I actually could do it! And without copying and mimicking someone else’s code. For those of you who don’t know, I enrolled in a PHP/mySQL course at Front Range Community College this semester. I figured it was time I actually buckled down and learned how to code for real (rather than finding code someone else wrote and using it or modifying it to suit my needs).

Today was our fourth class meeting and we came out with five assignments. I have to say the last one made me a little nervous. Especially when the instructor told us we would really not like him when we got to step 4 and 5 of the fifth assignment. Guess what… I don’t hate him at all. (Of course, it’s yet to be seen if I did it “wrong”)

The fifth assignment was a story problem instructing us to create a PHP script that fictional high school students could use to estimate the time and cost for their jobs mowing lawns around the neighborhood. Here’s the text of the problem:

The students use the following method to estimate the time and cost of their jobs for customers:
1. Calculate the total area of the yard in m² (Multiply the length of the yard in meters by the width of the yard in meters)
2. Calculate the total area of the house in m² (Multiply the length of the house in meters by the width of the house in meters)
3. Subtract the total area of the house from the total area of the yard to find the total area of the lawn that must be mowed.
4. Find the total time it will take to mow the lawn knowing that a high schooler can mow 4.3m² of lawn/minute
5. Find the total cost for mowing the lawn. The high schoolers charge $10 per hour to mow the lawn

Given the following dimenstion for a Customer:
• Length of Yard: 62 meters
• Width of Yard: 93 meters
• Length of House: 27 meters
• Width of House: 20 meters

Write a program which uses PHP to output the following (and then a sample text output that should appear on the page).

So, check out my page (P.S. It looks like the output with the correct calculations… YAY!)
And, here’s a link to my main page I’ll use throughout the semester to link to all my projects/assignments… if anyone cares!

So, here’s the crazy thing. I finally understand the addiction of coding. I’ve had friends for years who were hard core coders. And, though I always appreciated their zeal and passion to just sit and write code… I actually understand and have experienced it myself tonight… whoa! More problems… more code! I’m ready! (I think I’m addicted!) Is there a CWA (Code Writers Anonymous) chapter near me? I may need it!