Took a few shots of Lucifer today thought I’d post them up and share them. Click to go to the gallery page, see the whole album here.

She’s grown up to be quite the little ball of energy normally, so a few of her sleeping is refreshing I’ve been adding some photos here and there to the gallery over the last few days. I’m going to get a bunch of the lake over the weekend and update with those, so should be a good time.

I’ve ran into an interesting problem lately, I’ve been enjoying building more and more applications on a LAMP platform in PHP, vs C#.net on IIS. My roots are really in PHP anyway, but school taught nothing but C#.. Quandry!  Since we don’t have time to argue this out in a blog post, I’ll just leave it here: I’m leaving C# on the desktop and utilizing PHP for it’s fast deployment ease of troubleshooting and flexible coding. During my move to more PHP applications I’ve an into an issue recently where an entire web project I’m trying to integrate with was written in asp.net using MSSQL. I just need to run a few stored proc’s for some data out of the MSSQL db, but unlike my IIS server or old, the Media Temple grid doesn’t have any MSSQL support in it’s versions of PHP. So, where does a guy go from there? To the universal language of data: XML.

It was so satisfying to remember that I could whip up an ASP page that asks for hugely long security keys to verify the host asking for data and then upon successful reading of keys hands the PHP script back all the data it needs, in an easy to spit-out much enjoyed XML document.

This brings me to a neat point here: if you’re writing a huge database driven web application and you’re likely to expand it’s functionality or allow others to design functionality based on your data… USE XML for getting data to process and vice versa when it’s done processing. This will leave your co-horts happily programming in the language of their choice, a nice place to be!

I whipped up an HDR image of my sister’s street after the storm tonight, click it for a BIG version (be warned, 24 inch screens suggested ). The storm was glorious and I sat in Brocco with my two sisters and a friend of Ashley’s and watched it rain.  It rained, hard, and fast. It was quite excellent and I soaked it all up and then took a bunch of photos. Really, none of them turned out worth shit except this HDR collage of their street after the rain at sunset. Still shooting with my S5-Is in RAW with CHDK firmware. I’ll keep on shooting and see what comes out next, I want to do some streetlight shots, possibly a 15+ shot HDR collage.

In non-photo news I’ve got just 6 work days until I celebrate a full year on with Jenzabar Inc. This is my longest (ha) full time employment besides for myself. The folks at Jbar make it fun and easy to enjoy my job and help make a great product better. Long live JICS.

I’m also going on my 2nd month of using the Grid, from Media Temple. So far, so decent. There have been some odd slowdowns/catches and glitches, but over all plenty of disk storage, bandwidth and CPU usage for my sites. I’m getting much better at optomizing my sites for the unique SQL challenges posed by being on the grid. For instance, you might notice my gallery is finally nearly up to speed again, and it’s taken me a while to get it all tweaked out that way.  I have been frustrated trying to get my gallery url re-writes in my gallery plugin for WP and still cache wordpress. It keeps kicking each other around, so for now wordpress = not cached. Might have to just break down and get an SQL Container.

No change on the car status, still waiting to get headers on, but now it’s clean and uber-shiney in the garage waiting some more buffing and waxing. It will emerge a shiney mofo, ready to catch the eye of every mustang driver on the planet (ha, sorry Justin!) along with the ear of every cop. I did manage to get pulled over a couple times for noise violations, need to learn to keep my foot out of it! Otherwise, same old same old, hung a hammock in the garage for those lazy afternoons detailing or working, or a bit of both.

Haven’t made it to the lake yet, but keep meaning to do so. I’m sure it’s fine, but now I’m getting anxious! Can someone tell the weather we need a few more days of 60+ degree days so I can get up there and start enjoying?! I think we’re all excited about getting it opened up and we’ve got a pretty decent sized list of stuff to do this year including fixing the deck, and painting some bedrooms/living room/ kitchen and making  a bar in the dinning room/living room area. Outside we’ll get rid of the nasty shed blocking out beach from our new neighbor Dave’s place and really just try to enjoy the place as much as we possibly can.  That will include many a party, and several guests, so get ready to party!

Well, I’ve torn down the last theme and am workign on something much better, and in the mean time, I wanted to just bring it back to clean goodness for now.  Let me tell you what kind of torques me: people who make themes and over ride things like your meta tags. That hurts traffic and visitorship at my site, douches! I’ll be releasing the theme I make for the public strings free (no ads, no links, sell it if you want) on an MIT licence.  Hopefully soon I’ll get time to finish it.. I promise, you’ll love it.