Shay’s Blog

I had my final Dale Carnegie’s Effective Communication and Human Relations class tonight. It is nice to finish it. The class was 12 weeks with each class being 3 1/2 hours. It was a long class after a day at work. I have been trying to utilize knowledge I have gain in class to my interpersonal relations. It is easier said than done. I tend to criticize people at work that I think are making mistakes. This is one area that I have to work on. I am excited to have my Tuesday nights back!

Alicia and I went to see a play called Humble Boy at the Watertower Theatre.  This was Alicia’s first play at Watertower.  It was a good play.  I enjoyed the second act a lot more than the first act.  The first act was very slow and seemingly unmethodical, but pace of the drama picked up in the second act quite a bit.  The seeming unmethodical that was abound in the first act became much more congruent based on facts being reveled during the second act.

I did some interesting AJAX work last week.  I changed one of the pages in my application that displays dynamically created images to use AJAX.  AJAX allowed the page not to be redrawn as the user selects the different images.  The AJAX part was fairly trivial once I ascertained what was the server-side was doing.  The AJAX changes required some refactoring on the server side which was to be expected.  The browser would display the missing image symbol since the image had to be generated and then downloaded.  I found a way to keep that from happening.  What I did was load the image into a variable, and then attach a function to the onLoad event of that image.  The function swaps out the image in memory with the one on the page.  It is pretty cool if I do say so myself.  The onLoad function also does stuff like hides the progress indicator and enables the controls which were turned off when the AJAX call was made.  The code looks something like this:

var myImage = new Image();
myImage.onload = function{
var previewImage = document.getElementById(”previewImage”);
previewImage.src = myImage.src;
}

I used the ContentLoader library which comes with Ajax in Action for the plumbing.  The server sent JSON back to the browser.  This was my first time using JSON which turned to be pretty easy to understand and use.  I was considering using the DOJO toolkit, but I did not want to the number of javascript libraries that had to be loaded by the browser.

Firebug has released its non-beta 1.0 release. I wrote about the beta release of 1.0 here. It is nice to see this great web development tool get some more features. It works directly in firefox or with ie through using an external j/s file. Thanks for the firebug development team.

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I was watching The Colbert Report last night, and they did a segment on Alberto Gonzales’ testimony before the Senate. The attorney general stated there was not right of habeas corpus in the constitution. Here is the relevant portion of the US Constitution: Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution states that “the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” You would think that after six full years of this administration, I would no longer be surprised, but this is unbelievable. I wonder if this will affect the president’s already low approval ratings. I am sure there are die-hard Bush supporters that will say that Gonzales is correct. This is a scary world we live in.

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I have been doing some number crunching on my savings rate. I currently save 25% of my income. This is split between retirement savings and after-tax savings. I am not including the money that goes into my money-market mutual fund that is earmarked for my yearly property taxes. I do not escrow so this money my “escrow” account. The nice thing is that I earn the interest on the escrow money instead of the escrow company. I also do not include debt service payments. (more…)

I read this article today. It paints a very alarming picture for the current crop of retirees. Their debt is increasing, and in some cases it is increasing at a very high rate. The number of bankruptcies among retirees is increasing too. I am very concerned by the younger baby boomers and my generation, Generation X. The debt levels are increasingly higher the younger you go. You may have heard the term negative savings rate. If you have not, it means that the nation as a whole is spending more than they make. This is a terrible place to be.

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The developers at wordpress have been going crazy lately with releases.  They have released version 2.1.  You can read about all the new features and bug fixes here.  I am planning to upgrade to it, but it will probably be this weekend before I get a chance.  This release is a pretty big change.  It is a full install instead of just replacing the changed files.  I need to ensure that my theme will work.  Do my readers like the theme I am using?

One of my favorite firefox extensions has been updated. Update and enjoy. I use the webdeveloper and firebug almost daily for my web development work.

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I wanted to congratulate all of the Golden Globe winners tonight.  Here’s the list of winners:

MOTION PICTURES

Picture, Drama: “Babel”
Actress, Drama: Helen Mirren, “The Queen”
Actor, Drama:  Forest Whitaker, “The Last King of Scotland”
Picture, Musical or Comedy: “Dreamgirls”
Actress, Musical or Comedy: Meryl Streep, “The Devil Wears Prada”
Actor, Musical or Comedy: Sacha Baron Cohen, “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan”
Supporting Actress: Jennifer Hudson, “Dreamgirls”
Supporting Actor: Eddie Murphy, “Dreamgirls”
Director: Martin Scorsese, “The Departed”
Movie Screenplay: Peter Morgan, “The Queen”
Foreign Language: “Letters From Iwo Jima,” USA/Japan
Original Score: Alexandre Desplat, “The Painted Veil”
Original Song: “The Song of the Heart” from “Happy Feet”
Animated Film: “Cars”

TELEVISION

Series, Drama: “Grey’s Anatomy,” ABC
Actress, Drama: Kyra Sedgwick, “The Closer”
Actor, Drama: Hugh Laurie, “House”
Series, Musical or Comedy: “Ugly Betty,” ABC
Actress, Musical or Comedy: America Ferrera, “Ugly Betty”
Actor, Musical or Comedy: Alec Baldwin, “30 Rock”
Miniseries or movie: “Elizabeth I,” HBO
Actress, Miniseries or Movie: Helen Mirren, “Elizabeth I”
Actor, Miniseries or Movie: Bill Nighy, “Gideon’s Daughter”
Supporting Actress, Series, Miniseries or Movie: Emily Blunt, “Gideon’s Daughter”
Supporting Actor, Series, Miniseries or Movie: Jeremy Irons, “Elizabeth I”
Cecil B. DeMille Award: Warren Beatty

I wonder if this year will be the year the academy gives Martin Scorsese his due with the Best Director award.