Oh yeah I have a blog
June 28, 2006
I've been busy again, which is why this site has been neglected. One day I'll remember why I signed up for this blasted hosting plan. Aah, never mind.
The big deal lately has been that my new content management system has been finished. Well, nearly finished. Web "finished", you might say, which is typically just 80% finished. Everything's there that absolutely needs to be there, and the system doesn't tend to break down a whole lot. But I'm closer to 90% now. Describing the system is going to be inadequate. Maybe I'll try: it operates on a four level hierarchy. Templates > Pages > Items > Blocks. A block is a line of text, or a big chunk of text, or an image, file, or section of Coldfusion code. Those combine to make items, and one or more items are placed on a page, which is then fed through a template for overall layout purposes. It's actually quite simple: I know this because the new system runs like a zillion times faster than our old deal (which I also developed).
It has a name, too: Fountain (Flickr stream) . Liquifusion's Fountain Content Management System. Yeah. I like the ring of that. It has an awesome new UI, developed by me and named by Sunshine: Storm Cloud. Full of mildly ominous blacks and grays as I target (and miss somewhat) my goal of having a "luxury" interface. But the CMS itself has proved fairly intuitive. My buddy Jon Gray at FTRI had a blast with it. He know how to edit existing content and add new stuff, though not the whole "pages" deal. But I think a manual on this guy would be easier to write than the old system, so I'll probably give that a shot one of these days.
These past two days I've been in Ocala with Doug attending a pre-bid conference for the Florida Sheriff's Association Vehicle Bid Award. We're giving a presentation on our online Vehicle Bid Award system that's going to replace the old system of filling out 600 pages in triplicate. Really. Here's what happened: we drove down on Monday, arrived at 3:00 PM and made sure the meeting room at the Marrion County Sheriff's Office met our intense technical requirements (it had an internet connection). Then we went to dinner with Nelson, a big Ford dealer who looks a lot like Ian McKellen and is, to use his words, "loaded." We went to Carraba's (even with a bunch of adults they still go "I dunno, what do you want to eat?" and made me pick) and he tried humorously to buy me off and guarantee victory. Everyone at the table got a good laugh out of that, but my eyes were on the two hundred dollar bills he dropped to pick up the tab. Oh, I think I could arrange something...
Tuesday morning we made a 45 minute presentation and left. Is this what some businessmen do regularly? Drive or fly for hours for a pittance of a presentation? Of course the stakes of this one were quite high, but I still felt like I could have just handed the Florida Sheriffs ladies a script and stayed home. Though the hotel bed was awful comfy.
On the drive up and down I read Deepsix and Polaris by Jack McDevitt. And I think I'm finally over this guy. It's hard to write good xenoarchaeology, but these last two books are just by the numbers. Any time somebody refers to time between one and ten minutes (such as, "I'll be done in three minutes"), something terrible happens. The structure he's walking on collapses. Or a giant bear thing kills him. Or a shuttle explodes with him in it. Or her. Murphy's Law is turned up to 11 in both Deepsix and Polaris, but it's worse in Polaris because he's not even relying on resourceful Priscilla Hutchins to get out of a jam. For example, near the end of Polaris the main characters Alex and Chase (female) come out of a hyperspace jump out of fuel thanks to sabotage and sitting next to a pulsar that's sucking them in. Solution? Wrap a bunch of cable around the ship and use that to repel the magnetism of the pulsar. I suppose I would have been mesmerized if this wasn't the third time he used the "excess cable on a spaceship" for something like that.
Deepsix was only better because it was more of a guilty pleasure. A research team and unlucky captain Priscilla Hutchins get stuck on an Earthlike planet that's about to collide with, basically, Jupiter. Both their landers have failed, and the orbiting ships don't have space to surface capabilities. Solution? Use the "sky hook" left in orbit by an ancient civilization of Hawks to literally "scoop" the people off the surface of the planet. Trust me, only the Hawks don't sound terribly stupid when you read about it. But in the end, after the successful rescue, there's this great "end of Star Wars episode IV" part where everybody's a hero. A nice feeling, if somewhat cheap.
If you're bored you should check out this awesome Duke Nukem song played by somebody who would probably whip my ass in Guitar Hero.
