Just a Day in My Life

Still kicking

No time for anything more than a drive-by posting. Here’s some stuff going on in our lives.

  • The Kitchen Remodel. It goes well, and is almost done. To me, the only issue is that the refrigerator makes me feel short, what with the placement of the handle and the high shelves. Jennifer has been dutifully taking pictures and recording the progress. See them here. Or if you really want some fun, you can see a slideshow of pictures of our original kitchen here.
  • Work. I’m a PHP developer. Mostly I hack away at Moodle. Part of the fun here is that Moodle is a total LMS (Learning Management System) solution, but it’s built around some assumptions about how the educational institutions that use it will implement their business logic. Ours is completely different from the Moodle assumptions, so most of my time is spent rewiring Moodle to make it work according to our own business logic. It’s fun on the whole, though I was really thrown for a loop when part of the API changes significantly from one version — the version we use is 1.5 — to a new version — the most current stable version is 1.9. For example: a function called get_record() has changed radically, without my knowledge or approval (not that the core developers need my approval, of course). I spent days trying to figure out why my new code was throwing SQL errors at me, until I actually read the function itself. I’m also trying to figure out how to implement some test-driven development procedures in hacking at this legacy code. Sounds like fun, doesn’t it? Believe me, it’s twice as fun as I make it sound here.
  • Writing. My Story of the Week project has been going well, and has actually inspired me to work on other projects, like The Solitude of the Tentacled Space Monster and critiques of other writers in my writers’ group.

That’s it for now. I hope you’re having fun as well.