Monthly Archives: October 2008

10.27.08
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I've lost it!

I seem to have lost all of the progress I was making on the golf course.  I played last Friday  MDCC and shot 103.  I was all over the place, mostly to the right, off the tee again which really makes it hard to score well.

About 14 holes in, I made a slight adjustment, dropping my right foot slightly to force an inside-out swing path.  Once I did this my slice went away and I was off the tee correctly (down the middle) on all but one of the last 5 holes.  My putting however, was poor, so even though I wasn’t playing out of the woods, I wasn’t scoring very well either.  I think it is time to go back and take a tune up lesson or two to identify where I my swing is flawed, trying to fix it in real time on the golf course isn’t the best way to fix it!

On the plus side, it was absolutely gorgeous day, a little chilly perhaps which is why the course was empty.  As poorly as I played we still played in 3 1/2 hours which is always nice.

10.20.08
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Progress on Meet Events

Saturday morning I had a little time to work on wp-SwimTeam and started working on managing events for a particular swim meet.  As I had noted in another post, the idea is to import a set of standard events and then tweak them.

For the most part I have it working but now it needs some clean up.  The way WordPress loads up pages means you have to monitor the URL if you need to append GET values to control the flow for the user.  I had to work this out when I implemented to tabbed UI and now will have to do something similar for meet events.  Right now the meet id gets appended to the URI and by repeating a set of actions as you modify meet events, it can end up repeated N number of times.  Once I get that worked out, I think I will be ready to import meet results.

10.20.08
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Fog on the lake this morning

We had a very cool evening (about 35 degrees) last night so when I drove to work this morning, the fog over Lake MacGregorIMG_0228 was pretty thick.  I stopped and took this picture.  It was taken with my daughter’s Canon Powershot A530 which is an older camera 5MP that she isn’t using any more.  I thought it was broken but went ahead and put some batteries in it and it works fine so I have kept in my car for about a week now.  It isn’t anything special but it is handy to have something on hand to take pictures like this.

10.17.08
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More WordPress 2.7 Impacts

I updated one of my development areas to the current bleeding edge version of WordPress 2.7 this morning to see how things look.  Everything with my plugin still seems to work just fine – if you can find it!

I am torn with the new menu structure in the Dashboard.  I like the icons and how much cleaner they are but at the same time, it isn’t obvious where the menus for my plugin should live.  I expect I will have to make a new top level menu and icon.  I am glad the plugin still works but am a little concerned about the way it will integrate with the new WordPress Dashboard UI.

10.17.08
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Windows Live Writer

A while back I installed Windows Live Writer but then didn’t use it.  Yesterday I decided to give it a try, why it cropped back into my mind I am not sure, and I am very pleased with how easy it works.  While I like WordPress a lot, I find the Dashboard interface a nuisance when all I want to do is write a post.  It is fine for doing admin work but when all I want to do is post, having to wait for the Dashboard to load is annoying.

It is particularly bad on the Wp-SwimTeam site I have hosted on SourceForge.  For what ever reason, it takes a very looooong time for the Dashboard update services to time out (SourceForge doesn’t allow the remote connections) so it isn’t uncommon to have to wait a minute or so before being able to post.

I can really see the value of Windows Live Writer for a user like my wife who needs to post updates to our Swim Team web site but doesn’t need to be burdened with the WordPress Dashboard overhead.  Based on my initial testing, I like what I see.

10.17.08
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How to handle meet events?

Now that I have the standard events working with drag and drop reordering, I need to propagate events to each meet.  My thinking has been that a meet will start by importing the standard events and then add, delete, edit, and reorder as necessary to support a specific swim meet.

While I have had this model in my head, my first look at actually implementing it raised a bunch of questions – where I do put it?  How does it work?  The event management isn’t as simple as other meet management tasks so it sort of breaks in the way that I implemented the meet data.  I have an idea how to solve it but it will take some experimenting to see if it will work.

10.16.08
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I just love Newark Airport ….

I had to go to New Jersey yesterday for a meeting and had a 6:10 PM flight scheduled to continue on to Orlando for another meeting today.  I was flying Continental and while their planes are newer, the seat pitch just isn’t what American’s is.  That 2-3 inches makes a huge difference.  Anyway – when I got to Newark my flight was showing on time but by the time i got to the gate, it was clear it wouldn’t be.  There was still a flight at my scheduled gate so we were moved one gate down the terminal.  Then we were delayed.  By the time we started boarding it was about 6:40 and since the flight was full, it took a while to board.  After departing the gate we sat on the runway for another hour, maybe more.  The pilot made up some time in the air – and we finally landed about 10:30, about an hour late so he made up at least 30 minutes.  Just a typical Newark experience!

10.13.08
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Golf game heads south again

I have played twice since my last golf posting and unfortunately my results have more like the 2nd 9 in my Tale of two 9’s as opposed tot he 1st 9.  I didn’t even break 100 much less get close to 90 the  last two times out.  In both cases I was really spraying the ball off the tee and here where we have the nice thick bermuda rough, once you are in trouble, it is hard to get out of it.

I think I know what I was doing wrong – I let some old bad habits creep in.  My stance was too wide and my grip was too weak.  I went out one evening and played a couple holes and hit the ball much better.  Not sure I can play this week though, I’ll be out of town for a couple of days for work.