10 Days to PMC Challenge - 160 mile bike ride!

10 more days until I start a 160 mile cycling journey to raise money and awareness for cancer research!

You can find full details here: http://www.pmc.org/profile/WY0004

The race is a 2 day ride through beautiful Massachusetts. The below isn't the exact route, but it's close (and the maps on the http://www.pmc.org site are quite..odd)

I've been training pretty well for this race. I put in about 60-120 miles a week riding (and boy is my taint tired). So I feel like I'm in great shape for it and ready to tackle it!

I'm $900 dollars away from my fund-raising goal of $4200 and I feel like with a big push over this next 10 days I'll be able to hit it.

Huge huge huge thanks to all my friends and family who have already donated. You're all the best.

If you have been thinking of donating but haven't yet....go ahead and just do it now. You'll love yourself for it later: http://www.pmc.org/profile/WY0004

Wish me luck!

HTML/CSS rebirth

This is going to be a story I tell my grand kids.

I remember when I developed my first web page. It was in 1996 at my first co-op (internship) at Nortel in Ottawa, CA. I worked for a software research lab and living in -30 degree weather was a great incentive to do nothing other than work.

I remember creating a few Hello World test sites and the first bug I ran into was why the hell was the <centre> tag not working. Well..because HTML doesn't recognize Canadian spelling (e.g. centre vs. center).

I went on to do a lot of PERL development and cgi-bin apps. I learned a ton and it I felt like such a pimp going back to college and knowing how to build web apps. Over the next dozen or so years I've done a lot more web development (mainly java and .NET).

One thing that's always been lacking for me is mastering HTML and CSS. I've picked up CSS and can make my way around it but my skills are mediocre at best. I think I'm still stuck in the 90's mentality and wanting to put everything in tables and put styles right in tags.

During my developer years at Sapient, I worked on over a dozen web projects. However, almost all of them were staffed with "Site Developers". These folks cranked out HTML and CSS while peeps like me did the programming to make the pages do something other than look nice. And after years of just plugging together pages that were handed to me I realize I have a lot to learn to create sites from scratch myself.

Hence, I'm going to forget everything I already know.

I'm going to throw out my experience hacking together web pages, kludging together CSS, butchering sites by throwing in a few inline styles, etc.

I'm on a mission to relearn front-end dev skills so when I start creating some new sites I won't cringe at the HTML and CSS when I look back at it a few months later.

Cindy Alvarez makes a great suggestion, that I can access Safari books for free online using my SF library card ID! Only need to dig that up now...

But I also stumbled across this set of tutorials that look like a pretty solid place to find the tricks of the trade.

Any other online tutorials you would suggest?

I'm back?

I know better than to say "Man I miss blogging, I'm going to start blogging again for real!!". I've had the urge to restart blogging in the past and I never get restarted.

BUT, I am really itching to start blogging again. I am in a bit of a lull with work and I have (even) more time on my hands than usual. So...let's see if I can keep this up and start trying to write something worth reading.

Over the next few weeks, I'm planning a bunch of mini-projects for myself (get a lot better at CSS, whip up an app idea I've been stewing on for a while in Ruby on Rails, change this awful blogger template, take a CPR/First-Aid class, take some dance classes, continue training for PMC, building a simple Yodlee-SDK web app, etc.). I'll see if I can keep this blogging up and write about those projects along the way.