Entries this day: finished ritz

finished

12:07am CDT Saturday 21 October 2000

Erika, Karla's daughter, drove in from college today. She hadn't told any of us; she just showed up! She worked with us many hours during the summer; it was good to see her again. She brought with herself lunch from James Coney Island; when she walked up behind her mom and did the hands-covering-eyes trick, Karla was overwhelmed with the smell of onion, but identified Erika's watch.

I just remembered the pseudonym of the project I've been working on.. When I first started, I called it the Ritz project. Just today we finalized the first rough draft and let our client check it out at 3pm today.

Inspired by Erika's choice, Kevin and I walked to James Coney Island where he got two dogs, chili and water; I got baked potato and yummy vanilla shake. Kevin paid as thanks for my long hours on the project. I logged 54 hours this week, mostly to the Ritz project.

After we got back, we received an email from the ritz client. They were less than gracious about its imperfection, and Kevin wrote them back saying that he was impressed with how much was good about the project. The project is in its the first draft, and this is exactly why we are having them look at it now, and they can just bite us. He didn't write that last part, but he said it while writing the email.

I turned off the ringer when I got home at 7pm and slept through three phone calls, Jason about our hangout day tomorrow: wake boarding has been moved to noon, but I can still come early and we'll just hang out; Maggie: "while the phone was ringing, I decided not to leave a message"; and my dad, asking the brand name of my Handspring Visor and my Targus Stowaway keyboard, both of which I love.

Wende arrived home about an hour ago and is sleeping. I think I'll start reading Exodus. I finished Genesis and was thoroughly offended at the degradation of women in it. Only the sons of men were clearly listed in the genealogies, and women only in terms of who they married or to what man they were born. Servant women impregnated in place of the wives if the wife was "barren." Terrible stuff. And the worst offense that I remember now: Lot offering his two virgin daughters to be raped by the crowd to protect two men in his house. Gen 19:8

Oh, and God said to Abraham "your descendants will be like the stars in the sky." and then in Gen 22, God tests Abraham again and when Abraham passes the test God goes "I will surely bless you and make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky... because you have obeyed me." Gen 22:17-18. God had already promised that!!

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ritz

1:19am CDT Saturday 21 October 2000

The following description of the Ritz project is taken from an email I just wrote to my brother Fred:

I'm pleased as shit with this survey for a couple of reasons, which all stem from one basic thing: Not only do the contents of the questions come from a database, but the format of the questions is part of the database.

I think all our surveys should be this way, but until now, they have not. I'm just now at this job for a year, and I'm taking ownership and developing new and fly code. The main awesome result of encoding the format: only 1 program is required to display all the pages of the survey.

It used to be that for a 5 page survey, we had 5 programs that all called each other: "here's the data they entered on me; you save my data and draw yourself." This wreaked havoc if the user wanted to go back to a previous page; they would lose their current page of data.

Now there are navigation images at the bottom of the screen. When the back or continue images are clicked, the program saves exactly the data that was entered on the page and draws the new page according to which button was clicked. Makes perfect sense.

The old school method of doing it was developed by a man who has a masters degree in neuropsychology, not programming.

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