I had the pleasure of seeing some old friends this week, including one of my best friends from grade school who happened to be serving in the military overseas. Here are a couple pictures:

Sarah and I

Everybody.

Greg:  “T.J., maybe if you didn’t like dick you wouldn’t like blogging.”

Greg:  “Blogging sounds like a sexual term, anyway.”

I went to the County Clerk’s office today to get my DBA notorized so that I am officially recognized as a sole proprietorship.  It’s neat to know that my business is now a legally recognized entity.

The security at the courthouse cracked me up — it’s sad that even to access the Clerk’s office I had to go through a metal detector… I bet they think I’ll steal… their paper… or something.  I suppose it’s necessary, but I certainly would rather be greeted with a cheery “Hello” than “Remove all metallic items from your pockets.”

Oh well.

I have reformatted the entirety of my web site (and it is a work-in-progress).  The White Rabbit now operates on Wordpress 2.0.  The site is structured as such:

• www.teejayvanslyke.com - this is my company page.  it holds my web development and design services information and the like.
• blog.teejayvanslyke.com - you’re lookin’ at it.
• webpire.teejayvanslyke.com - this is my ‘portal’ page of sorts.  it has links to all of my various web projects, original music, web sites, and the like.
• development.teejayvanslyke.com - this domain will run an instiki for my development work.  it will also operate the SVN repository for all of my projects.

In the process of moving everything around, there will probably be some problems around the site.  Please feel free to report any of these to me .

I don’t think I’ve ever coded so much in my life. Skrap:pad is coming along nicely and now most of the GUI schema is in place. I also created a prototype for my new home page to replace the old television one — it was getting too complex and I want to make the site focus on my web development moreso than fun quotes.

I’ve also been hard at work on the WICB web site, including a calendar system and MyJSSQL, a library that allows direct access of data from a MySQL database via JavaScript and a driver PHP script. I am looking for freelance work for this summer, so if you know anyone that needs a quality piece of web lovin’, send them my way .

On yet another web-related note, the new issue of Buzzsaw is almost complete. All that is left is adding images and a couple smaller articles. I added an ‘auxilary pane’ feature that allows me to add a content pane to the top, left, right, or bottom of the page body. This will push the site to look more like an actual print magazine I hope.

As sad as it sounds, I am so happy the Christmas season is almost over. I need to regain my sanity at the store. I have most of next week off, so expect more frequent updates.

Merry Winter,
~ teejay

Yesterday the store did over $4,000 in business, making Saturday, December 3 the single most stressful day of work in my life. Combine that with several papers and projects due, my WICB web gig, and my own personal aspirations, and you have yourself quite the taxing month indeed.

Tonight I will be writing my final metaphysics paper on the theories surrounding the persistence of objects across time… that is, after I work the rest of the day and such.

It’s hard to believe the last week of classes is already imminent. My coworkers and I were joking around — after finals, I’m going to find a month spa… a day spa would be underemphasizing my stress .

We shall see what comes of all of this.

<3 teejay

So I’ve been developing some ideas for neat web projects to occupy my time with. Let me fill you in…

Hitchhiker, as I am calling it, will be a new way to categorize and find information on the web. Rather than having an implied hierarchy as is present in most online directories, why not visually represent the hierarchy in a Mac-OS-X-Finder-esque way? The page could start with a top-level listing on the left side of the screen. As soon as you choose a category, another list appears next to it. The application continues in this fashion until it gets to actual items with information associated, at which point clicking on the item will bring up a window with the article or whatever is associated with that item. All of this could be animated in the style of a certain nameless fictional book from a nameless recent motion picture of the same name .

skrap:pad… oh boy. This one is my baby. Imagine a web free of the chains of HTML. Imagine a web that works more like Adobe Photoshop. That is what I envision for this–rapid web “scrapbooking” using completely graphical menus. The possibilities would be endless.

to be continued…

Yesterday I met with the station manager at WICB and he officially offered me the job of redeveloping their web site. This is great news. Hopefully this will officially jumpstart my freelance web development career and give me some connections.

I have recently started learning the Ruby on Rails web development paradigm. It seems to be an interesting approach at database-driven web applications. However, learning Ruby might be more commitment than I’m ready for at this point. I started developing an application to keep track of my finances as a tutorial application. So far, I have support for accounts, transactions, and transaction categories. All of the data is stored on my MySQL server. What’s neat about Rails is its understanding of databases. With one line, it understands the relation between, say, account transactions and accounts.

Today also marks the first real snowfall of the season (ugh). Looks like I’ll be hibernating for a few months.

Until next time,
teejay

It’s the day before our Thanksgiving break starts and it’s beginning to get colder.

I just finished the server component of my Software Engineering class’s online-playable version of Clue Jr. Now that I’m more proficient with Java, I finally understand the merit of such a structured object-oriented language.

This break I’m going to be meeting with the station manager at WICB to discuss the possibility of developing their new web site.

Details later.

So today I turned twenty years old. It’s not as exciting as I had hoped, but it is still a reminder that I’m an adult… ugh. I decree tonight as Ye Olde Wine Binging Night.

I just upgraded my internet service to 3 mbps, so there should be a noticeable speed increase on my server… yay!