Tag... you're it!

I've been working pretty hard to get some better utilization of time into my days. I'm still in hot pursuit of a full time day job, but am also keenly interested in amping up my technical skills and moving my database project forward.

The past few days we've been keeping an eye both on the local conditions (water level) and the forecast, as the Des Plaines River officially crested at 10.92 ft (3.3284 m)- a new record. It's been pretty dry, with some light rains the past day (Tuesday). In the "Official News" department, Jennifer and I made our way to the township offices to appeal our real estate assessment. For whatever reason, our property is consistently over-assessed in comparison with other properties in our neighborhood, so every six months we have to file an appeal. In all honesty, I have to give a shout out to the Assessor's staff of Maine Township- they are friendly and helpful.

The new keyboard

I've made time to do a bit of HTML work over the past few
days, and working on the laptop has become a bit of a challenge, as the keyboard is not full-sized. Not a huge issue, as it is a very nice keyboard, but a problem arises whenever I need to use a shifted character: on the compact keyboard layout, the SHIFT key is approximately 50% the size of a standard keyboard, and it is directly above the left arrow key. Not much of  problem so far. On the bottom row, however, directly next to the left arrow is the CTRL key. Because of this arrangement, I've rediscovered a plethora of <CTRL+> commands that are quite useful when one actually intentionally executes them. So, after a few days worth of research, I almost purchased the Logitech G105 keyboard. Amazon was offering it at $56.97 USD, which is not too bad of a price for an illuminated keyboard. Upon further searching, though, I found the same keyboard, but with the Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 logo for $27.95 USD. The only difference in the the two models, apart from the logo, is green lighting vs. blue for the full-priced model. So, I went with the less expensive one.

All of this leads me to the title of this post.

So there I was, happily plugging away on the new keyboard. I decided it was time to do some coding, so I went to HTML DOG and opened up my project. I was all set to start typing when I discovered that my code did not look like the example code. It took a bit of comparing three or four pages before I discovered that my code was okay- the website was using an earlier bit of code to continue with the lesson. Problem solved- I pressed on, entered the code from the new lesson, and posted it. It worked, but one of my headers was tabbed out of line. Back to the three or four pages of their code vs. mine. The error, of course, was mine, and it was in the form of a missing tag: once I added the </u> tag, my errant text popped back into place. It made me happy.

Last of all, I got a bit of work done on the database. I got about 200 rows in the spreadsheet updated; only ~19K to go! The fact that there is absolutely no way to automate this part of the process is what is making it so slow going.

Timehack 06.15.13 1030

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to.