Katie and I are busy patting ourselves on the back over here. While it may look odd to anyone who's looking in our windows, it feels good. In the past year we've been able to save just under $900, and save hours of useless surfing.

Two main things have kept us from heading back into the deep, dark pockets of the cable industry:

1) Hulu.com - they offer most network shows we watch, anytime we want. Our home theater PC allows us to watch Hulu on our HDTV with limited commercials.
2) Over the Air (OTA) HD channels - we also bought an outdoor HD antenna for watching our major local channels. We get ABC, NBC, CBS, 3 LPB stations, FOX and a few other stations for free (and did I mention in HD?).

As you can see, we still watch TV, we just do it more intelligently (at least that's the way I think of it). We have what the cable industry has yet to provide - a la carte programming. We pick and choose what we want to watch, and get to watch it when we want. It's a logical approach. I don't want to watch '1000 ways to die' on the Spike channel, or any of the 23 other hours of the garbage there, so why should I be paying for that channel? Now, I'm not. Someone else is going to have to subsidize Spike, MTV and We.

Anywho, good luck to anyone else wanting to drop cable and save some money, it's been good for Katie and Me We've made it a year longer than I thought we would without cable.

In this case, I need the ability to allow the end-user of our software (a web-based document scanning app) to define certain aspects of how this software will operate.  This means letting them set up their own list of Document Types (Invoices, Checks, Bills, W-4’s, etc.), Document Statuses on each of those Document Types so they could recreate their office’s workflow.  We also decided (late in the design process) to allow the user to add as many indexes as they want for each Document Type… and this turned out to be the tricky bit. 

This means that a user can define an index called Invoice Number on the Invoice document type, and when they scan an Invoice, they type in an Invoice Number.  This way, when they want to find this document later they can look it up by Invoice Number.  They can create as many indexes on each Document Type as they want.  They could also create indexes to allow them to look up that Invoice by the person who received it, the account number, the date it was received,etc. 

So, being the smarty pants I am, I whipped up a couple of additional tables to account for this scenario -described, albeit not exactly, as follows:

1. ScannedDocument (already existed)
2. IndexField (new, holds the name of the newly created user-defined index field)
3. IndexFieldValue (hold a value for an IndexField, and ties that value to a ScannedDocument)

Simple, right?  Well, it turns out that it’s simple to create and to insert data into, but pretty rough on the person who’s trying to get data back out (unless my brain is just friend and there’s a simple solution).  When the user searches for a Document, they can add as many indexes as they want.  So, I have to dynamically create a query that will match any number of name and value pairs, in addition to any other search criteria a user might select (Date Scanned, Document Type, etc.). 

That’s where I’m at today… trying to figure out a good way to find the documents in our database based on one or more Name/Value pairs.  In looking around on the internet, it looks like I designed myself a sort of EAV (Entity Attribute Value) model… though a slanted a bit to better fit the relational database model.

Just about every article I read on the internet trashes the idea of storing an EAV model in a relational database (which is what I’ve done here), trashes dynamic SQL (what I’m considering using… though, not because it’s the most prudent choice) and basically dirties the name of anyone who considers it.  Consider me dirty. 

I’m looking at a bunch of solutions, none of which look promising and staring a deadline in the face that I’m unlikely to meet now.  It’s an ugly day… but I’ll make it.   

Since we've moved from North Bossier down to Shreveport in South Highlands, I've learned quite a few things about home ownership.  The least of the lessons learned involve lawn care.  They are as follows:

1. It's hot in Shreveport in June, hotter in July, and in August you burst into flames.
2. When it's hot I don't want to do yardwork... not that I'm crazy about it when it's nice out.
3. If you dislike a task enough, it's well worth the money to pay someone else to do it.
4. Be selective about who you pay for yardwork

A year ago, I finally learned the value of #3 -paying someone else to do a job I hate.  Shortly after, I learned #4 - being selective about who you pay for those jobs.  I hired someone who had done work for our neighbor in the past, and needed work.  He did a good job at first, but slowly started to miss spots or not weedeat from week to week.  So, we parted ways.

This spring, I started back to mowing again but kept noticing my neighbor's lawn across the street, which was now being cut by a lawn service.  It always seemed to be cut and trimmed well.

I talked to my neighbors and found that they've been using Baber Lawn Service.  Soon after, I contacted them and have been happy with the results.  No missed spots, no nonsense.  I come home from work, the grass is mowed.  That's an awesome feeling.

So, anywho... the point of the post was really just to offer that advice for anyone else who shares a hatred of yard work.  Hire someone else if you're able... and if you're in Shreveport, call Daniel at Baber Lawn Service (Contact info below).

Phone: (318) 424-1728

Cell: (318) 588-0805

Cell: (318) 754-1487

I tried to do the math on making a successful go at starting a delivery business in my off-hours. I ran into a couple of problems.

1) I don't have enough energy. It may be that I don't sleep well at night or have sleep apnea... I'm not sure. Either way, when I get home from work I don't want to do a dern thing that resembles work.
2) See #1

The thing is, I think it could work here. It could work like this:

1) Create a website that listed a large selection of available items, with their prices and pictures. (Companies exist that will provide a database of food items with prices and pictures).
2) Allow users to register and purchase groceries at your prices (hopefully priced between walmart and brookshires prices). If the order is placed before 3PM, it will be delivered the next day. Add $10 for orders under $100, 10% above $100.
3) Have the website print a master list of groceries ordered by 3PM, combining all orders into one big list. Shop Sam's and Walmart, etc. for all items.
4) Bring groceries home, split into individual orders.
5) Refrigerate necessary groceries.
6) Deliver groceries the following day.

The main thing someone would want to do would be limit the delivery areas initially. I imagine that targeting an area like South Highlands (small, upper middle class area) would be a good way to fine tune the business.

If I were a college student with the ability to create this website, I'd be all over it... but I'm not. I have a full time job, bills to pay and little energy. It doesn't seem like it would take much... a website that can accept credit cards, a decent size car, grocery skills, a few ice chests, and a heavy heap of time and patience.

It must be nice to be rich, or CEO or politician and have a team of knowledgeable advisors to give you advice.  When you have an idea, you can run it by a few people and get informed opinions at each step of your decision making process. 

I, on the other hand, don't fit into the CEO, politician or rich category.  Most of the time, I just run decisions by the dog and if he doesn't argue against me, I proceed.  It's no brain trust, but it'll do in a pinch. 

This past weekend, I came up with another business idea (not new, just new to my city).  I ran it by the first line of defense against fruitless labor and thoughts, the family and a friend or two.  After receiving a decent response from most, I realized that I still needed some insight that I probably couldn't find without finding someone who's tried something similar, or just trying it for myself. 

Normally, I'd turn to the internet in situations like these (finding products,travel destinations, factual information,etc.) , but the internet doesn't offer what I'm after here.  I need a decision engine, and I don't mean Bing (sorry Microsoft, but the phrase doesn't fit the functionality).  It really would come in handy for all the ideas that pass through my mind.

Oh well, my ADHD will probably take over in the next few days and I'll be on to a new idea.  I should probably just focus energy back on my existing side projects, and getting them up to 100% before moving on... but a brain trust would still be cool to shoot ideas past every once in a while...

On Friday, we upgraded our PC's at work to these sweet new Dell Optiplex 960's... it's hard to believe that Dell is making something that's worth getting excited about, but these are nice. The cases are aluminum, the buttons feel nice, and even the keyboard is an improvement over the 755's we had before. The main thing to get excited about is the fact that they are beasts... 64-bit machines with Quad core processors, 8 gigs of RAM... the works.

This upgrade meant that our old computers were going to have to be dealt with, so I asked about whether we could buy one and sure enough my boss agreed to sell me my old PC (on the cheap). The nice thing was that since I've only been at my current job for 9 months or so, I had a much newer PC than anyone else (by a full 2 years or so). So, today I brought home my old work machine - a Quad Core machine with 4 gigs of RAM, a DVD burner, 500GB of hard drive space and a 256 MB ATI video card. It may be old Tech to my employer, but to me, it's a swanky new development machine.

As always, when her family is involved, we had a good time.  The key ingredient to our happiness was of course the food.  We had pie night, a staple in her family, where everyone has their favorite pie made and those pies serve as dinner.  There was the traditional gumbo (Katie’s grandma makes killer gumbo… not deadly, just killer), greenbird turkey, taco salad, burgers, fish, pancakes, bacon, and last but not least… blue bell ice cream.  I love you, Blue Bell.

The second ingredient that made this year great was the location -  the club house (for lack of a better word) at Jeem’s Bayou Hunting and Fishing Club.  Not only is the house a few hundred feet from Caddo Lake (with a pier 30 feet or so into Caddo Lake), but the entire family was able to stay there comfortable – all 20 or so of us.  They had 10 rooms over two floors and enough room to seat us when it came time for dinner.  There were nets for badminton or volleyball, swings, benches on the pier, and rocking chairs scattered all over the place within a screened porch.  It was a great place to have so many people with so many different interests.

I hope everyone else had as good a time as I did… although from looking at me, a city boy who sits at a desk in the air conditioning playing on a computer for at least 8 hours a day, Katie’s family probably thought I was miserable.  Anywho, I’m posting the pictures to flickr from the week, including some from our family trip to Jefferson, TX and the boat tour of Caddo Lake (both on Wednesday of this week).

This happened on Thursday, I think.  Since then I’ve been on a regimine of calomine lotion, benadryl (lotion and pills) and today had to break down and get a celestone shot – in the butt.  They call it the “hip”, but they really mean butt. 

Who are they trying to fool?  “Well, this shot usually goes in the hip, so lean over this table, and take your pants down a bit.  Bend your leg a little…”.  Lady, that’s my butt.  If you have to ask me to take my pants down- one, my cheeks tense up and my prostate gets mighty nervous.  Somehow it found out what happens in doctor’s offices when pants go down.  And two, it’s my butt.

Anywho, the shot hasn’t really done much yet.  Toward the end of the day (4-5 hours after the shot) I was feeling less itchy, but my rashes were still highly visible (people have been asking about them all day) and a bit itchy.  My right eye is actually surrounded by a rash, and a rash on my forehead above the eye is creeping toward my eyebrow.  Rash on my right leg, rash on both hands, elbows, biceps, BOTH EARS… here a rash, there a rash everywhere a rash rash. 

You know, people on the internet (doctors, I suppose, too) say that this stuff doesn’t spread.  Again, I say poppycock.  I’m getting rashes in new places, places where clothing fully protected me from exposure… and I wasn’t rubbing my jeans or shirts on the backs of my knees when taking them off, or rubbing dirty poisoned clothes on myself afterwards.  I’ve been to this poison ivy rodeo before.  The rashes are also growing radially (or were, I should say… until the celestone).

That’s enough griping, just had to get it out there.  Doc says there a 50/50 chance I’ll not sleep much tonight (50% of people have sleeplessness as a side effect), and at this point, I think the Benedryl should’ve knocked me out. So, I hope you’re sleeping better than me tonight, even if I do have a regular night’s sleep. 

Here it is in all its glory.

Feel free to add it to your igoogle homepage (or anywhere else).

It turns out that it D-day used to be a military term for the day an operation would take place – this is not as fancy an origin as I expected.  I kind of expected an abbreviation for something like VE-day (Victory in Europe day). 

D-day was just referred to as the day an operation would take place.  The day before was referred to as D-1, and the day after as D+1 (Similarly, there is an H-Hour). This way, if the operation’s date needed to be changed, any planning documents wouldn’t need to be updated… and this actually ended up happening to the D-day Normandy invasion.  It was pushed back a day due to bad weather.

Anywho, my search turned out being a good exercise in history – going to Wikipedia and the army’s website to find out a little more about D-day. 

I jokingly referred to my wife as a swarthy drunkard - never a good idea, married men and my first clue that my brain was working at a sub-standard level.  As I thought I was coming out of my stupor, I looked up the definition of swarthy (which I was sure meant hairy).  I found that it meant dark-skinned.  Unfortunately, one of the very next links in the dictionary referenced a swarthy gerbil.  When my axons and dendrites got together on that word, my remaining brain cells caused me to laugh out loud.

So, a word of warning to everyone that's being shamed into cleaning because people are coming to your house.  Do not mix cleaning chemicals in a small bathroom.  Convert, with me, to housekeeping agnosticism.  How can a house ever truly be clean?  If a house can never be truly clean, what's the point in trying to clean?

I haven’t worked on the eCommerce site lately, or on the local ratings site, but I’ll get on those here soon.  Hopefully, those will be successful.   

Apart from the web, in real life news, Katie and I are doing well.  We’re shopping around for some computer furniture for the office (since her Mom is snagging my current desk).   We’re also planning a trip for sometime this summer… Katie’s eyeing Nashville, or Vegas.  I’m eyeing my wallet… since we’ll be going to europe early next year as well.

Lastly, Katie’s uncle and aunt – Chris and Ann – brought their baby (Max) home Friday.  He was born prematurely and was in the NICU for two weeks, but he’s a trooper.  He’s been able to gain weight and keep his temperature steady.  They brought him home and showed him off to the family on Friday, hosting a cookout.  It’s about time things started going their way.

BargainFiend.com is now up and running.  It may have been a little premature to release to the public, but I figure it won’t get any hits for a while…

I still need to add items to the menu, and add article content (which will take a long time to write), and come up with a better way of getting content on the site.  Right now I’m scouring the internet for posts and manually adding the good deals to the site.  It takes a good bit of time to get that done…

The other thing that I realized today is that I need an easy way of ‘expiring’ deals.  I need a css class and a method in wordpress that will let me mark a post/deal as expired and have it switch that post’s css class to expired.  I’ll get to those over the next few days.

Maybe I should have waited to release the site until these things were taken care of, but I was too anxious to get it up and started.  I hope everyone likes it… if not, let me know how I can improve it.  I’m not going to be sensitive about it… It was created in a weekend (thanks to the flexibility of wordpress) and could stand to be improved.

So, in my last post I talked about spending time doing web work on side projects.  Fortunately, the three day weekend has given me time to do just that.

I decided to start off by attempting to modify a WordPress installation to do what I wanted – show short summaries of “deals” on the front page.  Clicking each link should result in the display of the full details of the deal.  Those details include links to the product page, and any information about how to take advantage of the deal (coupon codes, Mail In Rebate amounts, etc.). 

So, three days after starting I’m almost there (the site is still on my local machine only, though).  I’ve styled the main page, made use of jquery to animate the show/hide action of the full deal details and am about to finish up styling the search and single column pages.  I also need to make sure there’s a place for ads – after all, the site is intended to be profitable.  Later, I’ll add some articles on finding the best deal in a number of different areas (travel, cars, cables, etc.). 

So, by the time all this is up and running, I should be able to just make a quick blog post on Bargain Fiend and have it appear as I want.  I’ll probably add forums later, and sign up for some affiliate programs once people start visiting the site more often.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, I added a plugin that allows for the functionality of facebook connect on Bargain Fiend.  People can login to see who’s been visiting the site.  They can also share deal links and comment using their facebook accounts.  I think it’s a nice feature, one that people may enjoy… and that may keep people using my site rather than other bargain sites (maybe).

Anywho, I’m surprised that it’s only taken a weekend to get this close-to-done… and that includes most of Friday and Saturday morning’s work being scrapped due to my unhappiness with my own graphic design skills.  It really helps to base a project on a good framework – WordPress in this case… and in the e-commerce site’s case, I’m using Magento.  In both cases, I’m just using pre-existing functionality, tweaking it a bit, and skinning the site to look as I want it.  It’s much easier than starting from scratch… that’s for people with time and/or money.