Frenzied Daddy

As most of you know, I started a website- wishease.com. It’s a generic online wishlist, generic in the sense that it’s good for any website or even any off-line store. I’m aiming at people who want to keep track of their friends and their friends’ wishes.

Slowly, it’s gaining other users besides me, my family, and a few friends. I picked up two people that I don’t even recognize, but they haven’t entered “wishlists.” In fact, the second one sent in a feedback — that was “My wish is … ”

I am 3 ft away from being homeless. I just need some gas money to get to friends house where I will start a new job. I only have $10.00 in my bank account and I need to drive a old honda to Los Angeles. My wish is that someone or people would lend me money and I will apy ever cent back. I tried a car loan, my family doesn’t want to lend me money because they are dysfunctional and would rather see me in the streets than make it. They say it builds character and testimony. Well, I need to leave on 2/26/05. I have a tank of gas, and ten dollars in the bank. If anyone cares my bank account is with US bank and the number is xxxxxxxxxxxxxx. My email is victoriaxxxxxxxx@excite.com. Please let me know how much you lent me, and I will make payments. Thank you and God Bless you. More important than money for me, are your prayers. Please pray that my 83 HOnda that smells of exhaust and needs a tune-up, and by the grace of God is still working……pray that it makes it to Los Angeles on 101. Please start a prayer chain for me. My Love to you all, and blessings.

This is not what I set Wishease up as- and I was pretty sure I was clear about the purpose of the site. But that’s not a bad usage either; a place to record, somewhat anonymously, what you’re “wishing for.” An usurpation I don’t really mind.

I found this terrific book at a new scrapbooking place Ms B went to- Scrapbook Attack. It brought together a lot of thoughts I had about everyday life, and why people only scrapbook ‘events,’ and gave ideas on journalling and photographing the normalacies of life. It was totally cool, and I recommend it highly.

Not only is it a household cleaner and a hero of the Trojan War, but it’s also some new buzzword for a neat old web technique. Basically, using javascript, passing information between the client and the server (your browser and the webserver) on it’s own timeline.

Google Suggest (Beta) uses it; watch the results change as you type in the box.

I thought I was being slick by having one javascript function run a timer and every 60 seconds trigger another function from an included javascript page, that happened to be generated from a script on the server, which caused new items to show up without refreshing the browser. But I had stumbled upon an old technique that has been refined since it was first dreamed up. Now all I gotta do is find a place to use it.

addendum: It’s funny how kid’s brains work. I grew up in Anchorage, Alaska. Playing with maps.google.com (another ‘AJAX (Asynchronous Javascript And XML)’ site), I looked up the neighborhood where I last lived. I could figure out where my school was, and my kid-brain knew how to get there. And my high school too. But I had no idea which direction other things were; Merrill field was a lot closer than I remember it, Earthquake park was surprisingly close. Those were places that I only went on special occasions; we’d drive past Merrill field going downtown, or we’d drive past Earthquake park (I think ) going to the airport. Not only were they in a different direction in my brain’s atlas, but also they were a lot farther away. I wonder how I can help my daughters see the world as the way an adult sees it, or even if I should.

For those of you keeping score, Baby K is actively crawling, and the dogs are learning to flee. For like Sunny’s biting, Baby K’s hair pulling is becoming legendary.

But that’s not the biggest news of this weekend. Miss B’s bike no longer has training wheels. One day of peer pressure has proven stronger than one summer’s insistent questioning by one’s parents, and Sunday she was flying down the sidewalk at breakneck pace. So this is what it’s like to be free! she was heard to exclaim. Watching her pedal away from me was bittersweet. On the one hand, HURRAY for her. It’s so cool, and it’s a delight to see. But on the other hand, it’s another few feet on that string. Bike riding was, for me, a ticket all over the neighborhood, and I’m sure it will be so for her too.

When I was a ‘kid’, I reveled in the end-of-semester stress, and when it peaked, I loved it. Well, perhaps ‘loved’ is the wrong word, but I digress. I likened handling stress to ’stress surfing’ where you’re in the curl, the wave is pushing you forward, and you can see the light at the end of the tunnel. There’s a real adreniline rush that kicks in, and you know you’re going to crash and go underwater, but the goal is to get as far as you can and look as good as possible doing it before the crash hits and the sharks eat you.

Now, however, it’s more like ’stress doggie paddling’ where I’m just hoping I can stay afloat long enough to reach my board.

… I did it

Now, on WishEase.com, you can import your Amazon wishlist directly into the site. <preen> I did it with the Amazon Web Services, which actually have been upgraded since I started that project. There’s a bunch of neat things you can do with those Amazon services, including item searches and other things. They’ve also got the Alexa Web services too- so I can incorporate Alexa information into other applications, using the same development stuff. For instance, I could put up a list of referrers (people linking to my site) and then show their ‘Alexa Web Popularity’ (which is akin to Google Pagerank) .

First, czar of dumbasses, don’t ask me for a bid on your homework. Second, don’t limit the bid to a measly $7.00. Cheating isn’t cheap.

A few weeks ago, the stress level at work shot sky-high, and it’s slowly coming down like a feather drifting in the breeze.

Listening to the Boss and the Marketer talk about how to sell our main ‘product,’ it’s been tough trying to figure out exactly where to press my brain and shove- so this past week, I’ve been writing ‘wizards.’ Apparently, the way we have the settings-area configured makes great sense to, well, us but not to the people who would be using the service. Go figure.

They have a list of about thirty people who would like to take a look at our ‘product,’ but it won’t work for them for one reason or another; over the past two weeks I’ve written configuration wizards, an interface to Paypal, and an interface to Moneris. I think the next project is to work with our designer and isolate CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) tags to use in place of many of the built-in definitions my predecessor wrote in (that way the users can easily modify the site).

Anyhow, my stress level has been drifting down slowly.

It’s funny, under stress; I want to run around doing everything. I have a hard time trusting other people to ‘do their jobs’ — I want my fingers in the marketing, in the design. But really, what I need to do is tightly focus on my role and let the Boss handle the inter-workings. This lesson has been hard to learn; I haven’t really learned it over the past um thirty-five years. At one point, it cost me a volleyball championship, and it’s cost me at least two science fairs. Basically, when the pressure builds, I’d rather help someone else with their job than work on mine. That, thankfully, has changed too- while I sit quietly at my desk and madly key in new stuff, I can hear the other people in a meeting talking about marketing and design, and feel left out but determined to finish my tasks.

We’ve been reading this book at night to Miss B (and by happy coincidence also Baby K), and it’s been terrific. Reading out loud to her has gotten us to a place where we’re not fighing any more to get her to bed, and it’s something she really likes. We’ve done a lot more reading out loud in the past, but for one reason or another, our schedule has caused it to drop from our habits. Kind of like my running, sadly.

In this book, we’re learning about four kids with four different (elemental) kinds of magic. But rather than being flashy ’show faces in the fire’ or ‘predict the future,’ kinds of magic, they’re more work-a-day magic; they have affinities for certain elements. In the most recent chapter, one of the kids was trying to break up a fight by bringing up a small amount of water from the harbor and dump it on the fracas. But she got distracted and turned around, and the small bucket of water turned into a ten-foot waterspout which menaced the marketplace.

We were on the edges of our seats learning how Tris handled the waterspout, and the repercussions of it. The book is well written and fun to read out loud.