Catching My Breath
The past month and a half have been a whirlwind of activity, punctuated with family illnesses.
I’ll start with the illness, a stomach flu that caught us by surprise while we were vacationing up north in Gilford, NH, on the shores of Lake Winnepesaukee. Our plan was to spend a relaxing long holiday weekend on President’s Day weekend and go skiing and/or showshoeing. While Saturday and Sunday were pleasant with swimming in the hotel pool and spending time at the Funspot arcade with its large variety of current and classic video games, my wife came down with an intense, violent stomach flu just after midnight on Monday. While she spent the day in bed with occasional hurried trips to the bathroom, my son and I stayed in the living room part of the suite and hunkered down as best we could.
We came home on Tuesday and the hour and a half drive back home was uneventful thanks to some anti-diarrheal medicine. However, while my wife very slowly recovered, my son and I got hit with the bug just after midnight on Wednesday morning, the day I was due back at work. Calling this thing violent was an understatement; the full contents of my digestive system were emptied in almost no time flat and left me in a near delirious state. I spent the rest of the day on the family room sofa in extreme agony in between numerous bouts of fitful sleep. I would wake up, sure that hours had passed, only to see that I’d only been asleep for 15 or so minutes. Meanwhile, the muscles in my arms, legs and shoulders were a mess of aches and it felt like someone had beaten me about the midsection with a 2×4.
It took me until late Sunday to fully recover. It took my son nearly the same amount of time. However, he didn’t seem to have the same illness. Instead, he contracted something called Fifth Disease and, while my wife and I stayed in a state of elongated nausea, he had numerous fevers ranging from 101 to 104 degrees Fahrenheit.
It took my wife about an extra week to fully recover.
Meanwhile, my side projects with Compass Games continue to move forward. I have taken over their webmaster duties and am now in the process of overhauling their site. All I’m going to say is that the HTML coding of the site left a bit to be desired. It looked like an HTML editing tool like FrontPage was used and then the results were cut-and-pasted willy-nilly where needed to fill a void. Ghastly, ghastly stuff.
My goal was to use a software package called Joomla! to redesign their site, but time pressures have pushed me away from that at the moment. As I am not experienced with Joomla! and Compass Games needs to have the site updated tout de suite, I have decide to postpone the Joomla! installation and configuration to a later date and have instead used my own home-brew templating system based on Ruby scripts, Javascript and the erb Ruby code module. So far, it’s all coming together nicely.
Other projects continue to vie for my time as well. I’ve made a ton of progress on my Crucible web application framework and I shall soon use it in a production environment with my dice roller application. Zoran continues to keep me busy as well. Not only am I involved in several concurrent projects, but I’ve also been tapped for a possible management position in the near future. If this does happen, it will add another set of challenges to my career. I hope it happens sooner than later.