Jeff’s Blog

Waiting for activation

Originally uploaded by decidedlyodd

1 hour in line

lime pie

Originally uploaded by decidedlyodd

I made this for Easter dinner. It’s the first time I’ve ever made my own crust. Can’t wait to try it out!

On Thursday, I helped Robert pick up his new grill at Home Depot. Ever since I got an apartment with a balcony, I’ve been considering getting a grill myself too. Today, Joe, Robert and I went grill shopping. We hit up a ton of stores–Home Depot, Sears, Lowe’s, McClendon’s, Fred Meyer.

I ended up buying the Weber Spirit E-310. It’s definitely a more expensive model than I’d originally planned to buy, but I wanted to buy a quality, no frills grill. I have no need for side burners or other features that might just break in the future.

Now, to get this sucker assembled…

Do you know what this is?

It was stuck in my garbage disposal.

For those who don’t know, I’m the webmaster for OutVentures. I volunteer my time trying to provide the membership of the club a kick-ass web site. Last winter, I completed a full rewrite of the site, which I’m told is the envy of other local LGBT sports organizations. Anyhow, it’s just my way of giving back to the community. When the site went up last spring, all of the core features were present but I’ve spent the past year or so periodically adding improved functionality for users and the board. For example, last week I added a trip reports listing section.

One of the original design goals of the site was to reduce the amount of manual intervention required by administrators. In particular, I wanted to streamline the membership sign up process. The process on the old site (which I did not write but which I maintained for a year) was:

1. User fills out form on website to join the club.
2. An email containing the membership information is sent to the membership director.
3. User pays via PayPal or by sending a check. If PayPal was used, the membership director gets an email from PayPal once payment has been completed.
4. Membership director enters the form information into an account creation form manually.
5. Membership director emails the new member with a temporary password and user name.

The process for renewing a membership was not too different exception for all the filling out of membership information by both the member and director. It was an effective but extremely manual process. In the new version of the site, I worked on the flow was simplified to:

1. User fills out membership form on web site, choosing a user name and password of their choosing. Their account is created immediately, but doesn’t have permission to do much of anything until they pay.
2. User pays via PayPal or a check by mail.
3. Membership director receives an email from PayPal confirming payment.
4. Membership director goes to the website, clicks on the name of the user to approve.
5. User automatically receives an email informing them that their account has been approved.

I spent the better part of this afternoon hooking up PayPal Instant Payment Notification (IPN) to cut step 4 out of the process. I got it working and it’s great. In most cases, a user will follow the sign up process and have their account activated automatically as soon as they pay by PayPal. Manual intervention will still be needed for cases where the PayPal email address doesn’t match the one we have on file (this happens more than you’d think). However, it should be a massive improvement in turnaround for new memberships and renewals.

In order to get this all working, I had to dig back into the PHP code for the web site and into the PHP manual for various pieces of functionality. After working in a .NET shop since July, PHP seems incredibly clunky while simultaneously quick and dirty. Adding some dynamic behavior to a page is easy and has a lot less overhead, but once you want to do anything more complex, it starts getting kind of scary. It’s funny because I worked in a PHP shop for about 2 years, but never noticed this until I’d been exposed to other ways of doing web development and had to go back. Not that ASP.NET doesn’t have its own idiosyncrasies.

While trying to figure out how to change the HTTP status code, it suddenly occured to me that PHP is totally the new Visual Basic. Apparently, I’m not the first one to have this thought. The similarities:

1. Quick, dirty and easy way of writing simple code to solve a problem
2. Easily lends itself to poorly structured code
3. Not really designed to cope with more complex projects
4. Lots of useful built-in libraries for basic coding (array, string manipulation, resource allocation)
5. Not much support in the built-in libraries for large project necessities (logging, instrumentation, error handling)
6. A large and growing base of software mainly due #1

This is how my phone looked after I had to call 911 this evening. I was driving my friend Brynna back to where she’s staying in Maple Leaf while visiting Seattle. While traveling north on 10th Ave E at 520 to get onto the freeway, I saw a guy on a bike spill badly on the road. Just before we saw him fall, I remarked to Brynna about how he’d been going. He’d been in front of me for just about the entire hill and I was going about the speed limit (maybe a little bit over–probably about 30mph).

I pulled my car over, put on my flashers and we ran to see if the guy was ok. He was laying on the ground, slightly rolling around and groaning. He seemed totally unresponsive to us talking to him even though I was asking him if he was ok. I called 911 as more people (at least 3 other bicyclists and a car) pulled over to help. I explained what was happening to 911 and they said paramedics would be there in a couple minutes. Around this time, the guy was sitting up, still mumbling and confused. One of the other onlookers had asked him what his name was. He was trying to talk, but it was just all coming out mumbled. 911 then called back to ask “if the car was still there”. Apparently, they thought he’d been hit by a car. I informed them that he hadn’t been hit by a car, but that it looked like he had tumbled after losing control, probably from hitting a bump in the road. The operator then asked me if I was sure, to which I said yes. There were no cars although I do vaguely recall now that he’d just passed a parked car when he tumbled.

After what seemed like a while but couldn’t have been more than a minute or two, a fire engine rounded the corner with its lights on. It occurred to me on the way home that there’s a fire station on the corner of Roanoke and 10th, about a couple hundred yards from where this was all happening. After I saw the lights but before they actually arrived on the scene, the guy stood up and started saying completely coherently that he was fine, not to call anybody, that he was sorry for having bothered everybody, etc. Everybody of course told him that he had been very disoriented and unable to speak only a couple minutes ago. The fire department gave him a quick once over and let him go after he assured them that he was fine. He said his shoulder hurt a little and his ear was bleeding a little, but otherwise was fine.

His bike was definitely damaged. It had a flat front tire and one of the drop handlebars was bent near the shifter. I’m not sure if the tire became flat after he crashed or was the source of the crash.

He left to walk home, the other onlookers returned to their bikes or cars and the fire department got ready to leave. I resumed driving Brynna home. We both discussed how strange it was that he’d gone from being fairly messed up to completely coherent in a matter of seconds. Is that a typical response to this sort of injury? I wonder if he’d had a seizure while riding which caused him to lose control. The severely slurred speech would seem to indicate something like that, but I’m obviously not a medical professional. If he was an epileptic who’d known he’d had a seizure, I suppose he might react in such a way.

Anyhow, it seemed like everybody was ok although it was pretty scary that at first when the guy seemed really messed up.