It has been in my plans for a few months now to buy a Nintendo Wii for the house. Dylan has always had fun while playing it at friends houses and I have to admit it is fun even as an adult. Yesterday I went out and bought the Wii which of course led to buying accessories and games for it as well. My fiance Claire wanted the Wii Fit which is a board you can use to play games but also as a fitness tool. I added that to the list along with a couple games and the Wii Fit Personal Trainer game. In the end everything came to a total close to $600 which added up really quick.

The first thing Dylan did when he got home was to play the Wii. He choose some kid games and while watching him play I thought they were ok but not great. I had bought the snowboarding game and wanted to give it a shot. I do have to admit that using the Wii Fit to snowboard was a new experience for me. I have not been snowboarding in years but used to go all the time when I lived in Vermont. Snowboarding on the Wii Fit takes some getting used to as when you put more weight on your heels or the balls of your feet by your toes it makes you turn. It does take a moment to get used to it but after a short period of time I was able to control the character.

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Over the last few weeks I have had potential employers ask to see a code sample. I have not had any recent code that I could share and out of all the code samples I have written the one that got the most inquiries was the YellowPages Content Grabber. This code does not work any longer however. The code is using curl to scrape the HTML and extract the content from the site. I created this a long time ago when I was creating a “local” list of businesses which I could contact to offer my services.

Starting today I am going to completely revamp the code and also fix the regular expressions so that they will actually grab content. I am going to add a front-end to the code so that you do not have to alter code and run this manually from the browser by altering the query string in the URL.

I have started on this today and will be working on it heavily over the next few days until it is completed. At this point I have finalized the fetching of categories and storing them in the database. Now because this code is just for sample code which I will probably turn into an article on this site I am not going to use any special database abstraction layer. I am going to keep it simple and just use the php mysql_* functions.

Stay tuned for more information if you are interested in a complete rewrite of the code I linked to above.

Over the last few weeks I have been applying all over for Web Developer positions here in the Boston area.  I have been telling everyone that I am a beginner with CSS / JavaScript however I think I have been selling myself short.  I decided to take the W3Schools CSS Quiz just to see how much I know off the top of my head.  I found the quiz to be easy but I never figured I would make it through 20 questions in 3 minutes 34 seconds and get them all correct. I know that the W3Schools quiz is just a simple one so that you can see how much you know and is not actually a test of skill.  While I still have quite a bit to learn I think I have been stating that I know less than I do and well that is not a good thing when it comes to trying to find a job.  I have been trying to be honest however I have been lying to myself.  I know more about CSS than I thought.  I also did a lot of reading today from a sitepoint book I have and most of the stuff I understoood.

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Tonight when we were on our way home from picking up the boys, we stopped in Montpelier Vermont. We could not stop laughing long enough to take a picture of the sticker silhouette people on the windows. Funny though it looks to be registered in New York State. Even Better!!!

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Over the last few months the team at Politics.com has been very hard at work. We have been working on a lot of new features to make the site even more interactive for the user. I am hoping that all of these changes will make the site become more popular with the political community. If you are political in the very least and love the social side of the internet you should definitely check out the site. Politics.com is a social networking site where you can meet people and debate political issues. There are a lot of features to the site and I will not be covering them all in this post but you can think of it as a combination between YouTube, Digg and Facebook!

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The other day Steven released another video on the TMC website. This video is all about Key Value Coding and using Bindings in your interface. I finally got the chance to watch the rest of the video this morning and I have to say that it is a great starting place if you are looking into bindings. He goes into detail about KVC and explains how it all works. I do wish however that he went into more details on the magic of Bindings and how they work behind the scenes.

There are many developers (myself included) who have not yet adopted bindings because they see them as some magical functionality. At some point I will have to read deeper about bindings and actually learn how they work so that I can use them properly in my project. I do know how to implement a table view without using bindings and I have to say… Bindings looks *much* easier to do. It was a short process for getting the data into the table view in this video tutorial. When doing all of this without bindings you need to have all the table view methods in place to return the proper data.

This is another good release from TMC so be sure to check out the KVC and Bindings video tutorial if you want to start learning about KVC or Bindings

The other day my friend Steven from Thoughtful Tree Software released a new version of his Inspector Framework. This new version includes both the framework and an Interface Builder Plug-in which makes it extremely easy for you to integrate this into your own projects.

After reading his blog post and watching the video that he has created it looks like a very nice addition to any application that would require an inspector style window. I might have to look at using this in my project the TomTom POI Manager. I am not yet sure what I would use this for but surely I can find a reason to use it.

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So while this does not seem to be *new* it was just e-mailed to me by my parents and I had never seen it. It is an amazing piece of work.. Here is what the e-mail said about it.

This is almost unbelievable. See how all of the balls wind up in catcher cones.

This incredible machine was built as a collaborative effort between the Robert M. Trammell Music Conservatory and the Sharon Wick School of Engineering at the University of Iowa. Amazingly, 97% of the machines & gt; components came from
John Deere Industries and Irrigation Equipment of Bancroft, Iowa, yes farm equipment!

It took the team a combined 13,029 hours of set-up, alignment, calibration, and tuning before filming this video but as you can see it was WELL worth the effort. It is now on display in the Matthew Gerhard Alumni Hall at the University and is already slated to be donated to the Smithsonian.

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The other day I found another web developer with the same name as me. It seems that there are more of us in the world….. I wonder just how many Joseph Crawford’s there are who are web developers? You can see this guy’s site. It seems he has a year on me when it comes to web development. Is there a way to search people in the US and figure out their careers other than a Google Search?

Steven has released another video tutorial over at TeachMeCocoa.com. This time it is about Basic C Programming. I cannot wait to have some time to sit down and watch this later tonight. I have to give him credit too because I sat down last night and tried to make a screencast and it did not come out nearly as good as his are. The entire recording and editing process takes a lot of time just to create one of these tutorials. I thought just how hard could it be…. Then I tried it.

Thank You Steven for investing so much time into helping others learn to program for the Mac and iPhone. I really appreciate it and hope that others do as well. You are not taking on a small task here with basic tutorials you are doing something great and if there is anything I can do to help just let me know.