If you do quite a bit of web development there is a nice FireFox plug-in that can help show you which CSS selectors are not in use. This can be handy when you are working on cleaning up a site from an old layout and want to reduce just how much garbage code that is left over from the old design. Dust Me Selectors was just updated to support FireFox 3 which if you have not updated yet I urge you to.
I am back in Maryland this week so I will get back to anyone who contacts me as soon as possible. I am here until Friday this time so it will be a bit longer for me to respond.
Through my lifetime I have had to stay in quite a few different hotels. Recently work has been calling me down to Timonium, MD and they have been putting me up in the Hunt Valley Marriott. I must say that this is one of the nicest hotels I have stayed in. Upon check-in I was greeted by very courteous staff who were set out to do anything they could to make your stay enjoyable.
However cost comes with the nice decor. The room I have been staying in have been around $220 per night. The bedding is some of the best I have seen. They have down comforters on every bed, nice fluffy pillows and the mattresses are very comfortable. The room I am staying in even has a flat panel LCD tv which is very nice.
This week I am down in Timonium, MD for work. I thought I would take a few minutes to review a restaurant that is close to work. On a lunch break you cannot get very far without a car so it is really convenient to have this almost next door.
During my first visit the guys brought me over to Qdoba for lunch. I was hungry and usually a burrito is small so I ordered one chicken and one steak. That was a mistake. The burritos at Qdoba are pretty large and one would fill up just about anyone. My favorite item there would have to be the chicken burrito, but I have also tried the Mexican Gumbo which is really good.
If you are in the area of one of these restaurant’s I would highly suggest that you stop in for a meal. The food is great but the service was just as good. I was actually surprised at how good the service was for a restaurant like this.
I will be out of town for the rest of this week. I will be going to Maryland until Friday and getting back late. If anyone is trying to contact me I will get back to you as soon as I am back home.
Over the last few days I have had several kernel panics on OS X 10.5.2. The only thing that has changed since this all started happening was a new job. I have been working from home using the Cisco client for the first few days and all was going well. I found it tedious to continuously enter my password into the Cisco client and it was recommended that I use a utility called Shimo which is a more feature rich front end for the Cisco backend.
All of these kernel panics started happening shortly after I started to use Shimo, I am wondering if it could be the cause? Have any of you readers had this issue? It seems to only happen sometimes and not every time I connect or disconnect. It even happens after I have been connected for a while. I think I will have to discontinue use of Shimo and go back to the Cisco client. If this solves the kernel panics I will be sure to let you know.
For the next few days (Weds - Friday) I will be out of town on a business trip. I am being called into the office to work and collaborate with the team for a few days. I will get back to anyone that contacts me over thee days as soon as I possibly can.
I am currently looking for a PHP Developer position at a company that is local to my area or something that will allow remote employees. I am interested in contract positions as well as an on the books employee. If you know of anything please feel free to contact me. All of my information is located on my resume. I have 8 years of experience with PHP/MySQL and I am a Zend Certified Engineer with PHP 4.
As you might know I have recently changed employers. I am now working for ERE Media and they are strong supporters of continuing education which I love. I just finished taking my first course over at Oreilly School and I must say that I am pleased with the course. The first course that I took was a “brush up” course in Linux administration (Linux/Unix 1: The Unix file system). I know the basics of Linux and this course actually did teach me some things.
At first I was a bit skeptical about the on-line courses that they offer. The main bonus was that it was not “led” by an instructor like most of the courses I have attended on-line. When I say that I mean you do not have to be there to attend the course at a set time during the day. You get to choose when you login and do the reading and assignments. The instructor(s) will login and grade your performance based on Objectives and Quizzes that they provide for you.
In this course there are 19 lessons which you can see in the course syllabus. I plan to take the other 3 system administration classes but first I am going to take the client side web development courses. What is cool about Oreilly School is that when you complete a set of courses such as the system administration courses you will get a certificate from the University of Illinois.
I think the best part of this entire setup that Oreilly School has is the fact that you do not have to sit down at a certain time to do the work, also there is NO time-limit on when you have to complete a course by. You could theoretically start a course and take 6 months or a year to complete it. There is one downfall to what they offer. You have to pay lab fee’s while taking the course. I think that this should be included in the cost of the course. They should not force you to tack that onto the cost of the course. The lab fee’s are pretty cheap at $9.95 per month, however if you take one of the system admin courses you have to pay another $9.95 per month because you get access to a root server. This is all automated so why should you have to pay the extra fee’s like this? The courses are cheap compared to others that you can find on the Internet but these will get you interacting with the Objectives and Quizzes.
The only thing I can think that the Oreilly School could do to improve this service is to add a 24 x 7 telephone support line so you don’t have to wait upwards of 1-8 hours from a response. If you contact them during normal business hours you tend to get a response faster, however if you email them after hours it will take some time. My guess is they only have 1-2 people working overnight to answer questions, etc.
Overall I rate this service an A and look forward to taking the other courses that are waiting for me.
Over the last few days I have been sick as a dog. I have been congested, short of breath and even sick to my stomach. I went to the doctors yesterday and they said that I have a sinus infection and a double ear infection. I hope I get better soon it just sucks being sick.
Although I have been sick I have been pushing through it trying to get as much work done as I can. I have been making some good progress with the Google Maps API and hope to start that article at some point so keep your eyes open.
