In honor of our marriage, Jess and I have started a joint blog to merge our two individual blogs together.

Her blog was titled "If I had a blog, this would be it" and this blog is title "Kyle->GetThoughts();" So to merge our blogs we came up with "If we had a marriage, these would be its thoughts". Jess' blog used to live at kessashypotheticalblog.blogspot.com, our new blog is http://dickersonshypotheticalblog.blogspot.com/

So head on over there and start reading, there are already a handful of posts that were created before we got everything setup properly, so be sure to get all the posts. This blog will now be deprecated and no longer updated.... it served me well.

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Well, let's see:

1. Got Married
2. Honeymooned
3. Flew to Utah
4. Successfully defended my thesis
5. Had our open house
6. Drove to California
7. Got into our apartment
8. Set up our Internet connection
9. Bought a bed
10. Started work
11. Had our stuff delivered
12. Had our bed delivered
13. Got a mattress
14. Am Exhausted

That's the very short version, stay tuned for more information.... eventually.


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FYI: I'm getting married in about 2 hours.

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So, the Custom M&Ms I ordered arrived at the house today. The custom printed ones were fine, but one of the extra bulk custom color bags was the wrong color. Instead of Blue they shipped Dark Blue. Frustrating. So I called their Customer Service number. "My M&Ms" gets a A+ for customer service from me:

1. No waiting time. The number rang, a automated response said "Thank you for calling My M&Ms Customer Support" or some such thing. Then a real live human answered.

2. Polite and helpful! She asked what she could help me with, and I told her the problem. Then she apologized for the mistake in a sincere tone of voice! She looked up my order information, and verified that I was the same person that placed the order (asking for the email address, billing address, and phone number on the order). Then, not only did she tell me how they were going to ship the correct item, she asked when I needed it by (which wasn't an issue since I was planning ahead, but led me to believe that they would have rush-processed the order if necessary). So now the correct color is on its way, and they're letting me keep the mistake order for the inconvenience.

It's so rare to get helpful, friendly customer service these days. While it was annoying that the order was incorrect, at least fixing it was a painless process requiring only a couple of minutes on the phone.

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As you probably know we used Google Docs to collect all the addresses of people we wanted to send announcements to. So, we have all the addresses in a nice spreadsheet format, properly formatted, ready to go. We thought, hey, we could probably save ourselves some time and hassle by just taking this spreadsheet and the stack of envelopes down to a printing company and have them use a nice font and print the addresses right on the envelopes. Well, you'd be wrong to think that apparently. After several in person visits and phone calls we've determined that these companies, with their thousands of dollars worth of equipment, are unable to perform the job of a $30 ink-jet printer connected to a crappy computer. We did find one place that was willing to do the job, for 4 times the cost of the announcements and envelopes.

All I wanted was some ink arranged in specific patterns! Is that really so hard? Well, no, it's not. So, now I'm doing it myself. After 40 minutes making sure the addresses looked nice and would print correctly I was ready to go. And now I'm just sitting here waiting for them to print. Seriously, in the year 2009 companies are unable to print addresses onto envelopes? Where does all the junk mail come from! SOMEONE must be able to do this cheaply.

Anyways, that was my complaint for the day. While Jess is having her bridal shower, I'll be printing envelopes, putting announcements in them, sealing them, and putting stamps on them. What a great party.

And for all the complainers about how printed envelopes are lame, the fancy font makes them look fine and is saving hours upon hours of tedious work. Who scrutinizes the envelope anyways?

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My lab on campus just moved and we now have a room dedicated to meetings and such. Unfortunately, the whiteboards haven't actually been installed yet. There was one leaning up against the wall vertically and my lab partner and I filled it trying to figure out exactly what we needed to do for the lab. We wanted to use another one so we designed to take another one and lean it up against the wall next to it. Unbeknownst to us those things are actually incredibly heavy. Well, we got it into position to raise up the end that would lean against the wall. Each on one side we lifted it up, then I slid my hand down the side to get a lower grip and keep lifting. Turns out that the threadings on the screw holes aren't cleaned off. So there are razor sharp metal edges sticking out the back of the board. I felt it slice my hand, but didn't realize that I was actually bleeding until I went to wash off the marker ink stuff and the paper towel came away with a red streak.

It kind of stings a bit:

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Django is a web framework for Python. I love working in Python; it thinks like I do more so than any other programming language I've used. Getting entirely frustrated with working in PHP I decided to give Django a whirl. Django will power the new version of the Board which is in progress.

I started a side project this week (as mentioned in the previous entry). In 72 hours I was able to develop and deploy a (basically) fully operational website. This includes time to configure the server, style the website nicely, and do research to learn how to do several tricky little pieces of magic.

The motivation behind this system was that for our wedding registry we wanted to include items from several places, and rather than registering at many different stores we wanted a more centralized solution. Enter myregistry.com. Myregistry.com is pretty slick and has a lot of promise, I really like a lot of the way they do things for your registry. However, in order for guests to view the registry they must provide their name and email address. I find this entirely intrusive and obnoxious. I sent a message to their support explaining why harvesting email addresses from guests for advertising is obnoxious. Then, since they have no intention of changing this practice, I decided to create my own web registry system.

Behold: ARegistryFor.Us This is what 72 hours with Django can do. Pretty darn impressive if you ask me. And, of course, that isn't 72 hours of programming, that's 72 hours of life. It's a well functioning registry system. It's not quite ready for multiple users, but it is designed with that intention, and with some more small tweaking should be ready to fly.

Some of the slickest features:
1. The fancy text of our names is created automagically when the registry is created in the system. It's user-customizable, as is the URL of each specific registry.
2. When you add an item you provide the URL of an image, the system automagically grabs that image and scales it to the right size.

Things I'd like to add:
- Auto field guess: give the system a URL of the item and have it guess at the name, price, etc. I'm thinking I'll use Beautiful Soup to help with this.
- Welcome Page: give each registry a welcome page that they can have a slide show on or something.

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