Independance Day

Last Tuesday was independance day. The IBM site I work at shut down on the Monday as well so I took the other three days off and had a week off. It was a week at home as we have less than no money after doing the attic and two bathrooms. When I had the time ( which is difficult with the two kids ) I was out in the garage trimming it out and trying to tidy it up and clean it out. It is still not finished and both the cars are still parked in the drive way..... maybe this weekend. We went to the pool almost everyday and also went to Jordan Lake on the Sunday for a picnic lunch and swim in the murky water.

The week before last Matthew went to bible school for the week.... they start the brainwashing early in the bible belt. It was fun for him, they sang songs and played and he got to hang out with one of his friends. It was for 3hrs a day in the morning. This week and the next he is going to the YMCA each morning to do stuff.... play and have some supervised fun with a bunch of other kids. This means Adam benefits from some one on one time with Margaret

I'm still managing to work from home 3 days a week. I heard on the radio driving in to work this morning that they are predicting fuel peaking at $4 a gallon over summer so there is even more reason to try and work from home. IBM recently introduced a new thing in our area... "Think Friday". This is where we are encouraged to inovate. They don't want us to work on the 'normal' tasks but to pull our heads from out of the sand and see what the market is doing and try and come up with new ideas to lead it. Considering the super tight deadlines we always seem to have I'm not sure how well this will work for us plebs in the trenches, I think it is trying to target more of the upper management than us. But we shall see. I am taking the opportunity to take a look at ajax and some of the open source tools available out there. I have recently installed MySQL, the Apache HTTP server, and ruby on rails onto my machine at home. I also have grabbed the ruby on rails eclipse plugin. I have managed to get it all configured and running together ( which was NOT a simple task ). Now I am going to write me some rails code and a few web pages to use it and then I'll have a go at ajax-ifying it. We sadly lack any tooling to help ajax develoeprs and so I don't think it will be a bad thing to get a general understanding of how it all works.