2009
Nothing's Coming Out!
You want to know why recycling isn’t keeping pace, why the universe is going to suffer heat death and run out of energy a few billion years from now? I just opened a new container of bay leaves— if you don’t know what those …
2009
Anatomy of a Late Night
New Year’s Eve has totally thrown us off schedule. For some time (the formula for which is: NOW - # of years we’ve had a dog) we’ve been consistently in bed by 11, 12 on weekend nights, with 1am being a notably late night …
2009
HP: W3C Print CSS Testing
Sponsored by HP, I worked with the W3C to create tests so browser/ user-agent programmers can make sure their code conforms to CSS2.1 and CSS3 Print standards.
A long and ultimately very rewarding project that started out by teaching me some humility. Coming …
2008
“Life's Good”, Indeed
I am providing this post-mortem both as a public service and so I don’t punch in the screen of my brand-new LG monitor. I picked up a new 22” monitor at Best Buy yesterday after losing a monitor to the power surges from the ice …
2008
2008
Xmas Flick Tradition Continues for Hicks in Stix
I bought myself a couple of early Xmas/ Birthday presents this week, Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s. I bought those two old weepers in order to maintain the family tradition (my moth…
2008
denimrack: Denimrack Website Overhaul
Updated an existing X-Cart-powered ecommerce site to improve usability, correct bugs on the front-end and add reporting to the administrative tools.
Denimrack came to me with a list of edits they wanted to make to their live web site. I added tracking of abandoned purchases …
2008
Making .NET 2.0 Spit JSON
I just finished translating a set of PHP web services into C# for a national car insurer and came across two things worth mentioning, if only for my future reference.
Each service needed an XML and a JSON version. I knew I didn’t …
2008
Progressive Insurance: Progressive API Conversion
Took an existing API concept written in PHP, converted it to C#, polished some of the rough edges and documented.
Progressive had a proof-of-concept API for insurance price quotes written in PHP. They wanted it converted to C# for better client compatibility; the Read the full piece
2008