We started last year searching for a house, and I ended it lounging in newly purchased house with the first actual week off from work I’ve had in years. Over the summer, we took a road trip to Las Vegas with the girls I finally quit my ridiculously part time job at Wizards of the Coast (moved away from Renton).

In any case, let me see if I can at least write out 12 bullet points:

• Jan: started the home search
• Feb: ???
• Mar: Found the house, signed the papers!
• Apr: We started refinishing the floors while the house was still empty.
• May: Started moving our stuff in, and cleaning up the old house we were renting.
• Jun: First official month actually living in the new house.
• Jul: Niki’s 9th birthday!
• Aug: Road trip to Vegas (started in July, to be honest), and my brother’s wedding.
• Sep: Surgery to fix my sinus issue.
• Oct: Maeby’s 5th birthday!
• Nov: My first official year at Substantial
• Dec: Took an actual week off!

It’s amazing how much time the new home claimed and maybe someone can fill in the ???, but I’m satisfied with 2011 nevertheless.

Today, I went in to see the doc again and he felt I had gotten a lot worse than the last time I saw him, and noticed how bad my ears looked. In fact, he recommended an immediate myringotomy to keep me from temporarily losing my hearing. I nearly canceled² but now that I’ve gone through it, I can tell how bad my right ear congested.

He also cleared out my sinuses so he could poke around and see what’s going on in my skull. First he stuffed my sinuses with cottonballs soaked in local anesthesia (ridiculously uncomfortable). He followed that with a good vacuuming. The tubing was clear. Was clear. Oh god, it was terrible. Once he got it all cleared out he stuck an endoscope in and took a look around.

Ultimately, he suspects a type of nasal polyp, that will most likely need to be removed surgically. I’ve scheduled a CT scan for Wednesday to confirm, and then I’ll possibly have to schedule a surgery. Either way, I’m hoping to get my sense of smell and taste back soon. My hearing’s half way back!

Of course now I’m leaking fluids out of my nose and ear, so you’ll have to excusemewhileiruntothebathroom

With help from family, it’s all done though and we no longer have any ties to our old place. Normally when we move I’m filled with a sense of melancholy as we pull out of the drive way that one last time, but this time? After two months of moving? After a year of packing and storing and living in what was functionally a real estate show room? As the tow truck pulled away with me in the passenger seat, I don’t even think I looked back.

In time since I last posted, Nicole and I managed to not only find a house for sale, but we also bought it. We’ve started renovating it preparing for our move with happens in a couple days. We’ve even started a blog about the process.

I’m still working at the awesome Substantial, though at the rate they’re growing, it feels like I haven’t met even half the people that now work there. I’m also still working for Wizards of the Coast, albeit even less than I was previously, as I’ve requested to be put on the back burner while we work on the house and try to get moved in. I’m also still doing work for Nology Media at times, and their growth rate is probably double that of Substantial’s. In any case, all that adds up to me being incredibly busy. Any free time I have lately is filled now with playing Black Ops, usually for an hour or so, just to get me away from a keyboard and mouse (Magic Trackpad, actually, but you get my point).

Because of how busy I am, many of my side projects are suffering greatly:

• TweetMe.TV has barely left the planning stage¹.
• TweetMe.me has been in barely maintenance mode.
• Prototype Apps barely has a working alpha, and I’ve already considered switching technology.
• Seek and Destroy is also undergoing a technology change.
• Validate on Save has had more work done by contributors than myself lately (yay open source!)
• and there’s a bunch more (probably on my github that I haven’t touched in a long while.

Ah well, maybe I’ll be able to get to some of those this summer².

In other news: I started drinking this Peanut Passion smoothie from Emerald City Smoothies for lunch. They’re ridiculously good. Nicole put together a recipe so I could make them at home. It goes something like:

• 1 banana
• 1 half pint of strawberry yogurt
• 1 half pint of milk
• 2 tablespoons of smooth peanut butter
• 2 tablespoons of granola or cereal

Blend together until smooth. The measurements aren’t exact, you could practically use any amount you want, it will most likely come out good. I usually throw in a tablespoon of grape or strawberry jelly as well. A coworker at Substantial, Shawn, suggested we get a hand immersion blender; we did that, and we basically just toss everything into a large enough cup and blend away.

He broke it down into 5 points:

• Good front-end engineers rarely have a computer science degree.
  I ended up leaving college to work in the design department of a newspaper.
• Good front-end engineers cannot be forged from back-end engineers.
  I started with html, css, and javascript years before I started dabbling with back-end techonology.
• Good front-end engineers list Javascript on their resume, not jQuery. John Resig (creator of jQuery) was about 12 years old when I started writing Javascript.
• Good front-end engineers are artists.
  I’ve been in several bands, own a ton of camera equipment, and love to draw and paint (though I haven’t done any of that in years).
• If you want to find good front-end engineers, look to the newspaper and print industry.
  I worked for two years doing advertising design at the newspaper (one of my first jobs).

The last point practically guarantees my status as a rare-breed with the print industry (and newspapers, specifically) imploding. If only there was a way to forward this to every prospective employer.

In any case, I got this sent to my comcast.net email address this morning:

Dear MATTHEW AUAYAN,

Our records show that you recently changed the email password on your account. If you did not authorize this change, please call Comcast at 1-800-COMCAST and we’ll be happy to assist in any way we can.

Your security is top priority at Comcast! To learn more, visit our FAQs at www.comcast.com.

Best regards, The Comcast Team\r\n[EventId:60097249:/EventId]

I bet when my Comcast phone service goes out, they diligently call me on my Comcast phone line to notify me of the interruption of service¹.

I’ll try and flesh them out over time.

Seattle JS Community

• meetup.com/seattlejs
• meetups.jquery.com

Upcoming jQuery Mobile Blog

• jquerymobile.com

Current Mobile Browsers

• Opera 9.5,10
• IE6,7
• FireFox 3.5+
• Safari 2,3,4
• Blackberry

A-grade Devices

• iPhone 3gs, 3.x
• iPad, 3.2
• Nokia N97 S60VG
• Palm Pre 1.4
• HTC Magic
• Droid

B-grade Devices

• iPhone 2.x
• Nokia N96
• Curve
• Storm
• HTC HD2

Notes

Use cache manifests, html storage for cacheing libraries on modern browsers. See also: http://github.com/wycats/jquery-offline

Resources

http://quirksmode.org/mobile/ http://github.com/jquery/jquery-tmpl

First, do this:

1. Find Safari.app in your Applications folder
2. Right click
3. Click ‘Show Package Contents’ from the context menu

Then, find this (you’ll probably want to save a copy of this in case you want to revert):

1. In the new Finder window, go to the Resources folder
2. Find Reader.html
3. Edit with whatever editor you’re comfortable with.

Then, make some changes and save:

You might be asked for your admin password when you save. I set text-align to left because that’s how I roll.

Before:

After:

Seriously though, if you don’t know what you’re doing… please don’t even attempt.

Screenshot

An Early Screenshot (note to self: replace with updated screenshot)

It’s all JavaScript, CSS3 and HTML5. The gauges are all built and controlled with a JavaScript library that I developed, and are rendered with CSS3. The only images are the footer bar texture and the logo¹ (I know, looking at that screenshot, it’s hard to believe).

I built this for two reasons. The first being that I wanted a rotary gauge JavaScript library (for use in another unrelated project), and the second being that I wanted to demonstrate (mostly to myself) how feasible these WebKit apps really are.

Installation

When you go to the app’s URL, you’ll be given instructions on how to install it (it’s as simple as bookmarking it to your homescreen). Then, when you launch it, it will download and cache all the assets², and each subsequent launch after that will check for updates if your device has network access.

How it works

Basically, the app calculates how fast you’re going by getting the distance between your current position and your last position and dividing that by how long it took to get there. There are other things going on, like soft rejecting³ positions that would seem to indicate an acceleration of anything above 2g⁴.

This could be further optimized, of course, and when I do that, I can push those changes and everyone (with a network connection) will have access to the new version as soon as they launch.

Features

• A speedometer
• A bearing indicator (it tells you what direction you’re heading)
• An analog clock

The clock was really just an exercise for myself. It’s basically a rotary gauge with 3 custom indicators with their own values.

If you have an idea for what should be there instead of the analog clock (or any other feedback, really), feel free to let me know. I’m also on twitter.

Sidenote(s)

Debugging and testing this isn’t easy. While iPhone can hit .local domains on a local network, I couldn’t exactly do use a local network to test this app. I had to be in motion. I spent time while commuting to do my testing and debugging. I also needed full access to the internet to update the remote servers so the iPhone could access the app. I don’t think I could have done this without tethering⁵.

I might have been able to create a WiFi network with my MacBook to get access to the .local domain, but even in that case, I’d have to configure my development environment to serve this app from my .local address, and that’s also not ideal. Meh, I’ll figure out the best solution eventually.

Forgive my rambling, I had to be up early this morning (like, so early it was still Saturday for another 30 minutes).