Taking Pride In What You Do

Have you ever worked on something for a long time, and when it was done, looked back and took pride in what you had done?  That happens to me a lot.  I like digital photography and nothing is better then looking at a picture that you constructed.  You set the shutter speed so it was perfect.  You messed around with the colors.  You did it all and no one helped you and the picture turned out beautiful!  Every time you look at the picture you remember all the work that you had put into it.  You take pride in your work.
I also develop applications.  When I'm using an app that I've spent weeks (if not months) on and watch how it runs perfectly and does exactly what I wanted it to do, I look back at what all I put into it.  It would have to take a lot of someone else's work to get me to like anything else better.

It's like after I helped my uncle build part of his shop.  Whenever I go in there I remember the concrete that we had laid, the way everything was planned out.  And I take pride in it.

I've talked to people (I'm not going to mention any names) about this and they say that it is a sin.  They point me to verses about being Proud and how God blesses the humble and all that stuff.  But there's a verse in Galatians chapter 6.  It's starting at verse 4, "Each one should test his own actions.  Then he can take pride in himself, without comparing himself to somebody else, [5] for each one should carry his own load."

Maybe I'm interpreting this wrong (and I'd love to know what you think), but it sounds to me like it's saying that its ok to feel good about what you've accomplished.  I don't know, maybe it's not such a bad thing liking my programs just because I made it.

Using Your Documents Online

I, as a web developer, have a love-hate relationship with the Internet.  The Internet, possibly one of the world's greatest security threats, now fills our everyday lives.

With everyone using the Internet, more and more stuff is being moved to the Internet.  Now there is no need to go spend hundreds of dollars on Microsoft Office, there are equally attractive solutions available online, for free!  The most popular one of theses being Google Docs.

Google's most popular office app is GMail (replaces Outlook), but they also have Documents (replaces Word), Spreadsheets (Excel), and Presentations (Powerpoint).  These are like small stripped down versions of the different Microsoft Office suites.  They do, however, add features that are better online, such as collaboration between multiple authors, and availability anywhere.

But there is another website, Zoho that has even more features then

Google Docs.  Zoho has a complete office solution providing many things that I find Google Docs to be very lacking in.  For example, Google Docs does not allow you to double space documents, is this a big deal?  Maybe not to you, but for school I need to have my papers double spaced, something only Zoho provides.

Zoho also has a much richer set of applications.

I mentioned security in the first paragraph, and if it is not obvious I will tell you why.  With these online office solutions, all of your documents are stored on the website's server, giving who knows who access to your personal files.  How do you know that they won't misuse the information you upload onto their server, if they won't sell it to advertisers, or "accidentally" leave it un-encrypted and have it stolen.

Anyway, check out zoho.com and docs.google.com, see which one you like better.

Google Gears

I don't know how many people have heard of this, but I've been using Google Gears for a long time.  Only recently, however, have I tried programming with it.

For those that don't know, Google Gears is a way to run a Google Gears enabled website offline.  When you go back online, what you did when it was offline syncs up with the online version.

If you haven't installed Google Gears you should get it now, even if you don't use any web applications that support it.  Google Gears is virtually three parts, a local server that caches the files of the website to serve them offline, the database, which is where the offline web app can store its data, and the Worker Pool.  The Worker Pool works with multi-threading JavaScript.

Currently I have only used the Local Server and the Database, I have not tried the Worker Pool yet.

I'm trying to port my photo sharing application to work with Google Gears.  I'm using the SQLite database provided by Google Gears to store the list of albums and pictures.  I then have it cache the pictures of the albums set to be available offline using a Resource Store.  I'm completely amazed at how easy it is to use Google Gears, I was able to port a lot of the program in just one day.

So if you haven't checked out Google Gears, head over to gears.google.com and give it a try with a program like Google Reader.

Test using Windows Live Writer

I'm now testing writing a blog using Windows Live Writer.

Windows Live Writer is currently in beta, you can get it at, go.live.com.

Here is a test including a picture in the post.

Good, the post works, I think I'm going to do the rest of my blogging through Windows Live Writer, it makes writing blogs so much easier!
I like now being able to write my blog on my computer and publish when I go online, plus this wysiwyg editor is awesome!

Here is a test using Website Screen Capture

All I had to do was enter in the url http://calebgo.com, and it would go capture the image of it.  Works beautifully!!!

Working With Bees

I spent yesterday with my cousins helping extract honey.
It was really fun, we probably got, like, 3 quarts of honey which is pretty exciting for a first year! Anna also gave me a little jar of honey to keep :)

Honey Extracting

I just helped Anna extract honey from her honey supers, she got around a gallon of honey :)

After her vacation I think she may come over and help me extract, I don't know...  It was really fun!