A Thousand Apologies
To anyone and everyone that’s dropped by this site, sorry for not having updated or posted in over two months. I’ve been really busy with a number of different personal projects and other, very big life changing things.
The first topic, and most important of the two that will be discussed here, is about my girlfriend and I getting engaged. The story goes like this…on Thursday, May 17, 2007, I tricked her in to believing that I got a special discount at Mitchell’s Steakhouse because I booked a table through OpenTable.com. After convincing her to go and telling her that I would pay for the bill, she agreed to go. We arrived at the restaurant and were taken to our table in a quieter area as this is what I request after speaking with the manager.
Scott was our waiter and he was a hell of a waiter too; very knowledgeable and helpful fellow - if you ever go, be sure to ask for Scott. Dinner goes on and I eventually decide to visit the restroom as we’re waiting for dessert. I was gone for a while and after coming back she let me know that she thought I was going to have the ring come out with dessert, but unfortunately it did not. We got the check and she asked if I put the gift card in with my card and I told her that there wasn’t really a gift card, dropped a knee, and went to it.
It was something of a nervous moment because of people being very close to us. A lady was literally a food from me and probably every single word I said. No that I’m ashamed but I can be shy at times. Only after paying for the bill did I come to find out that Scott knew about it the whole time. What an awesome guy, playing it cool the whole time. In the end, she said yes and a couple of people around us said congratulations. A very eventful day to say the least.
The second reason why I haven’t posted in a while - and the reason that generally consumes more of my time - is because I’ve been doing a little programming on the side. Before I go into what the program does, I want to say that I feel like cooks and programmers share a very common interest and that is creating something by hand. I say this because I feel like I fall into both categories. I love cooking because it gives me a chance to combine the ingredients and make something into my own and programming is fun because it applies the same ideas of making something and watching it come to life.
Anyhoo, the program servers as a page that retrieves Ebay listings for a specified keyword and displays them in a moderately organized fashion. When the results are displayed, it provides an image, the item description, price, and how much time is left in the auction. Calculating the time is really what’s taken the longest to develop because there are so many scenarios to prepare for that it’s been a matter of writing some code, testing how it works, and revising it based on the results. This may not sound hard, but believe me, the smallest typo can throw things off. At this point it’s got pretty much every scenario covered but I’ll have to keep watching it for those times when an error pops up.
If you’re interested in checking it out, I’ve got one site set up that has listing for KitchenAid items on Ebay at http://kitchenaidauctions.com. Let me know what you think. If you like it, feel free to link to it and give your fellow cook a resource for their next KitchenAid mixer purchase or any of the other many KitchenAid products out there.
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