I normally love my job. In fact while working on the blackberry web site today using a real blackberry for once, I thought back to all those journals where I talked about wanting to do mobile development and there I was doing it. It's coming along quite well. I even wrote an excel parser that would take the excel based menus for the week and notify the mobile user what specials were up for the day.
Anyways, so I love that and then at about 6:00PM just before I left for work one of my co-workers asked me to take on one of the projects he is working. The work is for a good cause/site. It's the Ride for Roswell Site
Unfortunately, the kind of work it is, it is the kind of work I hate more than anything in the world. It is a squishy mix of old and new crappy machine generated code to wade through. The machine generated code looks like it comes from a combination of dreamweaver and the on site WYSIWYG system that writes the most mutated code I have ever seen. In fact only a machine with no emotions and not a human could write such disgusting code. capital, lowercase, css, markup, style tag, font tag, argh
The thing is it is not specifically the fault of any programmer but rather the system they used. It has a CMS system that involves a WYSIWYG online text editor which creates the crappy code. Unfortunately, now that they have this WYSIWYG editor they are going to crave it and I got the job with only about 10 days to fix it all up and make a new cms or fix the old one.
For the sake of the future me, I see no point in working in classic ASP and VBscript, the language that was used to write the system in the first place so it will have to be a quick re-write. I wish I could have had a little more advanced time to not just patch it up.
I hope it is not the beginning of a series of horrible fixer uppers or I am going to relocate to California. I hate fixing up mushing human/machine, old/new crap code. That is exactly one of the main reasons I wanted to stop being a professor. It thought I was going to be a developer.
[map]1600 Pennsylvania avenue, washington, dc[/map] is an example of how you would type a non-buffalo address. How much easier could it be?
Paul, you ask why doesn't "anyone" use these search links.
All I can do is answer for myself.
The e-strip search link I've never had the need to use it. If I am referencing an e-peep I find that just referencing the (e:peep) is sufficient.
The google maps link is entirely too Buffalo-centric for me. You can't just type in "309 Leconte View Lane, Knoxville, Tn" and get a valid result. You emailed me instructions on how to override the default Buffalo-centric settings and I tried to write a help based on it but I never liked the result. I barely understood it and i wrote it. To me it it is just easier to open a new tab with google maps and then copy and paste the link to the result than to try to remember the code to do the same thing from within (e:strip).
The Wikipedia search is one that I use when I feel it appropriate. An (e:strip) shows that it has been used in 40 journals - other than you it seems that Ajay and me have used it the most if my counting ability exists.
I've told you on more than one ocassion that it would be a good idea to have some sort of introductory page or newbies guide to (e:strip) to help people know what all the wonderful features of (e:strip) are.
The problem with help and f.a.q.'s is that people usually only look at them if they have problems.
By the way, journal dots don't work in Linux and osX using Firefox - the window opens and the number of journals is "0"
Paul I think you are genius and a very good person to make Elmwoodstrip happen. I appreciate all the hard work you do.