For the umpteenth time this winter the electricity is gone, not quite as long as the big wind storm, but Friday night until Sunday afternoon was spent listening to the radio in the car, sleeping and reading. At least the car is getting some use, it’s uninsured and not going on the road, but was good to start it up and idle it in the driveway for a while – still runs great!

Still applying for tech jobs, the latest is one in Kelowna which would be nice as my parents are aging and being closer to them would be “a good thing” for me to do. The position itself was with a Human Resources outfit in that area, and have signed up on their web site to see what else is available too. The weekend newspaper was disappointing as always, a grand total of one IT job in it and it’s one I applied for already on-line.

Had an interesting contact from one of the on-line communities, interesting in that the name of the web site is similar to one of my nicknames – “nomad”. Don’t know if he’s lived in quite as many places as I have in North America, appears to be matching my chart, but in Asia. Have a look at some of posts, his writing is easy to read and you’ll find out things like how the food carts in Indonesia make different sounds depending on what they are selling.

Meanwhile on the web dev front, I’ve stopped using the php-Smarty MVC for serving up the pages on mgwebservices.ca. In the long run methinks it’s a great system for when you have a large group of people developing a site, but for those with only two or three people working on the same project using plain old normal php includes gets the job done faster. I liked the form generation class that you can get with it, but one still needs to deal with sessions much the same way as without using Smarty so there isn’t any time savings there to speak of, it is faster if you have a one-page form and there isn’t much customizing to do. For separating the HTML from the PHP it’s really no better than my manual system of includes, and the forms generation class is downright horrid because all the javascript is inline, instead of being separated like it should be.

Elsewhere in my IT life, getting sick and tired of this web site hosting business and all the crapola that goes with it, and thinking that I never should have listened to my capitalist brother and started this business. Fine for him, but I’m neither an entrepreneur nor a business man and it is becoming more of an albatross than anything else.