To begin, perchance to reawaken

Back in one piece, it would seem. It’s been nutty, as always, but wanted to stop in and write a few passages before heading off to explore some more. :)

The Riverside competition front end is complete, finally. I figured that since last year we’d have it all taken care of, hiring a professional developer, renting a colo box, setting up a new domain name, and all of the other stuff that goes along with getting Ruby on Rails on the web, we’d be all set for this year. However, we ran into a few bugs in the program last year - not really anything wrong with the program, it just didn’t have features we didn’t know we wanted. :) So, this year, we hired back Resolve Digital to handle the upgrade to version 2 of the front end. It took a little longer than planned, but the end result is very spiffy. I’m thoroughly enjoying the new features -

1) It will not give the wine a bottle ID until it’s been paid for, this is SUPER important because last year, bottle ID’s were being generated even on unpaid wines and when people didn’t pay, we had gaps in the bottle ID’s.

2) It also marks the appropriate fields like payment type and such.

3) The payment stuff has been completely reworked so that now wineries won’t be whisked away to another site for payment. Now, it’s all on our site, so it looks and operates quite professionally. Because of this, I had to spend an evening setting up our server to be secure. That was a very long evening as I’ve never done that before, but the people at InstantSSL were wonderful and really helped every step of the way. I recommend them if you need to get a secure certificate.

4) There is a new module for Ruby on Rails that allows it to run through Apache, so we migrated away from using Mongrel and Pound to Phusion Passenger. It took a while to configure and set up as well, but the end result: allowing both the front-end app (Ruby on Rails) and the back-end app (PHP) to coexist peacefully running on port 80 - the standard web port. Last year I had to run things on port 8000 and port 7000, and when the results came out I had to scramble to get it back to port 80 so that the businesses who blocked non-standard ports could see the results!

5) Wineries can change their contact info - couldn’t do that last year.

6) Returning wineries who used a paper entry form last year but who provided an email address are able to login to the site this year thanks to a new section that prompts them for additional login information. Very slick.

Props to David, the programmer I worked with at Resolve Digital. Thanks so much David!!

From now until the competition in May, I’ll be very slowly finalizing the back-end admin interface as well as the results pages for this new year. I don’t think it’ll take as long to put together as last year because most of my time last year was spent configuring the PDF creation modules, but I can reuse all of that code this year. Wooha!

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Because of the craziness, I decided to drop my physics class. :( It actually was getting to be too easy for me, if you can believe that! I was really surprised at how much I knew from 10 years ago taking the same class! But more importantly, I was stressing over the piles of homework that were continuing to back up. No worries about the education goal - SSU will still take that class I took 10 years ago towards a bachelors. I’ll just start back up again in the fall. To sweeten the goal of relaxing, I’m taking yoga for the first time. It’s rewarding in it’s own way, but will take me a few more classes to be fully used to it. :)

I’m 31! My birthday was on Friday and I did a bunch of things all over the map, so it was quite an enjoyable weekend. As a holiday gift, I got Joel tickets to see Henry Rollins, his personal hero. D joined us as well, and as both of them had seen him perform his spoken word act before, they helped to introduce me to his unique take on life and humanity. I was really blown away! What an incredible person this is. His stories about his world travels (to anyplace George Bush said was a bad place to go, he’d book a flight the next day), to humanity, to the critically thinking mind were all incredible. Joel was even able to get a wonderful picture with him after the show. :)

On Saturday I continued the celebration with friends at Sushi To Dai For. Quite good rolls they have there! For afters we headed over to Russian River to see Five A.M. in all their glory. It was a good show, though the place was PACKED so it was tough to dance with comfort. Hah! Still had a good time and got to catch up with some friends I’ve not seen in a while… well, as much as you can catch up in a place you have to yell to be heard. :P

Allrighty, off for the evening. I’m going to go relax with the kitties, an episode of Lost, and some hot tea! :)

Z.

Originally published at Zephire. You can comment here or there.