Monthly Archive for October, 2004
OK, so I’m supposed to be studying for my CNA exam I’m taking on Friday. As everyone knows, it’s good to take a study break now and then while studying. So, I’m taking a break.
I just read how to "set up Outlook to organize your email in the same way that GMail labels work" in an article by Rock Hymas. The author, shows that Gmail’s label organization is really nothing all that new, as Outlook has had categories for a while. What Outlook did not have before Outlook 2003, however, was search folders. Basically, search folders allow for quick searches of your Outlook documents that met certain criteria, such as sender, date, or subject.
Combining the categories with search folders, it is pretty easy to create a Gmail-like experience right in Outlook. And don’t bother saying anything about how Outlook is full of security flaws or how you can get the same functionality from open source e-mail clients or whatever. The fact of the matter is, regardless of the aforementioned facts, I still do like Outlook for its relative ease of use and nice presentation of information.
Chris and I finally did it yesterday: we got new phones. This isn’t anything great for me, but for Chris, she was able to finally get rid of her 4-1/2 year old phone that couldn’t even send or receive text messages! Also, yesterday marks the last time I should have to deal with Sprint and its bad service for a long time, if not forever.
I got a great deal on a "backup" phone — a $100 rebate on a $125 Samsung E105 to replace my year and a half old Motorola t720. Chris got herself a $120 Motorola V180 to replace her old Sanyo SCP-4500 phone.
With these new phones, we changed my current T-Mobile Get More 600 plan to a Family Time 800 plan. Now, instead of paying $100+ per month for a T-Mobile line and a SprintPCS line, we’re only paying $70 per month for our two T-Mobile lines. This is something we definitely should have done back in June when the SprintPCS contract expired, but Chris was worried about money with the wedding and honeymoon.
I’ll probably spend the next week playing around with my new phone. Chris has already done a lot of playing, mostly because she had no SIM card before to quickly transfer names and numbers between her old phone and her new phone. She’s downloaded ringtones, setup groups, and text messaged everyone she can, all within the first 24 hours after we bought the phones! I figure I’ll play around with my phone soon enough, no reason to do it all now.
The other day, I finally started an E/R diagram for a recipe/menu database. The hope is that Chris will be able to enter her recipes, catalog where she found those recipes, create a menu of what’s for dinner, and get a quick shopping list for the week to feed into Peapod all in one place.
Currently, Chris has recipes she likes flagged in her many cookbooks. Some, but not all, of these flagged recipes have been entered into an Excel spreadsheet, listing the name of the recipe, the main ingredient of the recipe, the cookbook in which it can be found, the page on which it can be found, any comments on the dish, and dates that she has made the dish. To further complicate things, she also has a Publisher calendar, in which she has created a menu for the last ten months (ever since we moved into the house).
Me, being the goofball that I am, I have wanted to be able to see this menu online. And of course, being goofier than the average goofball, I couldn’t have this menu online and static. So now I’m working on a MySQL database design, using the E/R diagram I started the other day. In the process of creating the MySQL database, I have already had to make several changes to the design. For example, I have removed entirely from the design a table for ingredient type and a table relating the ingredients to this table. I found that the ingredient types weren’t really all that important.
I think I am done designing the database. Now it’s a matter of data entry and designing a front-end. That way Chris doesn’t have to use phpMyAdmin to enter all of her recipes and make her menus all over again. I hope to finish this little (or not so little) project by the new year. Wish me luck.
I have finally done it! The ask-mark.com forum has been taken down due to lack of interest. Sure, I could have left it up since it wasn’t taking up a lot of room, but I thought I would take it down just to clean up a little bit. If you want to read posts that were on the forum, too bad, because I’m not going to send you any archives. Archives of the forum do exist, but you’re going to have to do a lot of begging in order to get them, so just forget about it.
Yesterday I went to Palatine High School’s Royal Rally. There is apparently a long tradition of energetic and entertaining pep rallies that goes back quite a ways at PHS. This year was different, though, in that it was the first year the Royal Rally was held outside in the Chic Anderson Stadium. The weather was nice, with little wind and temperatures in the low 60s to high 50s. The show was pretty good, albeit a little slowly paced, and it ended with a fireworks show. Overall, an entertaining event.
Unfortunately, with my immune system already getting weak, a nose that has been on-again-off-again stuffy for the past two weeks, and the cold, I think I’m getting sick. Today at work, I just got progressively worse through the day. I took some Tylenol Cold before I left work, so I’m feeling a little better. My temp is at 98.9°, which is ever-so-slightly above my normal, but not too hot. Even still, I think I’ll be spending the night at home instead of chilling out (literally) at Palatine’s Homecoming game against Fremd High School 
I guess there’s still Conant High School’s Homecoming next week, where I graduated Class of 1998 (you go ahead and do the math).
I guess there’s still Conant High School’s Homecoming next week, where I graduated Class of 1998 (you go ahead and do the math).
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