I can but can’t believe I have not blogged in almost three weeks now!

I don’t believe I have blogged yet about the fact that I’m going to be a father for the first time! My girlfriend has been about 4-5 hours away in another city for the last 6 weeks teaching a course up at UBC Okanagan and arrived back home last weekend. We’re entering our final 5 weeks until the due date and eagerly awaiting the birth of our unborn child!

The other distraction the last couple weeks has been from my uncle becoming quite ill. He has been battling rectal cancer and we’ve just found out they didn’t catch it in time and has spread throughout his body. As you can imagine, I’ve been quite distracted by this lately as this is the favourite uncle that I spent summers growing up with fishing and camping over on Vancouver Island. He attended SFU in its first year on basketball scholarships, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t do drugs, has never been much of a drinker, very athletic excelling in rugby, volleyball, basketball, and fastpitch as both a coach and player. I can recall the walls of trophies displayed in his house of the ones that made it home from around the globe as some were apparently too big to take on the flight home. The part that has upset me the most, is that he was diagnosed within 6 months of retiring from teaching. Seeing my 6′3″ very athletic and healthy uncle as sick as he is in the hospital just reiterates the fact that anyone can get cancer. So please, get your yearly physicals - he tested fine the year before. Just like AIDS/HIV, cancer does not discriminate.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program….

On the work front, I have been trying to narrow focus again and get down to work on a few projects. I have been hammering out the last few details for my sports card website while reading up on Ajax and an advanced PHP book. I was hoping to get thru these two books before starting to code but don’t think I should wait much longer if I’m going to make the deadline I set for myself. One thing that has been reassuring, is that it is okay to not launch a project that is perfect. I had never read anywhere that stated the real development happens after the project launch and the refactoring and optimizing of code occurs. Hopefully that will translate into my own psyche that I don’t need to write the perfect application the first iteration.

Now that I’ve discovered NamePros, I want to start looking more at selling off a few domains (mostly .ca’s) as well as a few websites to generate a bit of cash required for my sports cards project. It is money I could save by doing the work myself but I want someone with better design skills to do the design of the website and its logo. If anyone’s interested in doing tackling this, please let me know! I need a site design that can also be wrapped around vBulletin. I’m currently figuring just a text-based logo but if someone can draw up something better, that’d be well, even better!

On another note, I have been re-evaluating my desire to learn Java and don’t feel a key project for me right now is an appropriate stomping ground for me to be developing in a new language. I will dive into AJAX/JavaScript and hopefully at a later date, look into Java again. For now, I will be fully embracing a LAMP development platform. I have been looking at and pondering becoming a Zend Certified Engineer and possibly after that, looking into any certification for the LAM part of LAMP. Over the last year or two, I have been working on learning and applying more advanced PHP such as OOP and frameworks while trying to improve my codebase.

Because of the decision to further embrace PHP (more so then I already have), I have acquired phpark.com where I will over the next few days be moving my recent PHP programming related posts. Sip of Water has always been intended for my business so I want to keep more to Internet business related information on this domain and may unfortunately, move other parts of this blog at some point. Considering the lack of response (yes, people come across but are not engaging in discussion on this blog), I’d rather re-organize before the hopeful eventual flood of readers to my blog. My series on writing a shopping cart will pick up there once I move over the posts.