I’ve been working on a new footer for this site. For a while I’ve wanted a fat footer with more information. Today, you’ll see, I have one. It still needs a lot of work, but at least it’s there.

Areas for improvement:

• Remove the stupid 1px border
• Put in some social media icons

The other week we decided to send out a mass email to our cheerleading team in order to get information from each cheerleader. The problem was that we didn’t want to send sizing data about other cheerleaders. This meant a custom written emails for each cheerleader. We had an excel spreadsheet, I exported it to CSV and then wrote a ruby parser to generate custom email files for each cheerleader.

https://gist.github.com/2568583.js

There is some room for improvement:

• Parameterize the inputs. Pass in the CSV, destination folder, a template file
• Use a template file for emails. Instead of manually including the message

This site is undergoing some changes.

Firstly, you may notice that I have changed the homepage to have a static home page. It allows me to introduce myself to people who may want to just find out who I am without forcing my current thoughts on them.

Secondly, I’m working on consolidating my Categories and reducing them. There are way too many. I’m going to keep putting information in the tags, but categories will probably start to shrink to a more reasonable number.

Thirdly, I’m hopefully going to start writing more again. I don’t know if it will be only on this site or across the web at all of my blogs (yes, I have too many).

Hope you enjoy the changes.

These are my links for April 23rd through April 24th:

• The Skeptical Hypochondriac :: Worrying About Health News Since 2009. –
• Category Inflation at the Webbys – Waxy.org – Remind me never to partake in this nonsense.
• NEW MATH by Craig Damrauer –
• Fluid Images — Unstoppable Robot Ninja –
• Our Favorite Typefaces of 2008 | Review Feature | Typographica –

These are my links for April 22nd from 21:01 to 21:01:

• Deaths, injuries raise alarm at cheerleading's dangers – The Boston Globe – This post talks about the importance of Cheerleading safety especially in the state of Mass. It is an interesting piece, but I feel that people who advocate safety for cheerleaders sometimes go to the extreme and over regulate the sport. My classic example is the double full, which used to be legal in college, but due to safety restrictions has now been made illegal. Many people were landing it fine, some weren't. Better training would be a better solution than complete restriction.

Github is a web site for common git repositories. It has been around for a while, and I have been a member since before they became public. Basically you can create your git repos on the site, add code and whatnot, branch from other repos and then sync up. I use it mostly as a backup for my current project, which is a private repository.

Anyway, I wake up this morning to see that there is a new little item on the Github dashboard, “Gists”. I click on the link and get brought to a page that looks like Pastie. I’ve always been confused about how long the code stays around at Pastie. I would have like to post some links to Pastie stuff in the blog, but honestly, I haven’t trusted it to be around. So, maybe Gists existed on a more permanent basis. I started hunting around Github for some documentation on Gists, with no luck.

After doing some Googling, I landed on this video about Gists. It’s pretty informative. Basically, a gist is a simple way to create a small repo directly from the Github website. Looks like they are permanent, but don’t quote me on that.

A friend recommended I check out this band:

Ryan Shupe and the Rubberband

They are a bit bluegrass but also a bit country. I highly enjoy their music. I have been listening to them straight since yesterday afternoon when they were recommended to me. I would check out “Banjo Boy”, “Be the One”, and “Corn Dogs”. You can listen to the songs on their website.