Day #3 — June 5, 2006 — Must finish database. Stupid IDX.

Well I shaved. Thats a step in the right direc­tion. I was going to get a hair­cut, too, but real­ized I didn’t have any clean clothes, and by the time I woke up and got some laun­dry done it was too late to go get a hair­cut. Maybe tomorrow.

So what I’ve been work­ing today is fin­ish­ing up the IDX data­base to hold the data obtained via the local real estate board’s FTP site so I can inte­grate it into Ann King’s web­site. It has been a hor­ri­ble pain in the butt. For exam­ple, the comma-delimited text file for the res­i­den­tial list­ings has 107 fields. Already a pain because I have to man­u­ally type these in to cre­ate the data­base. To make it even more annoy­ing, about halfway through I real­ized that some of the fields weren’t listed in the real estate board’s key, and they are just blank null fields. So I had to start over. Didn’t make me very happy, I’ll tell you that. But I pretty much have the data­base done and have a good idea of how I want to auto­mat­i­cally load the daily text files, so all I have to do is fin­ish up the PHP code to actu­ally make all the data useful.

So about the pic­ture. A few things of inter­est. On the very far left you can barely see the beau­ti­ful Dell 3100cn Color Net­worked Laser Printer that resides in my room. What a beast! Mea­sur­ing 21 inches tall, and with quite a large foot­print, it is hard to miss.

You can also see my ghetto speak­ers (well at least one of them). My sis­ter took my nice 5.1 sur­round sound speak­ers and broke them recently, so all I have left are these crappy 2.0 speak­ers. But they work good enough I suppose.

That lit­tle shiny thing below the clock and a lit­tle to the right is my Archos AV700 Mobile DVR. Now THAT is a fun toy. This lit­tle guy has a 40GB hard drive, and 7 inch screen, and can hook directly up to TV’s, DVD play­ers, and com­put­ers so you can save audio, video, and pic­tures to it. I’m watch­ing Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan on it right now.

The large glow­ing thing I’m star­ing into is my mon­i­tor. I cur­rently have it ver­ti­cal so I can view more rows of my data­base at one time while I’m work­ing on it. Also makes read­ing web­pages much eas­ier. Appa­rantly it was a lit­tle too bright for the cam­era though. I really want to get a new dig­i­tal SLR but haven’t the money yet. Maybe when I get that job where my dad works…

Thats about it. Bor­ing pic­ture for a bor­ing day.