At work, we’re building out a mobile version of our replicated sites.  As anyone who’s used an iPhone or Android browser to fill out a web form knows… using an iPhone or Android browser to fill out a web form is really annoying, and it’s best to make things as user-friendly as possible.  That’s why [...]

At work, I use the excellent FPDF library to write PDF files.  But I couldn’t find any way to automatically make the text as large as possible to fit into a given space.  So I wrote the following function to stick into the FPDF class.  It’ll take a given text string and a width, incrementally [...]

In my almost-30 years on this planet, my father has worked for two companies:   Browning Arms all while I was growing up, then the LDS Church since about the time I went on my mission.   I’d call that a commendable track record, especially in today’s labor marketplace. I mention this because, this morning, [...]

Today is a big day for me and my family.   Today I start my new job with E-Harbor — doing PHP programming for an e-commerce company.   A little bit different from what I have been doing at RM Plus, but not too much of a change. My other exciting news is that I’m [...]

At work, I’m in charge of getting information into and out of a big database of orders.   That includes linking the shipping information to the UPS WorldShip program that our fulfillment team uses to automatically buy UPS service. When the computer they’d been using out there for years just got too terribly slow, we [...]

Like last year, I’m posting ABC 4′s year in review video. Unlike last year, I wasn’t involved in the behind-the-scenes planning of the recap, since I no longer work there. But when I watched the events of Utah news from 2008, it brought back a lot of memories for me — with the notable exception [...]

After more than 5 years working graveyards and weekends in news, I decided that I was ready for a more family-friendly schedule.   I started looking for a new job, either in or out of the journalism industry, and last week I found it through a Craigslist ad.   It was for a PHP/MySQL developer [...]

Today on ABC 4 News, we’re running a fantastic year-ender piece that our editor Kirk Colton put together. I gave him a few suggestions on what important stories to put into the story, then turned him loose — and it turned out really well. Kirk is that kind of guy — very creative, very dependable. [...]

I have some advice for PR people from a news person’s perspective. Put simply, here are five tips to make it as easy as possible for me as a news producer to get your information and use it. First, when you write your press release, don’t bury the details of who/what/where/when/why in a dense paragraph [...]

We ran a pretty cool story from the Cyberguy today at work. He featured a web site called MyHeritage that lets you upload a picture and see what celebrity you most look like. Check it out at http://www.myheritage.com/FP/Company/tryFaceRecognition.php This photo of me holding Audrey came up with Ashley Olsen. Yikes! My second choice was Bing [...]