Yesterday was a full day of fun! We started at the highly-recommended Poipu Beach on the south side of the island. We started out with snorkels, but ours didn’t work very well, so we ended up just resting and sunning in the sand. After a couple of hours of hanging out and smelling cigarette smoke from other people on the beach, we grabbed lunch at a place called Bubba’s Burgers nearby. We were hoping for some great burgers, but what we got was just same-old same-old.

After lunch, we hit another beach called Shipwreck Beach near the Hyatt resort. The waves were pretty rough — not good for swimming or snorkeling, but we got out our rented boogy boards and had a blast riding the waves into the shore for the next hour. Debbie kept getting knocked over by the waves, but we all had fun. We came back to the condo and soaked in the hot tub for a while, but my neck is still stiff from our first round of beach fun.

Last night, we went to a luau at the Smith Family farm. It was a great meal and a pretty good show for a really high price, but we were really tired. We were ready to come home halfway through the show, but then we would have missed a pretty cool fire-knife demonstration. We collapsed into bed, dead tired and full of sun.

Today, we had an early morning — we had to leave our condo in Kapaa by 6:00 to be at the marina in Port Allen for a boat tour. Captain Andy’s was supposed to take us up to the Na Pali coast on the northwest side of the island, but Kauai is having extremely high surf right now, including 40- to 50-foot swells. That meant that we couldn’t go north, we had to go east past some of the places that we’d already visited in person.

We spotted a big group of dolphins that were breaching and even saw a couple of them jump. They had us get out into the water (in better snorkel gear) and we saw neat fish and a turtle. I was able to touch the turtle on the back. They fed us a pretty good breakfast and lunch, but we thought that we should have gotten a discount because we weren’t drinking their beers like everyone else was. Overall, it was a good tour with a good crew — but I wish that we could have seen the 4000-foot cliffs of Na Pali.

After our tour, we drove up the Waimea Canyon. It was just a nice drive up to see a pretty lookout over a really big canyon. Afterward, we got shave ice at the best-rated place on the island, called JoJo’s. We considered it a birthday present for Debbie, since she turned 30 today.

This morning, the resort held what they called an orientation for new guests, but seemed to us more like a meat market for companies to come in and pitch their services. They held a raffle for each company, and Debbie won a 5-hour boat trip that we were already interested in anyway, so we decided to all go and split the cost of the three tickets. We also decided to do a plane tour of the island (rather than the touted helicopter tours that are $80 more per person) and get $100 off per couple by going to a timeshare pitch.

We went to a Christmas craft fair this morning near the Spouting Horn blowhole near Poipu, which was further away than we thought it would be. Sarah got some earrings and Debbie found some trinkets, and we were less than impressed with the blowhole.

We got back to our condo and over to the church (right across the street from the Pono Kai) in time for the first testimonies in Fast and Testimony Meeting, but not in time for the sacrament. The testimonies were very impressive — much less irrelevant crap than you’d hear in a testimony in our ward, and more meaningful expressions of love for the gospel and for family.

We were glad that we went to church, but we didn’t stay for the other two hours. Instead, we came home and had a nap. (We were really tired after a 23-hour day yesterday.) This afternoon, we finalized our plans for the week and played shuffleboard. The Gibbys beat the Welches — 103 to 98.

My customer service experience with Go Airlines yesterday was terrible. They were providing our flight from Honolulu to Lihue last night, and our flight was supposed to take off from HNL at 5:45 p.m. When we first checked in with the front desk at about 5:00, they said the flight was delayed until about 6:00. We were okay with that, since we’d been rushing to make it there from our Denver-to-Honolulu flight.

We got into the terminal and waited and waited and waited. The computer screen was never updated to tell us anything except that the flight was delayed. When I asked the customer-service person in the terminal what the reason for the delay was, she got really snotty with me and said she was busy with something else (which she wasn’t), but that there was a maintenance problem. She didn’t have any information about when we’d leave. Other flights on the same airline were going in and out from the same terminal, but there was nothing on the Lihue flight.

At about 7:30, the inept customer-service worker announced over the PA that they were happy to announce boarding for flight 1006 to Lihue. We looked out the windows and didn’t see any airplane, unlike the other flights that had come and gone in the last two hours. Regardless, we picked up our stuff and started congregating around the door that she’d announced. Nothing happened, and after a few minutes, we were among the first people to sit back down and wait. Psych! She got us good!

Eventually, they announced another flight that did take us to Kauai. It lifted off at 8:45 p.m. — a full three hours later than it was supposed to, for a 25-minute flight. The flight crew told us there had been a maintenance problem, then one of their crew members had gotten off and they had to call someone else in on their day off to cover for him. These people were apologetic, better than the ground crew girls, but they didn’t offer us anything to make things right.

I’m going to call the airline to complain tomorrow, but given the fact that we only paid $50 per seat, I don’t see that they’ll be able to do much. (Maybe they’ll refund the $10.00 per suitcase that we paid for our checked luggage — what a ripoff!) My problem wasn’t just that something was wrong with the plane, which could happen to any airline, but the failure of the people on the front lines. They were uncommunicative unless someone specifically asked them what was happening, and they gave bad information more often than not when someone did ask them.

It’s been a long day. We got up at 5:30 MST in our home in American Fork, Utah. We got out the door by 6:30 and to the SLC airport by 7:30. We got through security and our flight to Denver passed without excitement. We grabbed some lunch at an overpriced wrap place in the Denver concourse and headed to the next plane.

The flight between Denver and Honolulu was the longest of my life, literally. Seven and a half hours in one airline seat. We had two movies and various TV shows to watch (“It Might Get Loud” was a documentary that I’d been meaning to check out anyway, and “Elf” is always fun), but it felt like forever. My legs were so tired of sitting.

We got to Honolulu thinking that we’d have only 45 minutes to get our luggage and get to our next flight to Lihue. Fortunately, it only took us a couple of minutes to grab the bags and get to a shuttle that took us right where we needed to go. Unfortunately, our flight to Lihue has been delayed by an hour and a half, so we’ve got a lot of time to kill. Right now, Sarah is perusing brochures for touristy things to do in Lihue (my little planner!) and I’m writing.

It’s now almost 9:00 Utah time (I think), but before we get to go to bed, we’ve got to take another flight, pick up our luggage, get our rental car, check in at our resort, then find someplace to buy groceries. The weather here is nice and warm and humid, and what I’ve seen so far of Hawaii (the outside of the airport) was nice.

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 starting a new small business, and not surprisingly, it involves the Internet.   It’s a personalized Concentration-style matching game called MatchTheMemory.com.   You upload your photos to the site, and then build the cards from those images and any descriptive text you want to add.   Then when someone comes along to play the game, you have extra little surprises that pop up when they get a match or finish the game.   That could be a different photo, it could be a longer description of what’s going on in the picture, or it could be a YouTube video.

The best way to see what I’m talking about is to actually play the sample game (which is also the reason I wrote this in the first place, as a substitute for my family’s standard Christmas card) or one of my other featured games.   Then go create your own game.

The “small business” side of MatchTheMemory.com is selling printable versions of the games.   A PDF download that you can print on your home computer costs just $3.95, while a professionally-printed version starts at $19.95.   I think these would be a very fun custom Christmas gift.

I really want people to play my games, to create their own games, and to share them with others.   I explain more about why and how I built the site, and how you can interact with it, on the About page of MatchTheMemory.com.   Please go check it out!

So a guy posted on Reddit yesterday about the Markov text generator that he wrote to generate pseudo-Greek names.   If you don’t know what a Markov chain is, Wikipedia explains that “Markov processes can also be used to generate superficially ‘real-looking’ text given a sample document”.   In his case, he put in all of the names of characters from Homer’s Iliad to create new, similar words automatically.

My first thought was to plug in Book of Mormon names.   I noticed that the guy had already done Bible Names (along with Prescription Drugs and Rock Bands), but I wanted pseudo-Book of Mormon names.   What if you wanted to name a baby something distinctly “Mormon”, but thought that “Nephi” and “Moroni” — and even “Aminadab” — were too popular already?

I found this list of BoM names on Wikipedia and took out all the repeats and the explanations, and plugged it into the generator as a source text to create this : Word-o-Matic – Book of Mormon names.

It spits out stuff like “Helakish”, “Koriancumer” and “Zerahemish”.   Try it out to see if it creates your next baby name.

I’m a sucker for freebies, and I’ve always liked to personalize things I do online and on the computer, so when I saw this link on OurSignal.com the other day, I was intrigued: Create a font from your own handwriting – fontcapture.com.

This free web site provides four simple steps to get a font in your handwriting: “1. Print template » 2. Complete template » 3. Scan template » 4. Preview and download.”   Basically, you write all of the letters of the alphabet, along with other common characters (i.e. $!@()*%&{}[]), then scan it and upload it to the system.   It processes your sample and creates a .ttf font from it.   And best of all, it’s free.

I first tried it with a Sharpie, since that’s what the “Complete Template” step recommends.   The results looked pretty good, kind of like The Simpsons’ “Akbar” font, but the letters were rather thick for regular use.

The other problem that I had with the resulting font was that the characters weren’t all uniform.   The uppercase O and U were too small, and the baselines on many of the letters were way too high.   The template page online had good instructions about ascenders and descenders, but the page that you write on itself didn’t help me enough to get the letters in the right proportions to each other.

I tried again with a regular Bic, but the scan didn’t come out well and the font looked like a bunch of chicken scratches and dots, not letters.   So my third attempt was with an “Ultra Fine Point” Sharpie.   After I scanned the image, I took it into the Gimp and adjusted my characters to meet the baselines and ascender lines.   Here’s the final product, which I call Curtissimo.

Everything looks good except for the lowercase q is way too small, but really, how often do you use a Q?

I remember back when I was a teenager reading my parents’ computer/publishing magazines and catalogs, there were services that would do the same thing, only they’d charge you $30 – $50 for the font.   Those services would have you write specific words in addition to just all of the characters, so it could get an idea of how you put words together and how your characters line up with each other.

This fontcapture.com system doesn’t do that, and I wish they would do a little more error-correction on the scanned image, but you can’t beat free.   I plan to use the fonts with CSS3’s @font-face on curtisgibby.com, possibly for headers site-wide and maybe as the main text for this blog.

[update below about Facebook app that shows old status updates]

I like the idea of using my Facebook Status Updates as a miniature journal, but unless you want to copy and paste them out, it’s tough to archive them. Until now! You can now automatically get every status update emailed to you for easy backup with a few semi-easy steps.

1. Find the RSS feed address for your status updates. This is the hardest part. This url will be something along the lines of http://www.facebook.com/feeds/status.php?id=[your_id]&viewer=[your_id]&key=[special_key]&format=rss20

For some reason, Facebook is constantly trying to keep people from finding this information, but this blog has up-to-date instructions for getting this address. Basically you find the “notifications” rss url, then change the filename from “notifications.php” to “status.php”.

If you have a Facebook ID larger than 1 billion (what, you weren’t one of the first billion people who signed up on Facebook?) this solution generally doesn’t work. Instead, you can have a friend create a new friend list with just you in it, then find the RSS feed for status updates for his friends in that list.

The friend will need to go to his Notes application ( http://www.facebook.com/notes.php ) click on the “My Friends’ Notes” link on the right and replace “friends_notes.php?” with “friends_status.php?”. That will show all of his friends’ status updates. To show just your list’s, you have to add “&flid=[list_id]” to the url. He can find the list id by hovering over the list and copying the number that comes after “filter=flp_” — for example, in “http://www.facebook.com/friends/?filter=flp_84188095862”, the list id would be “84188095862”.

Confused yet? The final url should look like this. http://www.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=[his_id]&key=[his_special_key]&format=rss20&flid=[list_id]

Okay, that was a pain, but here comes the easy part.

2. Give this address to an RSS-to-Email web service. This will turn your RSS feed into a daily email to you. I recommend Feed My Inbox — it’s simple to set up and I haven’t seen any spam from them, just the email updates that I’ve requested. For easier auto-archiving once you get this into your email, you can add a bogus keyword to the email address that you give to Feed My Inbox, like this: youraddress+facebookarchive@yourdomain.com. It really works, try it!

3. (Optional) Set up a rule that automatically archives the emails from Feed My Inbox. This way you don’t have to see them every day, but you’ve got them in your archives when you want to go back and look at them.

Update: Since I originally wrote this post, I have written a Facebook app that pulls out all of your (or your friends’) recent status updates, along with giving some basic statistics about how often you add new status updates. You just copy and paste out the ones that you want to archive.   It’s called Catch Up with a Friend and can be found at http://apps.facebook.com/catch_up/.   So now you’re covered going forward, and in the past.

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 got a new machine from our corporate overlords and I set up WorldShip and a ODBC connection to my MySQL database on it.   But every time I tried to set up a “import map” in WorldShip (the part that tells it, “This field in the MySQL table is what you should use for that field in the shipment”), the program would crash.

I checked in the ODBC administrator that my connection was valid.   I reinstalled WorldShip several times.   I talked to WorldShip tech support for almost an hour.   (The Tier 1 guy wasn’t a lot of help, but the Tier 2 woman seemed pretty helpful, checking a bunch of log files on my computer that I would have had no idea how to find, let alone interpret.   She didn’t end up helping me much, but she seemed very knowledgable as we went through the detective process together, and she definitively told me that it was a problem with the ODBC driver.)

I even went so far as to reinstall Windows on the new machine, to ensure that there wasn’t some weird setting left on the computer from our other shop.   But every time I tried to make that map in WorldShip, it was the same result: crash, crash, crash.

After beating my head against a wall for three days, I finally found the answer by going to another machine that was running WorldShip fine, including the connection to my database.   I checked the MySQL ODBC driver there and it was an older version (3.51).   But for the new machine, I had naively grabbed the latest version of the driver (5.1).   I tried getting rid of 5.1 and installing 3.51 on the new computer, and it worked the first time.   Success!

This entry is not intended to bore the daylights out of my family and friends.   Instead, I write it so that the next time some poor sucker searches Google for “UPS WorldShip MySQL ODBC crash”, that person finds something more useful than I did.

Since I’m trying to become a better programmer, I’m updating my web site for a better user experience.   I originally built the pictures and recipes pages with SQL-based sorts, so that the user would click on a link that would reload the page with results sorted by the relevant column.

Since going to work on Tavawava, I’ve learned how to do this with Javascript.   I use the Prototype library there and when I needed to add sort functionality, I found the excellent TableKit plugin.   It’s easy to learn and quickly implements into almost any page (just add a class to any table that you want sorted, and it automatically picks up the fact that you want it sorted), and there are a lot of examples of usage on the web site.

Today when I decided to add the same functionality to curtisgibby.com, I started looking for something that would do the same thing under jQuery, because that’s the Javascript library I had started doing some basic javascript/AJAX stuff with, several months ago.   Everybody online pointed to Tablesorter, so I assumed that it would be as simple and enjoyable to work with as TableKit.   I was wrong.

With Tablesorter, I was able to get some functionality working pretty quickly, but I didn’t like how you had to specifically add a javascript call to document.ready() and ask for alternating colors, both of which automatically happen with TableKit.   The online documentation was confusing and skimpy.   During my coding process, I changed something that broke the sorting functionality.   The zebra striping still worked, but nothing I did brought back the sort.

Frustrated, I turned to TableKit, even though I’d never used Prototype on my web site.   I downloaded Prototype and TableKit and had them sorting my table within 5 minutes.   Now I’m thinking of using Prototype throughout curtisgibby.com

Overall, Prototype tablekit beats jQuery tablesorter by a mile.