{ StevenHaddox.com }

I ran my first mile with my Nike+ tonight.  It went well and I love the resulting output.  With statistics and visualizations like this I may just be able to stay motivated!

So Katie and I watched Gossip girl tonight (we missed it last night).  In one scene I realized that my hair is slowly starting to resemble Nate’s due to the length and how unkempt it is.

Afterwards I was talking with Katie when I said (mostly jokingly) that I should grow my hair out like Nate’s.  She replied, “I think it’d be weird to see you with long hair.  And it’d be weird if you didn’t have the same haircut as your boss.”  I managed to keep a straight face as I said: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not often that I get to take the things that I absolutely love the most in the world and combine them with things that I absolutely hate the most in the world.  Usually when those two things happen it is related to Microsoft Windows in some form and it absolutely kills me for several days.  Well not this time, this time it pertains to a very positive turning point in my life I believe.  I have recently acquired a Wii Fit as well as a Nike+ iPod kit.  These two small sets of hardware have enabled me to combine something I love with something I used to hate and hopefully improve my life and have fun while doing it.

I must admit that there are several factors involved in my decision to start getting more healthy.  I decided to cut the majority of soda out of my life after my incident several months ago where I had 4 kidney stones and some major medical issues that were not very pleasant to go through.  But in addition to cutting out soda there needs to be more.  Something more substantial that will make it so I’m not having a heart attack before Paisley has even graduated high school.  So here is the list of things that has helped change my motivation for working out and getting healthy: Read the rest of this entry »

There are a lot of things in our lives that we cling to emotionally.  There are things in our society that we find important enough to have a general expectation of remembrance for.  Most of these things are important events.  The date of our wedding.  Our birthdays.  Graduation dates.  The date of a significant religious conversion or ceremony.

Then there are those dates that are significant to us personally that mean absolutely nothing to anybody else in our society or even the world. Read the rest of this entry »

I thought that it might be time to give an update.  I have been very busy over with the agile evangelists at Integrum Technologies and have been loving every minute of all the things I’ve managed to absorb in the past few months.  My conversion to Rails has been drastically better than my past experience of learning other languages.  Within weeks I felt confident enough to start my own side projects and dive head-first into things that I used to wait months to fully understand how to do with previous conversions.

I have come to gain a very solid appreciation of AJAX, as long as it is done unobtrusively. I’ve also come to love the purpose and structure that a good MVC framework can provide.  I’ve come to swear by TextMate.  I can’t imagine managing a web project again without it.  I’ve found that pair programming provides amazing benefits that can never be guessed at until you’ve tried it yourself. I’ve found that my errors and refactoring due to pair programming have been exponentially improved and that my development style in general has become more efficent, more detailed, and more well-thought than in the past (in much less time).  I’ve also found that agile methodology as a method of software development just makes sense (for me at least).  Software (especially web based applications or sites) are constantly changing in their requirements, goals, needs, and acceptence criteria.  Agile methodology ties in perfectly with this dynamic lifestyle of software growth.

As to the other things that I’ve been up to, well I’ve started at least three side-projects Read the rest of this entry »