Fall 2001

Even though I've been a Web Programmer by trade for almost 1/2 a decade and an Internet use for a decade it's been over 4 years since I actually had and maintained a personal "homepage".  Since I'm sitting at home alone and relatively bored less than six months into my move to California from Minnesota I start diddling.

February-March 2002

In January I started the long deferred lifelong dream of the magical and marvelous yet challenging and frustrating endeavor of learning to fly.  As I seem to be having a particular frustration with that somewhat necessary task of landing I start a journal on my flight training and throw it on the web.  This gives the site it's first real content.

May 2002

I borrow a look and feel from a previous site I did, do some major page reorganization, add the pull-down menus and give the site the general look, feel and organization it has today.

June 2002

Getting tired of the terrible look and feel of the Flight Log page (which is done as a bastard HTML export from Access via Excel) I brush off my PHP skills and do the flight log as a 100% dynamic page from a MySQL database.

August 2002

I make some moderate updates on the Flight Log display to make it more useful for me (adding pagination and subtotals that match my hardcopy logbook to double check my math).  I also split the flying experiences into pre and post flight training phases and make a concerted effort to fill in the missing journal entries - I get mostly done.  I plan to chronicle my more interesting post-license flights and maybe journal my planned Instrument training.  Little do I know that life at a startup means this is the last real update I will make for 10 months other than updating the flight log data.

June 2003

It's been 10 long but fast months. Other than a few breaks it's been 50-55 hour weeks since before Thanksgiving and 60+ hour weeks since late March.  But I'm starting to try to update the site a little bit every few days.  1st priority will be filling in the missing student training journal entries from memory and then probably moving onto some technology areas.  The intervening year has seen me not do my Instrument training due to financial and time constraints and my life at work has forced my brain back into a more "tech" oriented set of thoughts and interests and the site will probably reflect that.

I have done 0 in EMS since my last shifts in Fall 2001 and surrendering my remote part-time Paramedic position when it became clear that my sentence to California wasn't going to show any signs due to the tech downturn ("flaming gorge of death").  But I plan on maintaining my license and certification as best I can which means I now have about 10 months to fit in 2 years worth of continuing education.  So I'll get to wake up some dormant parts of my mental process and see where that takes me.  ACLS and PALS here I come.