Goals for 2010

Every year I make a list of goals to accomplish and lord knows that I have gotta try and do something because 2009 wasn't exactly a great year for myself.

5 Reasons 2009 sucked:

1. Left a bad paying job for a relatively better paying job and went back to the bad paying job
2. Lost 2 cars which led to trouble all over the place
3. Lost a chance to work for a great company but lost that due to the economy
4. Both brother in laws got into a bad car accident but thankfully survived
5. Health insurance went up dramatically due to economy

5 Reasons 2009 kicked ass:

1. Saved a ton of money to help get out of debt
2. Took a trip to the Carolina's to meet gf's grandparents and see brother in law
3. Went to first developer conference. Was awesome!
4. Bought a newer car
5. Finally got my laptop after saving for way too long

Goals for 2010 (not in any specific order):

1. Secure a position with a company that pays their developers more then Walmart
   
2. Continue to learn the languages that I have been studying
3. Get a car that doesn't need it's oil checked ever other day
4. Work harder at getting freelance service known
5. Complete CMS Leo project
6. Get married to my fiance of 13 years.
7. Buy a house, buy a house buy a house
8. Learn to relax a bit more and less stressed out
   
9. Somewhere in there I'll also try and find time to drop a few pounds
   

My fiance was told to burn a certain candle for good luck in the following year and she did. Hopefully this will FINALLY be our year to succeed and accomplish what we've been trying for many years now.

- Pete

Get those images out of PowerPoint

Every now and then as a developer you get handed a disk or and email sent to you and someone says, here are those images that you need for the bla ba bliche project.

Problem is that once you toss the disk into the drive or open the email to get the files, all you see is a damn PowerPoint presentation. You may think at first that you're gonna have to save each image individually and before you even try to do something as silly as that give this little trick a go and see how you make out. It just may save you an hour or two or more of nonsense.

1. Get Open Office here and install that badboy once it's done downloading.
2. Open the PowerPoint file with Open Office.
3. Save the file as ODF Presentation .odp
4. Now give the file a new extension of .zip
5. You should now see a zip file, so how about we open it.
6. Extract all the files in the zip file or just the Pictures directory.
7. Your photos should now be available to you in the Pictures directory.

Hope this works for you as it did for me. Found this out just by messing around trying to get some images from out of PowerPoint without saving them one by one.

- Pete

Love of a new language

More than recently I've been having a go with the Python programming language and must admit that I absolutely love the language and now that I received Programming in Python 3 by Mark Summerfield I feel that I can go full force into learning this wonderful language that doesn't seem to be going anywhere, anytime soon.

When I first heard about the Python language I remember watching a tutorial on YouTube where a Googler rambled on about some real intense programming stuff with Python and of coarse I had no clue what he was talking about at first. Of coarse this was before I started to dive into the OOP club and might not have even completed my first year of hands on experience and still writing procedural code.

Once I started getting the general idea about how to do the OOP thing I began to get more and more curious about other programming languages and thought it might be a good time to do a bit of fiddling with Python since it seems to be a very popular and unique language.

The syntax is very easy to read and understand and actually takes less code in some cases compared to other languages such as PHP, Java and C#, for instance:

PHP, C# and Java - if(apples == "nom nom nom") { // do other stuff }
Python - if apples == "nom nom nom"

And of coarse the data type thing that needs to be done in some languages, but not in Python, no need to define your data types there.

Basically, you can do anything and everything with the Python language that you can do with all the others with the possibility to write less code along the way also. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't have a care in the world how much code I gotta write but sometimes certain things just click and the Python language is doing just that with my brain at the moment.

P.S. - Thanks for reading this ramble and I am VERY aware that it's not at all informative :^)

- Pete