Sun Dec 23 18:35:41 PST 2001

Well, attended a different church this week. It was an OK service, but it didn’t really feel quite right, a little on the light side. The worship was OK, but not really great. Very limited number of songs and the sermon seemed pretty short too. Part of that may just be that it was the Sunday before Christmas, but they started at 11:00, and I suspect that their normal finish time is pretty close to noon. A hour service just is a bit on the short side for me most Sundays. It really seemed like they were trying to cram stuff in to make the service just an hour. Anyway, we’ll keep looking around I think.

Got the MySQL database up and running on pooh. We picked up a copy of "PHP and MySQL web development" at Borders on Friday and it’s turning out to be a really nice book. I’ve read through the first couple of chapters and gotten a reasonable intro to PHP (more on that later) and I borrowed the back section to the the DB up and running. Mostly I just needed the syntax of the instrucitons. I’ve set up MySQL databases once or twice before.

Anyway, PHP is really pretty ugly. It looks like they took just about every syntax possible and instead of doing "pick and choose" they did "add it all" to an even larger degree than Perl did. On the plus side, it’s easy to write dense code… Anyway, we’ll hack together a small lib of functions and then drive the bulk of the content out of the database through PHP to keep things fairly simple and minimize data maintance costs.

Had chicken for lunch. Part one of making the gumbo. Right now the chicken carcases are cooking away with the shrimp shells and lots of other stuff to make the stock for the gumbo. We’ll have the gumbo on Christmas, but we needed to make the stock in advance since it takes several hours to simmer, and it’s adviseable to chill the stock so it’s easy to remove the fat from the top. This is one of those dishes that’s somewhat gross to make, but all the nasty stuff gets removed in the process (fat, chicken bones, etc) so it’s no big deal to eat when you get to the end.