Eric G. Wiley

Shazam! It just occurred to me that we had a fantastic turnout at the meetup last week. 14 people showed and everyone was cool. It's great to mix it up in person with folks who's on-line icons are more familiar to me than their actual faces.

A lot of talented people were in the group as well. Dan Ott showed off his newly launched redesign of the Cleveland Free Times site. He did both the front and back-end work - nice.

Nate Klaiber shared some of his valuable web standards knowledge with others in the group in a small breakout session. If you're looking for a rough idea of what books to read to get up to speed with your web development skills, Nate's book reviews are an excellent place to begin.

Brad Dielman is cranking out a small armada of clean looking, standards based web sites in his spare time.

And last but not least renowned CSS expert Eric Meyer showed up. Kind of like having Noah Webster show up at your English Vocabulary Hobbyists Group.

There were lot of people I'm not mentioning here that displayed some great talent and, my favorite part, enthusiasm for the craft of web design. Makes me excited for the future.

Posted by Eric Wiley at 04:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Up to this day, I have been fully appreciative of the power and magic of a database driven web site or web application without ever having to know how to build one. This morning, thanks to my honesty and gung-ho spirit, that all changed.

After the CEO told me what functionality he wanted I knew that I could hard-code it and it would work fine, but it wouldn't be scalable and revising it would be tedious. So I offered that a database driven solution would be the best route, knowing full well that the database monkey would jump on my back as soon as the suggestion left my mouth. I was right.

I've spent the morning scrambling around the web making bookmarks in Delicious, jotting down notes and adding books to my shopping list on Amazon. Here are the resources I've narrowed it down to so far. Keep in mind that I'm an absolute beginner with no programming experience:

ONLINE RESOURCES

• W3Schools PHP Tutorial. www.w3schools.com/php/


• "Free Webmaster Help" PHP/MySQL Tutorial. www.freewebmasterhelp.com/tutorials/phpmysql

BOOKS

• PHP and MySQL for Dynamic Web Sites: Visual QuickPro Guide (2nd Edition) (Visual QuickPro Guide)


• Beginning PHP and MySQL 5: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition

Posted by Eric Wiley at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Elke and I took a stroll by the lake today. The silty bottom just past the bank was packed with Bluegill nests. Perfect circles hollowed out from the bottom of the lake, like foxholes. The outer edge of each one built right up against the outer diameter of several others surrounding it.

Every hole was manned by one Bluegill swimming in furious circles, I presume to keep the other fish away from the eggs. From above it was an interesting show.

Posted by Eric Wiley at 12:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Lots of coyote stuff has happened in the past week (relatively speaking). First Colleen saw one frolicking with a stray lap dog, then we heard two group howl sessions before dark. The pre-darkness howling was a first for us.

The most significant coyote encounter happened yesterday. It was a gorgeous day. Warm, sunny and clear. I was up on a ladder painting the back of our house. Our six month old son was in his stroller under a nearby shade tree and Elke, our dog, was dozing in the sun about ten feet away from him. My wife came out the back door and exclaimed something about a coyote. It was not unusual to see a coyote passing through the outskirts of our yard so I was not surprised and hurried down the ladder to see it.

What I saw shocked me. It was making a bee-line for our dog. My wife yelled at it and it slightly changed direction and trotted towards the tree line. It had progressed to within twenty feet of Elke and wasn't very afraid of any of us. Elke thought she was the one being yelled at and was so confused that she never even saw the coyote.

Not a cause for hysteria, but definitely an eye-opener. The coyotes have been elevated from 'Neat-O' to 'Potential Threat' status in our household.

Posted by Eric Wiley at 12:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

My wife and I have heard many second-hand accounts about coyotes cannibalizing domesticated canine pets. More so now that we've moved to the country and often hear coyote packs at night as they celebrate a kill.

The basic story line goes like this: The coyote pack locates a naive, tennis ball chasing, eats-from-a-bowl-with-his-name-on-it dog as a potential victim/meal. The pack hides in nearby cover while a decoy, either a female coyote in estrus or a frolicking playmate, approaches the pet dog and attempts to lure it back to the ambush site. If successful, the pack will kill the dog and share it for dinner.

Because coyotes have been so vilified over the past century, I have been a bit skeptical about pet-luring technique tales. It sounded so much like a campfire spook story that I doubted it was entirely factual, and even now I don't know if it is.

My wife called me from home this morning and she was a bit upset. Based on what she told me, I'm one step closer to being a believer. Here's her story:

She noticed coyote playing in the field near the woods behind our house. It was enthusiastically capering around a small, bedraggled white "lap dog". Side note: We live about a mile away from a local dog shelter. Irresponsible people sometimes abandon their unwanted dogs in the general vicinity, probably because they're unwilling to go through the paper work and assume the dogs will get picked up anyway. End side note.

The little dog was not as enthusiastic about playing as the coyote was, but interested. My wife ran outside and tried to scare the coyote away. She did get the attention of both animals, but the coyote only stared at her and the small dog retreated into the woods. The coyote quickly followed it.

Unfortunately for the fact-gathering aspect of the story, she went back into the house and did everything she could to keep from hearing anything that may further upset her, so if there were "pack attack" sounds coming from the woods she would not have heard them.

However, I would not be surprised if that little white lap dog is never...seen...again.

BOO!

Posted by Eric Wiley at 08:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you're one of those people who wonder what the inside of a ground hog hole looks like, then we should hang out some time.

Posted by Eric Wiley at 08:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)