Web Conference

Went to my first web conference today. Drove 4 hours north and met with people that do what I do around the area. Finally had someone explained to me why Microformats is cool thing. It was neat to see how web developers come from all kinda of backgrounds. Some where not IT "alpha geeks" at all, background in Communications and had difficultly working with the IT group. Just so foreign to me to think that Web Development would be done outside of IT.
All in all the conference was nice and I would like to do it again next year. Now I need some sleep.

The route

1. Starting walking warm up
2. Start running down Sandusky
3. Cross road at top of hill, watch for speeders
4. Get off Sandusky (0.8 miles thus far)
5. Turn on Hayes
6. Top slight hill, starting to get tired
Run down Mohawk...my poor knees
7. Rhonda Dr. - One big stinking hill
8. Turn on Chinook (recovering from last hill)
9. Cut through school parking lot
10. Turn on to Pawnee Dr, gotta watch for speeders
11. Cross pass Long Meadows
12. Home stretch, walk up hill for cool down. (3.3 miles)

Ran a new distance

Well I have been continuing my running to keep in shape. Typically run on Mondays and Wednesdays if it isn't raining. The distance of the running part was just over two miles, which I was doing okay. I wanted to step up the distance up enough where I could run 5k without stopping. So I had been planning a route through my neighborhood that would give me 3.1 miles.

Well yesterday I ran that new route and ran the whole thing. (minus the top of the hill of Rhonda St., if you saw the hill you would stop too!). The new route is 3.3 miles so I'm really excited that I ran the whole thing and my body isn't sore today. I'll run the old route on Monday to keep my shins from hurting but will try it again on the following Wednesday.

I'll post a running map soon.

Excel Tip - Removing characters from a cell

Since I have remove characters off cells every so often in Excel, I always forget. I always have to Google my answer.

In Excel my cell contains data like this in cell A1
marker lat="37.5002273543" lng="-79.1252303123" found="-79.12523031234741" left="37.500227354254726"

But I don't need the duplicate longitude and latitude coordinates. So I write a formula that can do this.
=LEFT(A1, LEN(A1)-48)
That will chop off the last 48 characters. You can also do the right side and chop off the first set of characters. And I'm sure some can write a formula that can count from the left and chop off anything after that. But that is my method (madness I tell ya)

Google API done

Well I finally finished putting out code to make our attendance zones work. You can see my efforts www.amherst.k12.va.us and click on Attendance Zones. The code is sloppy and mainly borrowed from here and Greybox, but it took me a good two days to make everything work the way I wanted it. Now it time to rethink the design of the county's website. Inspiration coming from this site, [http://www.quatuor.be/]