Dan Olsen’s Weblog

So I am currently on the bus on my way into work. It is about 45 minutes on an express bus and then a shuttle bus that takes me up to the capitol building. When I first accepted the job with the State of Utah I was not excited about riding the bus. I knew I would have to since gas prices were too high to be able to drive to work every day.

Well, after almost 4 months of riding the bus, I have to say I love public transportation. UTA (Utah Transit Authority) now has Internet on all express busses and on Front Runner (the new commuter train that runs from Ogden to Salt Lake). The speed is a little slow but it allows me to get stuff done on the bus.

I must say. I am now a big fan of public transportation.

Yesterday Gov. Jon Huntsman of Utah announced that many state agencies will be moving to a condensed work week. Instead of a typical 5 day, 8 hour/day work week they will move to the 4 day, 10 hour/day work week.

The rumor had been swirling around the State Office Building on capitol hill but many of us thought they wouldn’t actually do it. However, yesterday morning al employees received an e-mail about it. This caused quite an uproar in the office. Most people are either strongly for it or strongly against it. I myself am one of the few that have mixed feelings. I am really excited about an extra day in my weekend to spend with my family. However, I am not excited about getting up an hour earlier and getting home an hour later.

I currently commute into Salt Lake from Springville which is about an hour south of Salt Lake. I currently take the bus because of ridiculous gas prices. I am one of the lucky bus riders that has a bus schedule that will easily accommodate my new work schedule. However, some people are not so lucky. One guy was saying yesterday that he would now have to leave home around 4:30am and he would not get home until around 8:00pm with the new 10 hour work day.

Gov. Huntsman said that the 4 day work week would be a trial run for a year so they can evaluate the impact. Most of us believe that the 4 day work week is here to stay. My wife and I have thought of moving closer to Salt Lake but with the housing market the way it is we don’t think we would be very successful in selling our house we bought a year ago.

There are currently many things the state still has to work out such as day care for employees as well as transportation concerns. They are launching the 4 day work week on August 4th and the plan to have most of those issues figured out before them. It was quite an aggressive move on the State’s part. All I have to say is that I’ll know how I really feel once I start working 10 hour days. I figure it will be like days I spent working at Omniture. The only difference is I get Fridays off.

So I switched jobs over a month and a half ago and I have always meant to write about why I changed jobs and I haven’t gotten around to it until now.

I started working at Omniture in May of 2006. I started out as an intern and for the almost two years I worked there I enjoyed it. However, I soon found myself working a lot of hours. Some days I was at work from 8:00am to midnight. A couple times of working late was fine and understandable but then it became a more regular thing.

After the late nights had gone on for a while I was realizing I was a away from my family too much and wasn’t able to fulfill some of my other responsibilities. Well, Omniture had me convinced that they paid really well. So for a while I just worked the late nights to support my family.

After a while I started talking to some of my buddies and found out that I was working a lot more hours then they were doing the same thing. I also found out I was getting paid less then most of them. One buddy told me that he worked for the State of Utah and never had to work more then 40 hours and he thought I should apply. I applied for two jobs at the with the State and was offered a position at the Office of Education. Unfortunately, the offer required me to take a $17,000/year pay cut. The was out of the question. I figured I’d do the other interview with the Department of Technology services. I wasn’t counting on an offer being much better from them. However, in the end I was offered just as much as Omniture was paying me.

My wife and I discussed the new offer and decided it was not a bad deal. Same pay, fewer hours and great benefits. I decided to take the job. Since March 10th I have been a employee for the State of Utah and enjoy that I am home more with my family now with an hour commute then I was with a 15 minute commute.

The point of this is that it is disappointing that there are so many people that ask a lot of hours from their employees but don’t compensate them for the time away from their family. My boss at Omniture told me they pay for all those hours and we shouldn’t need to be compensated. I think people higher up in the company forget that lower employees such as myself don’t benefit from the long hours like they did. They worked all those hours and made a lot of money but when the lower employees put in that amount of time they pay them a measly salary.

Don’t get me wrong. I miss working at Omniture but I had to decide whether Omniture was my family or my wife and kids were my family.

So I was little bored at one point in my life and decided to create a little page for my MyMiniCity.com city. MyMiniCity.com provides you with a link to each city that gives you XML with the current information about your city. So, instead of having to figure out what my city needed and entering the correct link, I just created a page that looked at the properties of my city and suggested the best link for me. So now I can go to http://www.dansworkshop.net/myminicity/olsen-land/ and I will be provided with a link that will best help my city.

If you don’t know what I am talking about your can go to http://myminicity.com and you’ll see what I am talking about.

I also created another page that gives me links that I regularly visit to help others with their cities. http://www.dansworkshop.net/myminicity/other/.

So I attended my first caucus last night as a mentioned in my previous post. I went in with the intent to just get a feel of what actually happens at a caucus. I must say that it was an awesome experience. For anyone who wishes to be active in politics, attending your state caucuses is a great way to actually get involved. There were about 20 in attendance last night which is far from the number of individuals who reside in the precinct. In some ways it was nice to have a small group but on the other hand I was disappointed that more people don’t care.

I am a believer in the idea that if you don’t participate in the political process you have no right to complain about your government. A young man I took with me to the caucus was not excited about going but he left with the understanding that if you want the government to hear your voice then you must participate in how officials are elected. The other young man I took with me loved the caucus. He was even more excited to find out that he could actually participate since he will be 18 by the November election. I wish I saw more young people getting involved even though they can’t vote. I’m sure if more adults were active in the political process we would see more young people joining in. Just because you can’t vote doesn’t mean your concerns about the government can’t be heard.

In conclusion, the two main topics that were discussed in our caucus were the budget/debt and education. I think I was in the minority since I voted against private school vouchers in the state of Utah. I believe that vouchers had good intentions but did not provide an equal opportunity for everyone. If we want to allow people to choose whether to send their kids to private school then we should give the poor as much of an opportunity as those with money. I don’t know how to do it but we need to make sure we don’t make more of a divide between the rich and the poor. I actually think that we should focus on making our public schools better and I think the best way to do that is require that parents be more involved in their children’s education. That is a big reason I believe charter schools and private schools are more successful. A student must have more then just the school educating them.

And there you have my brain dump.

Tonight are the Utah caucuses and I hope everyone gets out and has their voice heard. I am planning on going tonight which will be my first caucus. Over the past couple of years I’ve been more and more interested in politics. I actually changed jobs and I know work up at the state office building. I’m excited for the opportunity to go over and watch the state house and senate when they are in session.

Tonight we are taking a couple of young men from our church over to the caucus for our weekly activity. One of them is excited to go and see how a caucus works. The other says he is not interested. I think it is important to be part of the political process. I think those who don’t want to participate have no right to complain about their government.

I started to take an interest in politics when I saw my data being politically active and going to the state caucuses. Also with everything going on in the nation as well as in the state of Utah I have become more interested in making sure I am heard. So if you are not getting out and being a part of the political process then I don’t want to you hear you complain about your government officials.

I don’t know how many people have seen MyMiniCity. You can go to my city and see what it is about and then go and set up your own city.

I am testing Windows Live Writer to see if it is worth installing on my home computer for my wife to post to our own family blog. I’m always up to hear what others have to say about Windows Live Writer.

I used to be a huge fan of ESPN.com and I guess technically I still am. However, lately I find myself going to the Yahoo! Sports web site for sports news. Although ESPN.com has more content related to sports, Yahoo! has the design appeal. I love the look of the latest iteration of Yahoo! Sports. It is more pleasant to look at if you ask me.

I wonder how many people think like I do. You have an option between two sites that provide a lot of the same information. Do more people pick content or more people pick the design they like looking at better?

I got a new iPod Nano from work. I was wondering how well a small screen would do for videos but I have been pleased. I have not had any videos that I’ve been disappointed with the screen size. Of course bigger is better but then again, so is getting free iPod.

So I signed up for Facebook when Phil Windley invited me to join. I figured I’d check it out. It turns out quite a few people I know also have Facebook accounts. This has lead to a major Facebook annoyance for me.

The thing that annoys me is that people are using my Wall on Facebook to send me a message. So, when they post a message on my Wall I get an e-mail from Facebook saying so-and-so wrote on my Wall. Now I have to click on the link, login to Facebook and go to my Wall to read the message. What ever happened to sending me an e-mail instead? Sending me an e-mail provides a way to send me a message without requiring me to jump through hoops to get my messages.

One thing I wish Facebook could do in this situation is send me the message in the e-mail they sent me.

Mainly, people need to realize that there is a coolness factor and a convenience factor. What WOWs some people annoys others. Think about the user on the other end and determine if what you are about to do causes inconveniences for the other. So, if you want to send me a message, send me an e-mail. Don’t write on my Wall in Facebook.

Technorati Tags: Facebook, Messaging

It has been announced today the Omniture will be acquiring Visual Sciences. I had seen stories about this being a move Omniture should make but I didn’t realize it would happen this soon. I didn’t know about it until a company meeting this afternoon.

Technorati Tags: Omniture, Visual Sciences

I am hoping to eventually have a new blog design up. I have mostly used other’s blog templates because it is easy. I finally broke down and have started working on my own. Due to the lack of free time it may be a while before I actually have it up.

I found out what kind of power a single sneeze can have on a person. In early June I was sitting at my desk at Omniture just minding my own business. All of a sudden a large sneeze over took me. Instantly after the sneeze I started to have a pain in my side. I thought maybe I had pulled a muscle because it was quite the sneeze.

Well, I went home that night and started to feel sick. I had a temperature of 102, felt sick, and my head was pounding. I decided to go to bed early with the hopes that I would feel better in the morning. Well, the pain in my side was a little worse and I still had a slight fever. I figured it was time to go see a doctor. The only problem was that we had not yet picked a primary care physician since we were planning on moving shortly. So, we figured I would go to the urgent care and have it looked at.

Right before we left for the urgent care my dad called and said to try a couple simple tests to see if I might have appendicitis. They were some of the tests they had done on my youngest sister when she had appendicitis just months before. Well, in short, those tests hurt and we decided to go to the hospital. Sure enough, it was appendicitis. Not only did they find I had appendicitis but they also found a hernia. Unfortunately each has to have its own surgery.

After I healed from the appendectomy, I went in to have the hernia repaired. The hernia took a lot longer to heal then the appendectomy did. Not only that, my body was hammered and my immune system was shot. So what happened? I got some stomach bug that laid me out for a week and lasted a total of two weeks. This did not make our family vacation to California. I was healthy for the end of the trip and we had a nice day at the beach.

So, there it is, see what kind of power a single sneeze can have upon a human being. Oh, did I mention I also had a cold while I had the stomach bug.

The lesson here is to just avoid sneezing.

It’s amazing how much information you miss out on when you are down and out for a few days. Yesterday I made an attempt to go back to work after having my appendix out on Friday. One of the first stories I read was that Apple released Safari for Windows. At first I thought maybe the pain killers were causing me to hallucinate. Well, I wasn’t.

At first I didn’t understand why they would do such a thing. That question was quickly answered as I read about Safari being the platform for iPhone apps. At work I use Windows and for my Masters Thesis work I use a Mac and I like being able to use the same browser in both environments. I think Safari is a nice little browser and I think I would use it more if it were actually more developer friendly. As a basic browser I love Safari, but as a developer I find it to be not so great. I currently use Firefox since I have easy access to the Firebug plug-in. It is nice to have a tool that can help troubleshoot problems with my web apps. Safari lacks any really good tools to debug issues that only appear in Safari.

I would be more likely to use Safari if they had more built in tools or even a plug-in infrastructure that allowed for such useful tools. If anyone knows of any such tools please let me know. In the mean time I am going to continue to focus on Firefox and IE as supported browsers for my web apps. IE at least has a developer toolbar to help out with some of the problems. However, the Javascript warnings in IE stink a lot of the time.

Please Apple, give us some useful tools that help people make debugging problems easier. Once again, if you know of any such tools leave me a comment pointing me in the right direction.

Technorati Tags: Safari, Windows

I recently looked into phplib which is a helpful library for PHP. It has an easy way of accessing databases as well as taking care of sessions using PHP’s session functionality. This will save me some time in my projects in the future.

The downside is that it doesn’t support PHP 5. I wanted to use PHP for my future projects but I would also like to take advantage of phplib. The other downside is that it doesn’t look like much development is going on (February 2006 was when the last version was released). There have been some commits to the CVS repository so I am hoping that we will soon see a new version that supports PHP 5. If anyone has any information on phplib supporting PHP 5 in the future please let me know.

Technorati Tags: PHP, phplib

Have you wondered how Google’s street level images are taken? Well, go check out the entry on this Google Earth blog to see the 11 lens camera they use to get these shots. The video included with the post it pretty cool as well. I’ve added the video below.

Technorati Tags: Cameras, Google Earth

For those who haven’t heard yet Google has released an early version of Google Gears. Google Gears allows you to build web apps that allow for offline usage. I’ll leave the rest of the talking up to their web site.

Technorati Tags: Google Gears, Programming, Internet

I watched the Utah Jazz/San Antonio Spurs game last night and was quite disappointed. I am a big fan of the Utah Jazz so of course I was disappointed when they lost last night. However, I was very disappointed at what took place after the game. The ESPN commentator tried to interview Tim Duncan but couldn’t because people were throwing things at players and refs. In my opinion, and I’m sure in many people’s opinion, this is unacceptable. Of course I get upset with how things turned out and of course I am biased and think there were some bad calls but to lower myself to the level of throwing things? Come on! THROWING THINGS AT ANYONE IS NOT ACCEPTABLE! (I can’t wait to see if anyone comments on when it is acceptable to throw something at someone.)

I honestly think the Jazz could have put away the game last night and tied the series up if they had kept their heads on straight. Obviously they forgot what happened in the Golden State series when Golden State lost their heads over calls. The Spurs could have done the same thing in game 3 because I will admit they got the raw end of some calls. Sometimes that is when a team has to show they are the better team by not getting distracted.

All in all, my main message here is that we as fans have to think before we act. Just a handful of people made the whole group look bad and that’s just not fair. There is nothing to gain out of throwing things at these games. I am embarrassed as a Jazz fan at what took place especially after the commentators on ESPN praised the Jazz fans for what great fans they are. So…

BE A GOOD FAN!

Jazz in 7

Technorati Tags: NBA, Utah Jazz, Sportsmanship, Sports

I just watched the LunchMeet clip of Kaliya Hamlin and Phil Windley at the Internet Identity Workshop and I am impressed. I remember the first IIW Workshop back in 2005 where I accompanied Phil to help out with the workshop. I had the opportunity to attend a second time in 2006 as well which I had a chance to participate more thanks to the volunteers at the Computer History Museum.

From the sounds of things the workshop is growing. I remember the first workshop and was a little surprised at how people were very protective and critical of any idea that was not their own. There were also maybe half the number of people as there were at this weeks workshop. When I attended the second workshop in 2006 I surprised at how things were starting to change. People really started to talk and be receptive to others ideas. Kaliya and Phil both talked in the clip about how people are putting their ideas together and seeing “what kind of soup they can make”. I think the progress the workshop is making is amazing.

Now that I have moved on into full time employment and no longer work as closely with Phil as I once did I wasn’t able to attend the last two workshops but I like to keep an eye on what is going on and hope that at some point I will be able to attend the workshops again (crossing fingers). For anyone who is interested in identity I would highly recommend going to this workshop. It is an interesting experience and the great thing is that everyone has a say. If you have something you want to present then you can present. If you have ideas on other identity topics you are free to discuss. Another reason to go is because it is held at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, CA. It is a great venue for the event in my opinion.

Hey Phil, when are you going to hold IIW here in Utah so I can avoid airfare?

Update
For those who are interested Kaliya posted a comment with the dates of the next IIWs.

Since you invited everyone to come to the next workshop…#5 will be December 3-5 2007 and #6 will be will be May 12-15 2008. We hope you can join us.

From Kaliya Hamlin

Technorati Tags: IIW2007, Identity, Internet Identity

Here is a widget that is circulating for people to donate to the Hokie Spirit Fund to help the victims of the Virginia Tech shootings and their families.

I had been using Trac to keep track bugs for my projects. However, with out using fast CGI it was really slow and getting on my nerves. So, I started looking into other options that might fill my need and still appeal to me. Well, I found Retrospectiva. It is pretty much the Ruby on Rails version of Trac. So if you are looking for a good system to track your projects, Retrospectiva is another good option.

Technorati Tags: Bug Tracking, Retrospectiva

I read an article talking about DED|Chain by Dustin Diaz. I had heard about it before but never really looked into it. Well, I finally looked into it and I can see the power behind it.

DED|Chain is built on top of the Yahoo! User Interface library. It allows for easily performing certain actions on your web page. An example would be the functionality to show or hide an element on your web page. It also makes animation easy with a few lines of JavaScript code.

I plan to continue playing around with DED|Chain but I really like the ease of making things happening by using it.

Technorati Tags: DED|Chain, JavaScript

I am a fan of fantasy sports games. Because I enjoy them I decided this past year to create my own. My original iteration of the web app has lasted through the BYU football and basketball seasons. I am now in the process of putting together version 1.0 which I am planning on releasing August 1st. In time for some the upcoming NCAA football season. I wanted to get it out a little before the season to take care of any bugs.

For version 1.0 I am using the YUI toolkit to bring some AJAXy stuff into the site. I am also hoping to increase the number of users to more then the 10-15 I’ve had over the first year. One way that I am hoping to draw more people is to provide more then just BYU as a team in the game. As of right now I have plans to add USC and Michigan to the mix. I am hoping to have the multiple team functionality tested well enough to be able add all NCAA Division I teams to the game by the 2008 football season or 2007-2008 basketball season if things go well.

One time consuming part of my current setup is that I have to put all the final scores in by hand. I am looking for a web service that I can use to have the scores entered into the database automatically. If anyone knows of a web service that will provide me NCAA football and basketball scores, please let me know.

You can go check out the old version of the system by going to http://bballpickem.com. The site for the football version is http://football-pickem.com. Go check the sites out (the football site doesn’t have much yet) and get ready to sign up come August 1st and get your friends to do the same. In the near future I am going to put up a poll or two on football-pickem.com to allow people to vote on the importance of features and teams that I am looking at adding.

Technorati Tags: Sports, Games

My blog is now Open ID enabled for comment posting. So, if you have a comment you can now login using your Open ID URL.

Technorati Tags: Open ID