R. Andrew Love's Blog

This last weekend Kara and I went out to Maryville for her Mom’s birthday. While we were there, we went on the Roaring Fork Motor Trail. It was fun and it reminded of the time back in the day when the whole family went to Gatlinburg and climbed on the rocks in the river. Anyway, I’ve posted some pictures in the gallery under the album called Roaring Fork Motor Trail.

The day after we got back from Maryville I left for Atlanta, where I am right now. Work sent me to Atlanta for some training. I will be here until Thursday and will be back Monday to Friday next week. So, I guess I am now officially a business traveler. So far, the trip has been good. Also, this post marks a milestone for the blog. This is my 300^th post. Woo hoo!

Well, I guess I’ll take some time now and let everyone know that I accepted a job at Federal Mogul. For those who didn’t know I have been looking for a job now since May. You might remember that in April I had some interviews with DuPont that were promising. In fact, there was going to be a pretty good job offer, but the timing was bad and they weren’t able to make the offer before hiring of new employees was halted from the corporate level. Thus, since that time I have been interviewing with a number of different places.

Previously, any prospect with Federal Mogul, where I currently work, would have forced us to move to a suburb of Detroit, Michigan, which is definitely a no-go. Last week, they made an offer that we couldn’t pass up. So, this morning I officially accepted a job as an SAP Process Engineer. The big thing with this job is that I get to stay here in Smyrna. FM is implementing SAP R/3 5.0 worldwide and I’ll get to do some ABAP programming, among other things, to help out with that. Since I’ll be supporting the Aftermarket division in North America and Europe, there will be some travel involved, which should be fun/interesting. The fact that I don’t have to get familiar with another company helps a lot. And the compensation is very close to what DuPont was going to offer, so its a pretty good deal all around. I am so tired of going to interviews.

I guess this is kind of a delayed reaction but, I put some of the pictures from our weekend trip down to Birmingham for Noah’s third birthday in the gallery. Have a look.

This weekend Kara and I went to Long Hunter again and did some more walking. We walked the two mile path around Couchville Lake. It’s a pretty cool lake that’s not connected to Percy Priest Lake. I took some pictures and put them up in the Gallery. So take a look.

(View larger map)

I just finished adding another album to the gallery. It contains pictures taken when Kara and I took Caitlin to a quarter mile nature trail at Long Hunter State Park. It was fun. So go check out the pictures in the gallery.

For over a year now I have been using del.icio.us to hold my web bookmarks. It’s actually really neat. I read all of my favorite sites using their RSS Feeds, so when someone posts something it shows up in my Outlook. Let’s say that a post on Digg or a link in a Slashdot post interested me or I wanted to read it later. All I do is click the TAG icon in Firefox which is provided by the del.icio.us extension for Firefox. The bookmark is then saved. I can then access it from any computer at http://del.icio.us/randrewlove.

But that is not what this post is about. After reading the article Top 10 Ways to Use del.icio.us I had an idea how I could use del.icio.us to implement a wish list. I already use del.icio.us JSON feeds on the blog to show my recently bookmarked posts (this is the last item on the left panel of the blog). There is also an icon at the bottom of each post that anyone signed into del.icio.us can click to bookmark the post (as if I ever wrote anything noteworthy of bookmarking).

Anyway, back to making a wish list. You’ve probably seen or kept a wish list on a site such as Amazon. What if I want to be able to add any page on the web to my wish list? This would create a centralized wish list not restricted to any one site’s contents. I am using del.icio.us to bookmark each wish list item with a particular tag, in this case WishList. You can look at http://del.icio.us/randrewlove/WishList to see the items. Now, check our Our Wishlist page to see the final results. Using some javascript we now have a dynamic wishlist driven by del.icio.us. Every time I add a bookmark with the tag WishList or Kara adds a bookmark to her account with the WishList tag it will show up on our wish list page. We can even add a note to the bookmark which will also be displayed beside the item. Pretty neat. I guess this won’t be useful until Christmas probably, so I guess I have until then to add stuff.

For the benefit of those who don’t read or listen to Fred Thompson’s daily commentary, I heard a funny commentary today on his podcast. Go to Fred’s Blog to read the piece.

This morning I made some changes to our blogs. My blog has moved from andrewandkara.com/blog.html to andrew.andrewandkara.com and Kara’s blog was moved from andrewandkara.com/karasblog.html to kara.andrewandkara.com. Before my blog and part of the archive was found in the root directory, whereas only Kara’s blog index was found in the root folder. Now each blog is entirely separated into its own directory and sub domain. The previous blog index pages now redirect to the new locations.

We went for another walk today at the boat ramp in Smyrna. It was enjoyable even if it was too hot for my taste. The map below shows where we went (larger map here).

It’s about time for Fred to announce that he is going to run.