I always eat my peas with honey
I’ve done it all my life
They do taste kind of funny
But it keeps them on my knife
- anonymous
In IT we are often doing the same things as eating peas with honey because we are using a knife. What we need to do is not create solutions that make bad things bearable, but that actually fix the root of the problem - getting a spoon instead of using a knife.

So I went through my projects today to see how many of them could be considered “honey projects” - probably half of them could go away with a good CRM solution.

Even better, not only would they go away but they would be easier to maintain in the future. I’ve started, instead of looking at my projects a entities in and of themselves, looking at them in the whole scheme of things and whether they only are a band-aid to cover a problem, or if they are actually fixing it. Its a good change and I anticipate that looking at things this way will help to make projects in the future more productive.

Digg the website up: http://digg.com/political_opinion/Prop_8_The_Divine_Institution_of_Marriage/ (The site can be seen here: http://www.preservingmarriage.org/ If you don’t have a digg account - get one just for this!

Here is the text of an email I just received - and my response to it:

–
Benjamin Patron Villegas
801.472.0065
ibpatronv@yahoo.com
ibpatronv@byu.edu

Stick to your task till it sticks to you;
Beginners are many, but enders are few.
Honour, power, place, and praise
Will come, in time, to the one who stays.

Stick to your task till it stick to you;
Bend at it, sweat at it, smile at it too;
For out of the bend and the sweat and the smile
Will come life’s victories, after awhile.
-Anonymous

—————-My Response ————————————–

Ben,

I think I found your links - although the story seems to be a bit different than the one in the story this guy was sent to jail over a book about homosexuality in a book titled “Who’s in a Family?” http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=45594 - here is another link about how the supreme court failed to hear the case:
Massachusetts court case: http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=54420
Supreme court: http://www.wnd.com/index.php?fa=PAGE.view&pageId=77373

And here are some links on the field trip to the wedding:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,436961,00.html
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/11/MNFG13F1VG.DTL

One of the first thoughts I had was a site that I’ve visited a few times, but have yet to try.  It is Kiva.org.  Kiva allows you to make a “Loan” to an entrepreneur in a 3rd world country.  You pick a specific person to loan to, and the loan amount and they pay you back when they succeed.  If you invested even $25 (the smallest amount allowed) every quarter, or even every month, my thought is that if/when you get paid back, you can then reinvest that money back to someone else who could use it and that same money would build over time as you invest in more people and you could help a whole bunch of people - and you can see their businesses grow!

Another way to help out poverty in your own area is to do something that we just did recently here at work.  A food drive.  Its not a new idea but if you can get a group of people to donate a few dollars worth of food you can make a big difference.  I know that here in Utah they are needing way more food than they recently anticipated due to the hard economic times.  If you are time pressed, the Utah food bank even has a virtual shopping experience where you can donate food or money without even going to the store.

In the Doctrine and Covenants section 104 verses 17 and 84 read:

17 For the earth is full, and there is enough and to spare; yea, I prepared all things, and have given unto the children of men to be agents unto themselves.

84 Inasmuch as you obtain a chance to loan money by hundreds, or thousands, even until you shall loan enough to deliver yourself from bondage, it is your privilege.

Take a few minutes today and see what you can do to help poverty.  Even just a few dollars can go a long way.

1. It seems to load pages (particularly AJAX based apps) quite quickly.

2. It seems to respond quickly in general as far as switching between tabs and pages and such.

3. I like the tabs in the top bar and not having them take up the normal bar - it made the whole thing seem like it had a lot more space (although I do also have the web developer toolbar taking up a row too…)

4. I need some of my add-ons from Firefox, namely Adblock Plus. I just could not stand to use it for very long for real web searching with all the ads interrupting me…

Overall opinion - I like it but I will wait and let it develop before I think hard about adopting it as my default browser.

Here is what I was doing:

var button = item.appendChild(document.createElement('input'));
button.type='button';
button.value='THIS IS A BUTTON';

This code always threw an error, however if you do it this way (creating the button, and then adding it) it works fine:

var button = document.createElement('input');
button.type='button';
button.value='THIS IS A BUTTON';
button = item.appendChild(button);

Have fun dynamically creating forms that will work in most browsers!

Well tonight this proved useful. Today was actually quite productive as I focused on one thing, got it done, and moved on. I just got back from a computer reset however. This interruption was quite sudden. I guess one of my drivers threw a stop error which shut windows down quick! Well this is where the working on one thing was a great help. First of all I didn’t lose any parts of things I had been working on because as I moved from one project/task to another I uploaded the files to the server. All I would have lost was a few minutes of work - so there was no fear about lost data when it went down. The other thing is I knew exactly what I was doing when it happened. I didn’t have to go open 12 files and remember what I was doing with each one. So, not only does working on one task help you move through your list easier, you have less chance of losing work!