self.d-struct.org

Slowly sorting through all the video I shot while in Tanzania. This is one of my favorites, two elephants playing in the mud at Tarangire National Park.

As a Detroit-area native transplanted to Chicago, I’m often asked who I’m rooting for in the Red Wings vs. Blackhawks playoff matchup. I don’t really care about pro sports, but there’s no way I could root for anyone other than the Red Wings.

I’m pleased to announce the relaunch of Jobs4Recovery.com. I programmed the first version of this site in September 2005, in the aftermath of the Katrina-Rita one-two hurricane punch. After the initial wave of activity, the site fell by the wayside. The US Chamber of Commerce, in partnership with IBM, is ressurecting the site to deal with both economic events and natural disasters. Over the past few weeks I’ve worked on upgrading and refreshing the site. I’m pleased with how it turned out, and I hope it’ll help folks when they need it the most.

On a technical note, sometimes it’s fun to switch your whole working environment for a while. I’ve been hacking Ruby on Rails for the past few years, but went back to PHP for this project. While I’ve fallen in love with the Ruby language and the Rails framework, the immediacy of PHP is refreshing. To upgrade this site, almost all of the effort was in modifying the Javascript calls to reflect changes in the Google Maps API, or tweaking layout issues in Internet Explorer. The same core PHP code from 3.5 years ago worked flawlessly, without changing a single line.