zacharyc

Today I decided to create a Facebook account as woodside’s cheerleading coach. The benefit of this account is that it keeps its distance from my personal Facebook network, but still allows me to create events and groups for Woodside cheerleading. Anyway, I wanted my name to “Coach Zack”. Facebook rejected the name. So I tried to create ‘Zachary “Coach” Cohen’, again, Facebook automatically rejected it. Now I have been a big Facebook fan in the past, but of recent, I’m more dissapointed with them. I feel like they have started to remove the “fun” aspect of the application. Facebook used to be more about the network, and it is has turned into almost a twitter status message board. I’ve gone from checking Facebook twice a day, to checkign it once a week, if I get an email. ...

After 12 years of training cheerleading, I retired yesterday. I soft retired last year, but I found myself really missing it and wanting to get back involved. I joined the CheerGyms.com open team and cheered for them throughout the season. While I enjoyed cheering for the team, the logistics of the situation didn’t work out for me. The team originally said they would be splitting time between both gyms. One in San Jose and the other in Concord. San Jose was 30 minutes away, Concord was about an 70 minutes away. I decided to do the team anyway. The drive meant that I was up before 8 most Sundays. I couldn’t go out late with friends on Saturday for fear of being to too tired at practice. On top of the cheering aspect I coached a local high school. Coaching would take up Friday nights with football games, which meant that I really didn’t have a weekend. ...

We went up to Napa this past Saturday. On the way back, after the majority of the car had consumed a significant amount of wine, we stopped off at Taylor’s Refresher for a burger before the drive home. One member of our crew decided that we should get a full bottle of wine. Just so we are clear, I don’t really drink, I had a few tastings that day, but had already consumed more than I had wanted to, so I was out on the bottle. The three remaining members decided to attack a bottle of red wine in one lunch sitting. ...

I’m not much of a PHP guy, but I chose WordPress for this blog because I feel it is the most stable, well refined, yet easy to use blogging tool out there. Once the platform was decided I started looking for themes that worked well. I finally found something that I really liked when I stumbled on Ciaran Walsh’s blog. The theme is called JustSimple. It’s a great theme, and I enjoy it on my site, but there areas where it has come up short. Mostly in styles for certain elements. I started a simple github project for my changes to JustSimple Project. One such change I’ve made is to add support for Definition Lists. Terms are bold and definitions are padded left. ...

Almost two months ago I went to a CocoaHeads meeting during Macworld. They had Mike Lee talk. His presentation was about “Pimping Your App”. There were a bunch of interesting points, but one thing really stuck in my head. Mike was talking about how is a messy person in his life. His car is messy. His room is messy. His desk is messy. Everything is messy, except his code. HIs code is crystal clean, squeaky even. As a programmer you need to make sure your code is consistent and clean. Ever since I have been thinking about standardizing the way I write code. This is the first post in hopefully a stream of posts about quality code. ...