The Left Side of Normal Airplanes, The Internet, and Everything Else

I weighed myself this morning and did not like what I saw on the scale.  For the last several years I've maintained a (somewhat unhealthy) 220 pounds.  I've been fairly neutral about my weight, not seeking to diet or lose any, but also keeping an eye on what I eat trying not to make that number any larger either.  I'd be happy (for now) to stay put.  Over the weekend I noticed that some of my shirts felt a little tighter than usual and didn't think much of it.  This morning I decided to step on the scale and weighed in at just over 227 pounds.  This is the highest I ever recall seeing, and that worries me a little bit.

It also happens that not including the current week, there are 27 weeks remaining in 2010.  Through better eating, less snacking, and even a little exercise now and then, I'm going to push to lose 27 pounds by the end of the year.  That's one pound a week, a reasonable goal even for someone as busy as I tend to be.  There will be challenges, though.  I'll have a week off in July for summer vacation, I'm getting married in November, then Thanksgiving, a cruise in the Caribbean, and then Christmas, all of which will involve eating more than usual.  I should probably just throw out those weeks from the equasion and push for higher losses during the non-holiday periods.  I'll try to check in here on the blog with weekly status updates to keep me motivated.

If I can be at or below 200 pounds by January 1, 2011 that will put me within striking distance of my "ideal" weight for my height by this time next year.  Wish me luck!

I was just wondering last night when the new version would be released, so you can imagine my delight this morning when I logged into the blog administrator and saw the prompt to upgrade to 1.5.  The automated update process took about three seconds and so far everything appears to be working perfectly.  Thanks Laura!

I just realized that I have some catching up to do.  At work I spend my days looking after a fairly large number of ColdFusion applications running on ColdFusion 7 and 8.  Most of the underlying code in these applications was written back in ColdFusion 5 and subsequently adjusted to work in newer versions, but it's rare that we need to update the framework in a really fundamental way.  It does a great job and has lots of little whiskers all over it from where it's been ammended and beaten into doing whatever we need it to do.  However, it's all procedural code and scantly makes use of any of the newer features offered by the ColdFusion engine.  In my off-hours (if there is such a thing), I'm doing a lot of the same except for other clients who are also running older versions of ColdFusion or have applications originally written for older versions.  Then, I read a blog post from Terrence Ryan inviting ColdFusion skeptics to give the platform a try.  In the post, he outlines some of the concepts and features that we all know and love about ColdFusion.  He also links to some recent CF code on GitHub showing what "modern" ColdFusion can look like (in an attempt to show that not all ColdFusion code has to resemble your favorite pasta).

When I first clicked the link, I began to wonder if it was directed to the wrong place.  That doesn't look ANYTHING like what I'm used to seeing ColdFusion code look like.  I recall reading that components (ColdFusion's answer to classes in other languages) could now be written entirely in script form (as opposed to the usual tag form), but I had never actually seen one in practice.  Furthermore, ColdFusion 9 has made just about every tag available in script form, so we end up with code such as:

var httpObj = New http();
httpObj.setUrl(variables.apiUrl & "translate");
httpObj.addParam(name='v',type='url',value=variables.v);
httpObj.addParam(name='q',type='url',value=arguments.q);
httpObj.addParam(name='langpair',type='url',value=arguments.from & "|" & arguments.to);
var result = httpObj.send();

This was pulled from Ryan's sample on GitHub.  Usually this would be done with the CFHTTP and CFHTTPPARAM tags, but this is the first I've seen someone using the script form.  It all looks alien to me, which means that I need to take my own advice and re-read the tag and function references (my number one piece of advice to new CF programmers at Annex ten years ago).  Hopefully I will be able to find some time to refresh myself and convince my employer or a client or two that an upgrade to ColdFusion 9 is necessary so I can get some hands-on experience.  I do have CF9 installed on my laptop for development purposes, but the code all gets deployed to older servers, so I can't use the new features and put them into production just yet.  It's one thing to toy around on the local system, and another thing entirely to actually put code into production.