Nerdy Couple

UGHHH!!!!

There was a bug after deploying. Seems as though my web hosts variant of php returns directory contents in different orders than my local Linux host. Thus the order on the story is inacurate. I’ll fix tomorrow as it is pretty late here on the east coast.

Ok, it has been a while since our last update. I’ve finally implemented some changes in the silverlight image rotator that I’ve wanted. The light weight UI is leveraging a php service in the backend to know what files and other misc information to render. Please check out the results of the story from our awesome engagement party. (Some of the frames go too fast for the text, I know… I’ll fix that soon too) Thanks to all the people who spent so much time helping us set up and performing the tasks to make our little story come true.

All of the pages that had broken links are now working, though some still have inaccurate data. That should be rectified sooner than later as the clock is ticking down. Diana and I will be sending out the save the dates soon so those of you who have received an e-mail inquiring for your home address, please reply back as soon as you can so that we can get your real invitations as soon as we can.

For other news, we have just completed the pre-cana(marriage pre-counseling). I truly thought it was enjoyable and though I think Diana and I covered most of the topics prior to the class, hearing out what we have done is definitely reassuring.

We also went to coldstone to try some of the icecream for the icecream wedding cake… Though I’m not a huge fan, I think we may have to venture off to one besides the one in Times Square as that was too busy and seemed to have a limited selection.

So this is my first entry on the webpage because Min took so long to teach me how to use it! Well that and I was busy on my rotations all over the Northeast. So now I start my first blog of the wedding planning process. Just a little catching up to do about all this… First, we have found our church and venue. The ceremony will be held at the Co-Cathedral of Sacred Heart and the reception will be at the Magnolia. I am so happy to have both of these big tasks out of the way. I also have found my wedding dress and my very fabulous friend, Ms. Kim Lai, is tweaking it even more! My designer is Lea Ann Belter –> She is a Canadian Wedding Dress Designer! I had to stick to my roots. I was so lucky to get my dress at a sample sale in NYC. So many things to do still, but I am glad that we got the big things out of the way! More updates later!

This is actually my second entry but I wanted to date it closer to my graduation date… so here I am at my graduation with diploma in hand:

I cannot believe that graduation date has come and gone! I graduated from West Virginia School of Osteopathic Medicine on May 30, 2009 with family and friends to cheer me on. Yes, the graduation gear was very hot in the outdoor ceremony but I thank God for the beautiful day He gave us. Thank you everyone for your love and support through all these years of study. It was long and hard but now it is all a blur. I will cherish all the memories and make many more. I am now officially Dr. Diana Tran and starting my internship in Ob/Gyn! Congrats to me!

So the first release of the slide show is complete. I learned a lot about some of the hidden features that you’ve got to manipulate in Silverlight and it is clear to me that Silverlight isn’t as mature as Flash. There are an abundant number of side effects and a lack of controls developed for the platform, but I still give it the potential for cool stuff as it continues to mature.

The images on the slide show are low res but saved with large compresesion ratios so it will take a bit to download, but Diana will fix those when she has some free time. Otherwise, now that the I’ve got the slide show working for the main page, I’ll be modifying the behavior slightly for the ordered slide show variant for our engagement party story.

But, first comes first, I should wrap up the verbal context of my wedding party this week and can move on to other important information. Oh and one more thing. Apparently RSS, isn’t that difficult to implement, so I’ll be creating an RSS feed from these news entries for all of you e-stalkers to easily keep up with!

So, I’ve almost got the silverlight slide show implemented. I want to touch it up with a few more details in regards to clicking events, dynamic recognition of hostname so that it may resolve the images on an relative path as opposed to absolute and also have an ordered method with a text overlay. I’ll make the first deployment soon and then soon after, the ordered version will arrive with controls to navigate manually and all that nice jazz.

Development on the site slowed down a bit due to a hectic working schedule. Even WOW had suffered a bit of play time for work. Regardless, thing at work are also coming to good positions so that I won’t be too overloaded.

Once the silverlight rotators are up, we should have pictures from the engagement party up. “How we met” story and a few other tidbits about our plans. I’d also really like to get back to putting up some more/better graphics and working on the CSS to give the site more of an aesthetic appeal.

Ok, so Diana and I flushed out some of the content in the wedding party portion of the page. We’ve also added nice pics of each of the said members. This content should keep some of you amused for a little time being and you may QQ more later about the broken links.

The bigger changes are soon to come. Some Silverlight development is in the works and is being tested on the Dev version of our site. A lite version of this fanciness should be available hopefully tomorrow or sometime this weekend. Diana will then work on the about and info page, while I’ll work on rectifying all the broken links and adding some more graphics.

I’m also thinking about putting up a setting for dynamic templates on various pages and fixed templates on others. Regardless, in the meantime. Enjoy this funny video

Well, enough people have been nagging me about the appearance of the site, so I decided to add some of the graphic flair that I was speaking of earlier. Check out the nifty gimp artwork I did. The cartoon was not drawn to mimic the real life shot. Again, a lot of this is still me testing how things will look after it’s applied and so that I can create a generic template for the non-computer nerd to work on this page as well.

I’ll fix up more on the CSS for the links and the title. I’m also still not really content with the title graphic. Perhaps I need some sprites up there as well or maybe a darker shade to work with. Maybe a more drastic gloss. Looking it over now, it just looks like two plain gradients.

Ok, so we’re getting somewhere. You guys can slowly stop complaining. I won’t create a feedback page until I consider this out of “Under construction” Time to sleep!

Yeah!

How much does everyone like that sexy glossy bar at the top of the page. I figure adding glossy graphics will give the site a slight bit of appeal. Clearly, all of this is still in the works, but I was testing some logic to get the images for the wedding party. Some information is up, I’ll be adding more content as the week goes on.

Super sleepy now… X_X

Ok, so before the photo album, I wanted to flush out some plumbing for content. The code for the consistent templates across each page and the wedding party is done. We’re going to focus on the wedding party section in as our next milestone. I’d like to include my interpretation on how I met the particular BFF and get their version as well. I think it would be a fun exercise and the resulting stories to share should be entertaining to all those e-stalkers who care 😀

Plus on a fun note, we visited our new apartment today to measure out how big it will be and how all of our stuff will fit inside it. Here are pics of the layout that Diana has done, plus the open office draw file itself so that you can play around with arranging our stuff.

For the most part, we spent the last two weeks in Texas with our family and our super awesome friends. We’re super thankful for all the efforts extended by our friends for our engagement party. We will have pictures from the party in full resolution available on this site soon.

The page looks poopy… yes I know, I was trying to build a super fancy javascript image slideshow madoober, that was taking forever and there are still a number of bugs to work out. So I stopped and realized that I need to round about back to agile development philosophies and (KISS) Keep It Simple Silly.

Happy News Years to everyone!