This week just passed, I had to fly (last-minute) from San Francisco to Minnesota for a funeral (and managed to be there for Thanksgiving as well). That meant 2 flights of a little over 3 hours each. Some people might see this as a drama, and a big loss of productive time, but I saw it as exactly the opposite. I’m hardly the first person to comment on it, but flying can be an extremely productive time to get things done, and I often find myself getting loads of work done while flying.
I had a string of things that needed to be completed/added/fixed on a client project before I left from SFO, and literally finished all of them and more before I arrived at MSP. I would normally have estimated that the list of things I had to do would take around 6 hours to complete. Removing ascent and descent times, (and judging by battery life), I probably only worked for about 2, but I still managed to get everything done. What’s going on here? Read the rest of this post…
One of the projects that I’m currently working on for a client is being built in symfony, the PHP5 framework. I am working in version 1.1 of the framework, which has a new Forms handling system that uses the concept of widgets and validators to handle interacting with most form elements. I had a need to ensure that certain fields did not contain certain values. Although this could be done with the regular expression validator that comes bundled with symfony (sfValidatorRegex), I decided to write my own validator specifically for this purpose. Read the rest of this post…
I’ve been training in Krav Maga for a bit more than a year now and on Saturday, November 15th, I went through the grading to go from Level 3 to Level 4 as a Krav Maga practitioner at the San Francisco Krav Maga Gym. Simply put, it was the most grueling, physically-intensive thing I’ve ever done. I decided to post some details about it here for my own records more than anything else, but you might find it interesting if you’re into martial arts/MMA or that type of thing. For the record, I passed 
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Today I’m at the OpenSocial 1st Birthday celebration at the San Francisco MySpace offices in SoMa. I don’t know much (anything) about OpenSocial, so this should be a learning experience.
It’s going to be long, so click through to read the full thing. Read the rest of this post…
You’re now looking at (I think) the fifth major revision of this website.
It’s been a (long) time coming, but I finally got it online today. I thought it would be fitting. It is a day of change after all. It’s definitely time for a change here at Dented Reality — the previous version was online for around 5 years (April 20, 2003 according to the WayBack Machine). I think it stood up quite well considering the changes that took place in the browser landscape in those 5 years.
Dented Reality v4.0
You may notice that there are a number of new posts here, which just magically appeared. That’s because I was posting while I was developing this site on my laptop, but I didn’t want to post to the old site. For the record, here are all the posts that are new as of today (oldest to newest):
There are going to be a lot of small tweaks to be done still, and I’m sure there are some broken links etc, but I think this version is quite a step up from the previous one. It reflects a change in direction for the site and I think does a better job of showing who I am and what sort of projects I engage in.
Dented Reality v5.0
Comments are now open (and powered by IntenseDebate), so please feel free to leave a note on what you think of the new site on this post!
