Google Spreadsheets and House Projects

The process of purchasing a house and all of the little projects to get up to my standards has become quite overwhelming. The nerdiness and organized part of me decided to use Google Spreadsheets to keep track of everything like cost, phone numbers, supplies, and prioritizing all of the different tasks. Working for a company that does enterprise reporting, including spreadsheets, I've been pretty impressed. You can format and formulate as you would in Excel, including creating separate sheets, but it's all web based. They have even added charts recently. However, because I want a way to access and share with others, the publishing feature has been the most impressive to me. With the click of a button, I can provide a universally accessible URL to see my spreadsheet in many different formats. For instance, the following is my work in progress housing projects spreadsheet and examples of several different formats:

• HTML: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pk22WgzhimEuFNUNQKNIBaQ&output=html
• PDF: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pk22WgzhimEuFNUNQKNIBaQ&output=pdf
• Excel: http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pk22WgzhimEuFNUNQKNIBaQ&output=xls

You can even embed the spreadsheet in a web page:

Office Space

The office space where I work (map) has been reorganized to reduce the cost of our lease. With this reorganization, I got to move from a cubicle to an office. I like it so much better. I am able to close the door when needed for private conversations and keep things quiet when I need to concentrate on something. It was also a coincidence that I got a new computer with a 22" wide screen LCD:

More pics of my new office.

Caveman

Here's a pic a co-worker of mine snapped when we were in Boston about a year ago for a user's conference. It was at Durgin Park and I ordered their famous prime rib.

Maintenance Complete

All of the upgrades went fairly smoothly. The only trick is to get Apache to load PHP (my picture gallery uses PHP to render its contents). The following are the upgrades:

• MySQL - version 5.0.11 to version 5.0.41
• PHP - version 5.0.4 to version 5.2.3
• Apache - version 2.0.54 to version 2.2.4

So far, everything appears to be working and Apache hasn't crashed at all since upgrading.

Maintenance This Weekend

I've been having problems with my HTTP server crashing regularly so I'll be upgrading Apache, PHP, and MySQL this weekend to the latest versions. Depending on how many problems I have, my site could be down for a significant time this weekend. I've ghosted my current disk so I can resort back to that if I screw it up too bad :)

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