Matthew Darby's Blog

Last week, some people might have thought that my life had been turned upside down. I am a technology geek, especially in the area of computing and web development. On Friday, my day took a turn for the worse when my hard drive crashed and ruined all of my data. The only thing I was able to save was my web projects stored in Visual Source Safe (For geeks, this is a source repository that save our code and all of our revisions and thankfully so.) So my weekend was spent reformatting my computer and starting back from scratch. All my legal music, personal files, and databases containing my project data were all lost. Yeah this was pretty bad.

However, instead of getting upset and frustrated I looked at these turn of events as a new opportunity. I had a chance to rebuild my computer and learn from my mistakes, such as backing up my data. This also allowed me to reproach my personal web project I had been working on since I had learned a great deal in ColdFusion methodology and SQL scripting and design in the past month. This was a chance to me to have not only a better computer but to apply better practices in maintaining my computer and its data.

In life we will be approached with some difficult times where we hit some misfortunes. Some will be worse then others. It's important to keep a clear perspective in what is really important in life though. In my case, while the data in my computer was a key part to my ability to be a developer along with some more financial and personal data that is pertinent to certain areas of my life, being so tied to these things won't really help my progress in life more so then when I didn't have them in the first place. So grieving over the loss of my data won't help to bring them back, instead I turned the event into a learning opportunity to better improve myself for the next time things like this happen. Thus I grow and learn from my mistakes and move on.

So now I have rebuilt my machine and I am currently rebuilding the inventory database manager I had been working on in the past couple of months. Now I can implement some new methodologies I have learned in the past month, (ColdSpring, Reactor for the CF geeks reading this) and further increase my ability to become a better developer. Also, this maybe my chance to increase my blog posts and contributions to other online communities; hopefully.

Well I have upgraded to the new BlogCFC 5.0. I had to make a couple of minor tweaks to get my layout to work smoothly but otherwise it was a pretty smooth transition.

For some time now, my pastor has been making comments about potential problems with social websites such as Facebook.com and mySpace.com; being a software engineer at IBM helps to gives him a little creditability in this subject. He discussed the rising issue of online predators who prey on unsuspecting victims and now school and businesses that dig for information on potential candidates for enrollment or jobs. What it is important to remember is that it is not the site themselves that create the danger; instead it is the naive users who willingly put information about themselves that could later damage their character down the line.

For instance, my pastor was easily able to look-up information about several church members who had profiles on myspace.com. Among the few he found, where some very despairingly comments, pictures and phrases on profile pages of members and children of members of the church. It seems that many people, mostly teens and college-age young adults seem to believe that posting such information would only be shared among friends or other users of the site themselves thought of as their peers. Instead, for myspace.com at least, anyone can view the profile and begin making assumptions about a person's character based on what they read of see.

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For almost two months I left this blog for dead, during a time I was starting to pick up visitors no less. I knew before starting this blog I would need to be committed to one type of topic and stay with that. So I have decided to move discussion about my ColdFusion development experience and applications I have been coding over the past couple of months.

I know this isn't that glamorous of a topic for most of my initial readers but this is what I do, and if there is one thing I need to work on is my writing skill, this blog will help with that. Currently one of my passions is web development and so I will be sharing that with you. However, from time to time I will move out of the development talk and approach topics like religion, NC State, politics and whatever else happens to cross my mind.

I don't really care if no one views these posts. This will just be my outlet to work on my ability to communicate to a potential audience through writing while discussing a topic I love. I would hope that my writing skill continue to increase as the posts I make increases. If you are actually taking to the time to read this then I thank each and every one of you.

After two weeks of being down, my site is finally back up. It appears that a ColdFusion hotfix installed by my host disable this blog. During the time it was down, I had scratched my head bald, trying to figure out why my code mysteriously wouldn't work any more. I hadn't move any new code to the server prior to the outage and it worked fine without error on my development location.

Thankfully the error was found and the Coldfusion installation had to be rolled back. As a server administrator myself I take great caution performing update that could have an impact on all the application that are depending on every process working in precision. This further validates the need for backups. I put not only use Visual SourceSafe for my code but I make regular database backups for this site as well. When it comes to server administration keeping backups of configuration settings are crucial.

I want to thank everyone who has donated money so far and those you still planning to donate. There is still time to give your donation to St. Baldricks even though the date I get my hair shave is this coming Saturday, March 4th. For those of you who have or want to spread this message to other people please feel free. The money goes directly for the benefit of these children. The only thing I receive is the pure joy of doing something responsible and charitable for someone else. We are getting there with my goal of $500 and it would be even greater if we shoot above it.

I have also received a time to get my hair shaved at 4:00 pm this coming Saturday, outside of the Hibernian downtown location in Raleigh, NC. I will be out there from at least 3:30pm to 4:30pm for anyone who would like to come out to support me. It should be fun. For those of you who won't be able to make I will be filming the even hopefully and will post the video here on the blog for download.

Until then the hair is still growing and I am preparing for life after bald.

Since late December I have been growing my hair out. Why you may ask? I decided to participate in a campaign with St. Baldrick's, an organization committed to raising money toward the awareness of cancer in children. My part in this will involve shaving my head on March 4th at the Hibernian in downtown Raleigh, NC. My goal is to raise $500.

You may wonder why I would participate in such an event. To be honest, I felt it was only a small part I could play toward such a great cause. I have been blessed so far not to feel the affects of cancer nor to my knowledge anyone in my immediate family. Therefore while I reap the benefits of a blessing, it is the least I can do participate and in an event to help does who have not been as fortunate.

Sadly, I don't have a recent picture of myself on hand. Really I don't have a camera all together and I do a terrible job keeping up with pictures I receive in the first place. When I can get my hands on both of these items I will update my photo. So far though, I have a mini afro growing which is the first time in about five years I have allowed my hair to grow out for so long. Once I am shaved, it will be first time ever I will have been bald. While I might feel like Sampson when it comes to my hair and keeping it looking neat, its only a small price to pay as I meet my goal.

What you can do is donate money toward research in curing cancer in children. I have a webpage hosted on Stbaldricks.org that you may go to so that you can donate money online either in my name or directly to St. Baldrick's. If you prefer to just send a check you can write to:

St. Baldrick's Processing Center
c/o RT Lawrence
14111 Freeway Drive, Suite 200
Santa Fe Springs, CA 90670

Or you even have the option to phone it in by calling 1 (888) 899-BALD.

St. Baldrick's is a non-profit organization with the Federal ID 20-1173824. I want to thank for reading this if you got this far, a truly thank you if you have donated or plan to donate. You can check back on this blog to see the time I will be shaving my head if you would like to come out and support or make fun of me.

To date I still haven't spread the knowledge of this blog's existence to the full public yet. Only a select few know of its existence but that will change shortly. For those of you who know, I have been working on the primary web site for this domain. That is now live and you can view by going to http://www.matthewdarby.com. It will be a portfolio site for my work, which is somewhat different than the purpose of this blog.

At a later date I will combine change the display templates for either the blog, the main site or both so that they are both similar. However for now feel free to give me any feedback on what you see on either site.

If you have checked out the main page for this domain at http://matthewdarby.com you will notice there is an ugly place holder with my name on it. For months I have been trying to come up with design ideas for what will become my personal site. It will include my portfolio, info about me and whatever else you would expect to find on a personal site. Unfortunately I have been stalling on making progress with the site ever since I got sick, and it has been hard for me to find that same drive I had earlier to launch this blog.

As a developer I get writer's block. My brain fatigues and I suddenly become disenchanted with doing anything creative toward web programming. I am sure this is quit common for many other people when it comes to other areas of creativity. It just so happens however it couldn't come a worse time.

My motivation to go ahead and launch my personal site has been driven by my participation in a fundraiser for the St. Baldrick's Foundation (more on this in a later post). What I would have wanted to do is set up a page so that I could not only raise the money I needed for the event I will be participating but also use it as an opportunity to showcase my site to my friends and family. However, it seems procrastination and motivation loss got the best of me.

Thankfully tonight, things took a change for the better and now I have come up with a least a template for the new look and feel of my site. So with the ball starting to roll, lookout for some changes and hopefully the release of my new web site within the upcoming week.