pretendamazing

It really, really is.

I participated in the Overnight Website Challenge this weekend. I left Lincoln around noon on Thursday (missing classes to avoid a dangerous drive; turns out the bad weather had come and gone by the time I got anywhere near it) and headed up to Sioux Falls to see Jaime (and Gretchen, as it turned out!). A few hours later I left for Brookings to get a haircut. I left the next afternoon and got to Bloomington around 7:15 and to some friends about 10 or 15 minutes later.

After eating supper, Curly and I headed back to his place to meet Fernholz. Some email checking and talking later and we were off to bed while watching Iron Man. A few too many hours of sleep, a shower, and a drive later, we were at the contest.

My team, the Code Cowboys, were paired with Access Press (at the time of writing, the old site is still active). The organization creates a monthly publication centered around the Minneapolis (and surrounding) disabled community. The existing site is hard-coded HTML and a new page is created for each individual article.

We looked at the list of requirements and requests from the organization and all instantly agreed that the site was begging to be done in WordPress (or any equivalent system; we had plenty of experience in different aspects of WP so we went with it). 24 hours later, Access Press had a new web site. One member of our team said he was going to go take a nap; I don’t know if he did or whether or not anyone else did, but I think most (maybe all) of us lasted the whole 24 hours.

My specific tasks, in addition to helping out with small things here and there like we all did, were importing old articles and exporting any arbitrary article to PDF. I spent many hours working on importing, and stole Fernholz for many of those to help me (I work best when I am bouncing everything back and forth off of somebody else in real-time). In the end, the existing articles (the only way we could read them all was to use the HTML files directly from the site) were all inconsistent, even down at the month level, so an automated import is near impossible and we had to give up on that effort. With an hour to go, I finally got the PDF export (using FPDF) working. Once Derek added support to our theme, I fixed a small issue and walked away from my computer to avoid typing for the rest of the contest. Of course, at that point, “the rest of the contest” was something like 8 minutes, but still…

The event was stocked with an endless supply of coffee, a fountain pop machine, and endless Red Bull and Red Bull Cola. (The latter is basically sour flavored Coke.) I figure I had somewhere on the order of 12 Red Bull/Red Bull Colas, quite a bit of Barq’s root beer (which is caffeinated), and four chocolate covered coffee beans. I wish I would have kept track of it better; I’m curious exactly how much caffeine I pumped into my body. Caffeine has a negligible effect on me…until I’m just shy of zonking out. By starting with a Red Bull about 15 minutes into the competition and going strong on the caffeine until about 6:30am the next day, I only had a few weak moments where I was ready to sleep.

In the end, didn’t win the contest. I’m pretty sure we were basically guaranteed to lose. Given our non-profit, we had to worry about Section 508 and WAI. While other groups were free to do all sorts of fancy stuff like jQuery and Flash, we were heavily restricted to make the site usable by disabled people. But that’s okay. We created a site that meets (and hopefully exceeds) their needs and they seem incredibly happy with it. That’s what matters.

We didn’t walk away empty handed though. In addition to free breakfast, dinner, supper, midnight snack, and somewhat of a second breakfast, we all got a swag bag! Inside were a t-shirt, a blanket (with velcro and a handle for easy transport; looks like that anyway, haven’t touched it), a neck pillow (which worked GREAT with the chairs that were nowhere near tall enough for us to use them without going elsewhere), a travel alarm clock, a box of Nerds (logically), a nice water bottle, and a travel toothbrush (with toothpaste of course); it was all packaged in a standard cloth tote bag too. Yay environment! They also raffled off some prizes. Curly won a book and I managed to get a copy of Lightroom 2.

24 fun hours, a bag full of goodies, and $300 software. Woot.

Derek left very shortly after the event ended. Curly and I hung out for a few more minutes and finally headed back to his place. An hour or so later I finally got around to showering (way past needed). A few hours later I packed everything into my car and left.

Having spent 7pm Friday until 5pm Sunday with Curly (and much of that with Derek), I decided I’d take Lisa up on her offer to spend the night with her and some guy. I hadn’t seen her since June (I believe), and hadn’t seen him since July. Much too long.

I got to their place just after 7:30pm. After some awesome dessert and smoothies, we moved to the living room to watch a movie around 10:00 or so. I didn’t last long.

Got up this morning and charged my phone and iPod (having forgot to do that last night), ate some food, said bye to Lisa, showered, talked to Lukenbill a bit more, and once again packed my car and started driving. This time it was a 7 hour drive from Rochester, MN to Lincoln, NE. I stopped once in, uh, some place. I don’t remember what it was. I’ve been there though—I think I was there with Jaime at one point? Maybe when we went out there in June?

I got to spend many, many hours with friends old and new, help make something for a group of very deserving people, got some awesome goodies, won some expensive software that I’d been wanting to play with, and got to spend a few hours with other friends I had been hoping I could swing down and see. Amazing.

Sleep is for the weak. Goodnight.