I just realized that we celebrated Thanksgiving Day without any board games. In past years, that was the pinnacle of the party for me. This time it was barely a thought in my mind.
As the first hours of Thanksgiving Day arrived, I was busy working on the website of The Refinery Rock Radio. Tom and I recently got the SAM server set up to use the latest samPHPweb files. This is a package of files that have already been prepared to work as a database-driven website, but there is so much to be desired. Tom had tried working with their PHP files before, but he is not very experienced with PHP and had a very difficult time with it. In my opinion, the code provided is messy and comments are sparse. I spent several hours cleaning out unnecessary table and font tags. When I was done, everything for the "Now Playing" page was displayed using CSS for the layout and formatting.
One thing that Tom and I had discussed before was getting the "Now Playing" page to update without refreshing the whole page. I had read about using AJAX before, but hadn't gotten any experience with it before, so this has been an especially fun part of the project for me. I'm getting the plain text to update with the new songs just fine now, but there is album art along with the buy button and a few other little buttons to update that I'm still working on... and that's just for the one album playing, not to mention the Recently Played songs. Fortunately I have a book about JavaScript that has a chapter on AJAX, so I hope that I will have a better grasp of it all once I'm done with this part of the project.
Around 05:00 I decided to go to bed. I was tired and knew that the kids would be waking me up soon. Of course, it arrived in no time and I was up making my morning coffee. The coffee pot that I got from AliveTek as a parting gift is just about dead, so it took forever to brew a pot of coffee. After my shower and coffee, I helped clean up the house in final preparation for our Thanksgiving Dinner with Chris.
Chris arrived just as we were setting the food on the table. Beth had the camera battery on the charger hoping to get the camera to work. Fortunately it did, so she went to the edge of the kitchen to take a picture of us at the dinner table. I wasn't paying close attention to my position so I was standing next to the table when Beth said, "Get out of the way!" Chris sarcastically exclaimed, "Yeah, we want a nice family picture and you're blocking the shot!" We all had a good laugh about how Beth wanted to take a nice family picture without me in it.
After a nice dinner we decided to play Bowling on the Wii. It was a very close game. Going into the final frame, I was only one point ahead of Chris. My kids were also one point apart from each other. Chris did great on his turn and made a real challenge for me to win. I managed to get a strike and a spare in the end though, ending the game 4 points ahead of Chris. My kids were still just one point apart, with my son in the lead.
We enjoyed playing Super Mario 3 and Brain Challenge before ending our day watching Nanny McPhee. Kimby and Tim arrived from Alabama while we were still playing video games. They were heading over to another friend's house but just wanted to drop in and let us know they made it safely. Chris left after the movie was over and we put the kids to bed. Beth spent some time looking through the sale papers, putting together a list of stores and desired items. ... So we ended the day without ever playing a board game. Strange for me, but we had plenty of fun, so it wasn't missed.
