Toeing The Line

Monday morning saw us taking Rhiannon into Tauranga to get ripped off for school uniform. There are only two places you can buy it, and although one gives 5% to the school, they charge 10% more than the other. The clothes just seem to be about $10-$20 more than you could buy equivalent items for in other shops. One might argue that this is due to the cost of embroidering the school logo, but in some cases, there isn't one. We came out having parted with nearly $300. Thankfully Imogen will be wearing Rhiannon's old uniform which has only seen one term's service.

Di and I had been mulling over the possibility of buying the house we're living in. Our reasoning is that if it's a repo and we can get it cheap it would be a good investment. It would be even better if we could exchange our cash at a sensible rate which lead us to think that we might ask about a mortgage. This should be quite an entertaining process given that we don't have jobs, but do have enough quids. Di has made an appointment for tomorrow.

Annoyingly I tripped over a skateboard in the garage later that evening, making rather a nasty mess of one of my toes, which gradually turned purple over the course of the evening. I'm not sure whose skateboard it was, which is a good thing as it might have been used as a weapon of mass admonishment on the one responsible.

Tuesday we visited the bank to discuss mortgages. The woman who we spoke with was most helpful but was unable to give us a decision. We filled in an application anyway and she sent it off promising that we'd hear something by tomorrow. Due to a briliant piece of double booking, our 1PM appointment at the bank was about to clash with the 2PM appointment to show of the website. Some rather enthusiastic use of the Mirth Mobile saw that I made it on time. No mean feat, since this involved a sprint from Bayfair down to the mount and then a U turn back to Papamoa. To add insult to injury the speed restrictions were being increased on Papamoa Beach Road, dropping to 60 and various sets of bollards had to be negotiated.

Fortunately my work on the site went down a treat and I was instructed to make it live. This proved a little awkward at first, since I was rather unfamiliar with the control panel used by the web host, but after a phew aha! moments, I found it was possible to do just about anything including uploading and unpacking zip files, and restoring mysql dumps. Alas my laptop's battery fell over just at the end, and as I'd neglected to bring the PSU, I had to beat a hasty retreat and continue the work from home.

This is where karma paid me a visit. My use of GOTOs started
chucking up "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_STRING" everywhere they were used. It turns out that the goto facility was added in PHP 5.3, and the site is running a lower version. The cartoon opposite which I found on php.net website, on the documentation page had me falling off the chair and says it all, really. It kind of makes me wonder why they decided to add it. I'm pleased to report however that I came up with a thoroughly modern object oriented solution. I've no idea at all which design pattern I used, and frankly I don't really care, but it works. Objects are quite handy for maintaining state between method calls;-)

Di, Sam and Rhiannon went to watch Avatar at the flix, and came
back wearing extremely silly Joe-90 style glasses and giggling like a bunch of school girls. Imogen was at a sleep over with one of her mates and missed all this nonsense. The highlight of the evening for me was the realisation that the bruise on my toe was easing - because the blood had broken through the skin and thus eased the pressure. Naturally the graphic nature of this crippling injury is recorded for posterity.