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The semester is almost over! Thank God. It really has been brutal. I sure have learned a ton, though. One of the big things is that I love teaching and don’t love accompanying so much. I’m coming to the realization that I’m more of a concert person and like working one-on-one with people to really establish a connection and produce a great product/concert. So I guess in that sense I love accompanying. But I’m not into the whole mass-accompany-for-everyone bit. I like to perfect things and when I’m accompanying for tons of different people each week plus choirs and teaching full time on top of that, I don’t have the time I really want to practice and perfect things. Anyway, I’m sure that’s not terribly interesting, but I’m learning that about myself.

Lori Dunn and I did a duo piano concert on Sunday at Wesleyan and it went pretty well. It was our first concert together and we threw it together over the course of a couple months. She did an AMAZING job. Perhaps if Andrew is willing, he can post a couple of the pieces we did (the Dello Joio, Copland, and Prokofiev, maybe?). I definitely hope we can do more together soon.

Next week is juries for Wesleyan and then the week after for the TCU kiddos. I’m trying very hard to be encouraging while at the same time trying to instill the fear of God in them…..we’ll see how it turns out:) I have to say again that I truly do love teaching and I love working with the students at both schools very much. They work hard!

Well, I know all I write about is music and work, but that’s truly all I do between the months of August and May (and I still do a bit of teaching for June and July, but not nearly as much as during the school year). I’m very excited about getting a life back in a couple of weeks! I can taste the freedom of my summer schedule and that’s probably not a good thing at this point.

I’m looking forward to seeing Rachael and her baby bump in a few weeks! Also looking forward to spending some time with Helen before she heads off to Morocco (have to learn how to spell that….hmm). Had some nice visits this spring from Dad, Charles, and Helen. Looking forward to Brian and Molly and Simon’s visit this summer!!

Well, I’ve been random enough now. That’s my little update!

I do a lot of coding at my job. Most of it is in PHP and MySQL. My projects are fairly visible in the company so I like to do my best at coding things properly and make them as slick as possible. I was never really good at organizing my code or choosing a coding convention and sticking with it. In addition, I’ve grown tired of typing the same three lines of code to get a MySQL row. I knew there had to be a PHP framework that would make coding easier, scalable, and give me a convention to stick with. Enter CodeIgniter…

CodeIgniter is an Application Development Framework - a toolkit - for people who build web sites using PHP. Its goal is to enable you to develop projects much faster than you could if you were writing code from scratch, by providing a rich set of libraries for commonly needed tasks, as well as a simple interface and logical structure to access these libraries. CodeIgniter lets you creatively focus on your project by minimizing the amount of code needed for a given task.

I’ve also been getting on the AJAX bandwagon with the rest of geekdom. I started using Prototype and Script.aculo.us, which were very nice, but there was a lot of stuff I didn’t need in both of those. Recently I heard about a similar javascript package called MooTools. Just going to the website tells you this thing is very cool.

MooTools is a compact, modular, Object-Oriented javascript framework designed to make writing extensible and compatable code easier and faster. Mootools lets you get the job done efficiently and effectively.

Just a few useful tools for you web developers out there.