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May 09, 2005

Crusade for Children - CALL TO ARMS

It's almost that time of the year again ... the first weekend in June ... the WHAS Crusade for Children. Yup, I'm still part of the Crusade, and in a big way. It will always be this way, until the day I die.

I've been a part of the Crusade since 2001, roughly 15-20 days after 9/11 when some asshat decided to erase the Crusade Web site because he disagreed with then head honcho, Dan Miller. Instead of handling it like a true professional, he took his ball and went home. Did it hurt Dan? Yeah. Did it hurt the Crusade? Not really. I had a working, interactive Web site that was 100% better up and running within 30 days of the old site going down.

Anyhow, UCANweb has been a part of the Crusade since that point in time. Kyle and I shared our first Crusade as members of UCANweb, working mostly on the Web side of things and making sure everything worked properly. After all, it was the first real test run of the site.

The second Crusade was a bit different though. By this time, I was the IT admin for WHAS and Kyle had just joined as my assistant. We spent the next two Crusades flushing out the IT side of things and making them something truely different than what had happened in the past.

When I left WHAS in Feb of this year, I knew I was going to be back for Crusade. I made sure that both the Crusade was aware of this fact, and that my new boss was aware as well. This past week, last Tuesday to be exact, I went downtown to join the Crusade management to have lunch and get a feel for this years event.

It's a bit different than what it has been in the past though. Amy, the new IT admin for WHAS, is going to be just as big of a part of this project this year as I have been since 2001. I've made Crusade a very important part of my life, and it's going to be a bit difficult to give over some of the responsabilities that I've had in the past to someone who's never been there or done that before.

But that's okay though, I know she's going to do well.

The only real thing that sucks this year is that my right hand and very close friend, Kyle, will not be able to participate due to a medical issue. This will be my first Crusade without him, and it really sucks. He's just as much a part of what's happened in the past 4 years as I've been.

So, this leaves one experienced and one totally unexperienced IT persons with the task of getting the IT infrastructure of Crusade up and running. This is my call to arms, so to speak.

TO ANY IT PROFESSIONAL WHO WANTS TO HELP THE CRUSADE FOR CHILDREN:

Please send me an e-mail to ed @ thisdomain (ee dot com, if you can't guess what I mean by that) and let me know if you're interested in participating this year. Any help will be truely appreciated, and you'll be helping a great cause. Remember, it's all about the kids!!

~out...

Posted by ed at 08:42 PM | Comments (0)

SkyFinder update

Just an update to my previous post regarding SkyFinder.

Today, I purchased an updated zip code database that includes the latitude and longitude of the zip code in question. Because of this update, we now have over 30,000 possible zip codes in our database.

I'll probably update this database twice a year, as I really don't see a need to update it on a regular basis. After all, how many zip codes really get added in a year anyhow? Not that many, and there's always a zip code that's close by to someplace that should give the proper latitude and longitude anyhow.

Oh well ... go and give SkyFinder a try and let me know what you think. I think that it's a good piece of work.

Posted by ed at 08:23 PM | Comments (3)