What did I see in 2009?

Plenty.

Beatrice is pregnant with our 3rd child. It’s an amazing thing.

Beatrice and I put our house on the market. We’re still waiting for it to sell.

Aiden was diagnosed with mild PDD-NOS, and is making HUGE strides. He’s in a new preschool, and is thriving.

Delfina gets bigger every day. It’s amazing how smart she is. It’s a shame she was too young to start school in 2009.

I lost two amazing women in my life. Both my grandmother’s passed. Even though I didn’t get to see them much, it’s very strange not to have them around anymore. The world will be a worse place without them.

Beatrice became a full-time, stay at home mom. With 2 kids, and one on the way, I’m sure she’ll be working much harder than she ever did at an office.

After 2 layoffs in a six month period, I became fully employed, and have been for over a year.

I started moving away from PHP to program in Ruby on Rails. I’m finally coming into my own as a web developer with my own technique and preferences.

I’ve made/kept some amazing friends, some of whom I’ve never physically met, though I hope to remedy that in the future.

2009 had its ups and downs, but then again, so does every year. I’m thankful to have my amazing family, and to continue moving forward in all that we do, even if it doesn’t always feel that way.

This is just the push I’ve needed to move away from playing with Rails as kind of a hobby, and really start getting serious with it.

After tinkering with MySQL and PHP to grab the data JUST the way I wanted it, it hit me.  A solution so simple, so quick, that I was amazed I hand’t though about it earlier.

Here’s what I did:

1. Went into Drupal’s admin interface.
2. Clicked on “Webforms” under “Content Management”
3. Viewed the results of the form I wanted in table format.
4. Viewed source of the page and copied it into Textmate
5. Removed any source that wasn’t part of the table
6. Systematically found and replaced all table tags.  <tr>’s  and </tr>’s were removed completely.  <td> was replaced with double quotes and </td> was replaced by double quotes, a comma, and a space.

Voila.  Instant CSV file.

Here’s to hoping it becomes a full time posistion, but right now I’m just happy I have a job again.