Levi Brinkkoeter - Programmer

Things sure look different since I last dove into the world of programmers, my previous attempt into the gaming world sure wasn’t like this. I still know the basics and principles but there is so much built that was not there back when I was a coder monkey. I have much to learn about the .net namespaces, classes, attributes and the like. I brushed up on whats new in c# but the more I try new things the more I realize I have no experience with .net. Time to dive in and go into crazy coder document decoder mode and learn all the ins and outs of this new architecture that handles all the work i previously had to tediously try and code out. It is quite the sight to see what the professional coders at work can do with the power in this beast. Now comes my time to go break this wild animal to my will.

Lately I have been very spread out, with some new help at work the load has been lighted and the stress taken down a notch. The web work is still going strong mostly in coldfusion but I am also working through asp.net trying to get a hold on it. Coldfusion has such an ease of use to it that it is hard to take the other route which is much more robust and powerful yet at the same time more work. There is so much to learn about asp and C# in general it can be overwhelming, but I am taking it piece by piece try to build up to the level I need to be at. There are only so many hours in a day and only so many of those hours can be spent learning and working,  I need my downtime or else it just gets to be too much. I have taken my gaming down a notch trying to focus on other areas of my life that need attention, mainly day to day things like cooking cleaning and taking care of my dogs.

Although its hard to get over a recent death, you must. It will always carry a heavy toll on my soul, losing a friend so early in life, but I cannot live in the shadow of death. Life is crazy, always something you never expect coming out of the woodwork at you. My experience so far has taught me that. I have been very fortunate that I have not really had to deal with death that much. I have lost a grandfather, a great grandmother,an uncle and a friend. Each time it has given me a realization inspired by such tragic events. Each was different but meaningful, and they might not have happened had I not reflected on life itself because someone I loved lost theirs. Life goes on, I must push forward and live my life to the fullest.

I am getting back into coding closer to what I went to school for, its not game design but its at a level i can tolerate more. I am privileged to work at a company where my co-workers are an extended family to me. I didn’t realize it until recently when in my time of need they stepped up for me. To take such things for granted and to have gone this long without realizing it is terrible. I must change my ways be more outgoing as my friend was. Its hard and everyday is a battle with my innerself  not to be the introverted hermit I am accustomed to. If there is any place I can do it, its here. I am feeling very blessed to by in such a place and its through all the actions Ive taken and all the situations that have came up. You don’t always see things as they are, i become jaded and fall into a slump all to easily. It takes something extreme, good or bad to show you the path in which you may travel. To travel that path is all up to yourself, your dedication, your commitment and your attitude. My path lays before me, I must push on to see it end where i want it to.

I lost a very good friend recently, and as per usual when you lose someone, death sparks that feeling inside of all of us making life hard to handle. Losing someone near you leave you with a pain that you feel you will never get over… but at the same time awakens that part of you that has become numb to the thought of death. I would go through everyday hearing stories of people dying and because I didn’t know them it doesn’t affect my mood. Then someone you know leaves us and suddenly death is sobering, death is real, life is a gift I tend to take for granted. I compare it to the feeling I had as a kid, everything was new and exciting, just the wonder of everything and you don’t care about what people think, or even about tomorrow. You get caught up in it all but as time goes on and you get older you take your place in society as an adult and dont think about things in the same way. Death often rewakens this feeling in me, when you can no longer see one of your best friends you tend to appreciate the friends you do have. It is a bittersweet situation, good does come of it but because of your loss it hurts. I have very mixed feelings about it, on one hand their death has given appreciation for life but it is only because of death that I feel alive. The best I can do is to honor their memory and take the qualities they used to improve me life and make them my own. In the case of my friend, Ben Rice, he had an energy and was one of the most outgoing people I have ever met. I want to incorporate that into my life, i am not outgoing and tend to end up kicking myself later because of it. He always inspired it in me, but he can no longer do me that favor, it is up to me and my dedication to his memory to improve myself. If you knew him as I did please keep his memory alive, not for me, not for him, for yourself.  I was unaware is was such an avid fisherman, he had mentioned he went to Rockport, Texas at the drop of a hat, I guess I just didn’t connect the dots. He told me Tin Can Reef was one of his spots to hit up, it was also a spot i had seperate family memories at, now it holds even more significance and will always remain a sacred site from now on. This is my dedication to Ben, I know not how else to express myself, so I put my thoughts into writing. To all those who have lost someone dear to them, find a way to honor the departed as well as yourselves.

Life right now is a little hectic, I just finished moving and getting situated in a new place, but I am going to try to keep this blog active. As it is I am just keeping my nose to the grindstone, trying to crank out what projects I have pending to go into learning mode for asp.net. As it stands my computer at home isn’t up to snuff to do what I need for asp.net, hopefully in the near future I will get a machine with a better operating system and that will perform better. Aside from that I have some of the basic of everyday life to nail down, mainly managing the day to day, getting used to my new schedule and routine while trying to squeeze everything I need to get done in while still trying to have some time to relax. Right now I need to get my cooking skills up to par so hopefully I can recreate some of my favorite dishes from back home in Texas. My favorite breakfast by far is breakfast tacos, made with homemade tortillas, eggs and bacon. I have yet to find any places that use homemade tortillas,  the processed tortillas just put me off after being spoiled with homemade as the standard. In my hometown of New Braunfels, Texas only the big chains like McDonald’s, Burger King and whatnot were the only ones using processed tortillas. Because we were about 30 minutes away from San Antonio, I got spoiled on good mexican food or tex-mex as it was often referred to. The barbecue was another love of mine, Granzin’s was my favorite spot to hit up for some good eats. Drive through and leave with a sausage sandwich and a sliced beef taco and a sweet tea was a convenience I wish I still had. Not to mention their meat market that I loved to get fresh meat, sausage and some jerky. There are more spots which I may update in a later post all my favorite restaurants in the area back home. Someday I will make the move back to Texas and enjoy all my favorites again.

This is the latest website we have released, The TrueFACS, a medical bill auditing service. It is very interesting what hospitals are charging people, working on this site has taught me to review my bills very carefully. Some hospitals are charging outrageous amounts for something that costs dollars if not cents. You can view the site to see some examples one that really stuck with me was the hospital charging you for medicine you brought in, and not the price you got it for, it was the most expensive Tylenol Ive ever seen. Working on this site made me take a step back and try and keep things simple. “You’re too deep in the medium to see the outside” or something along those lines was said about some of the functionality we had planned. I can usually see both sides but it gave me a reality check, and its correct, you become so involved in doing things a certain way that sometimes it just complicates things beyond what they should be. The web is a very vast medium, you have both sides i.e. simple functionality vs advanced functionality. Tying the lead form on a website into a database while also including necessary parameters not to mention data validation, is a major focus of the other websites ive worked on. This one wasn’t the leads aren’t going to have the same volume as i am used to so it doesnt need the same treatment. Just simple and to the point, get the user interested and start a dialog with us so we may help them save money. With this release we become a step closer to wrapping up our current batch of projects hopefully freeing me up to get back on the ASP.NET track. There are still quite a few to nail down but there is a light at the end of the tunnel.

After about 3 weeks of development the new www.iCanbenefit.com is live. We took our time designing and tweaking it trying to get it just perfect. There are still some minor tweaks to work on but getting the site live out weighed some mis aligned text. All of our products are back, wearing their HCCUA disclaimer where needed. There are bigger plans still for the site, a member backend where they are able to use their benefits. There is automation behind the scenes, dump a users file into our database creating a password and sending out the new members fulfillment materials via email. That is not quite being put to use yet but it is built and will be pulling its weight soon. I laid the site structure out differently this time and I am liking the results. There is still more work to be done but it is mainly in flash and laying out some of the heavier content areas. Now that I have a little down time I will trying to pick up what basic ASP.NET concepts that I can. I will basically be starting from scratch and go through the growing pains from basic functionality to the more advanced stuff. For now I am content with just taking it slow not overwhelming myself in code. I am still learning some more advanced coldfusion features and will use it for my own personal projects until I feel confident in ASP to achieve the same effect.

I have temporarily stopped learning and playing with asp .net for a little while now, the needs of the business needed to get a site out quickly and coldfusion being my stronger language at the time we decided to crank it out. Brand new design, layout and functionality are all coming together in a relatively short time with all that is going on. I do love the speed at which I can develop in coldfusion, asp gives me the impression that is it more secure and a better way to do things yet at the same time it takes more work, more planning, more code. That’s not to say its a bad thing, It may be a better way to make websites more secure, better functionality, and ease of tying it with systems that are being developed for our company. The main reason to upgrade was to have a back office system that we could send our members their fulfillment material electronically, at least temporarily until their real fulfillment could be sent out. We are going to be giving the user temporary id cards to print out. Our artist, Ian Hench, created the cards and saved them as pdfs and I provided the functionality to pre-fill the form with the members information. The new design lets us put out benefit plan information back in provided a few disclaimers are in place. The system is set up using loops and stored procedures to display what plans are available in what states. It can get overwhelming sometimes but it does help not having to hard code everything into the page and design a system to display it. Early next week icanbenefit.com will be getting a face lift, look forward to our new design and some new flash pieces to come later on.

Staring down the crosshairs of my scope waiting for the enemy to show themselves…Driving recklessly around the streets of a simulated new york city… Exploring a world of fantasy in another persistant world with millions of other players.These are just some the latest adventures ive had in the virtual worlds developed by programmers, artists, and designers. All the while I experience deep stories, heavy action, from the comfort of my living room. I have had a love for games ever since I first laid my hands on one. The first game must have been atari 2600 war game. It was a collection of games all having a war theme to them ie tank vs tank and more i cant remember so well. Things sure have come a long way since those 8 bit days. Nowadays I spend my time playing Call of Duty 4 and World of Warcraft. Call of Duty satisfies that quick and fun deathmatch genre and World of Warcraft fills the role playing side of games I like so much. I will probably always be a gamer depending on how the future of technology pans out. Hopefully I will be able to keep up with all the latest and greatest in the gaming world. Games just seem to be the medium that I enjoy the most: books, movies, television just cant hold a candle to an interactive media where I can control the shots to some extent. We shall see what the future holds for the gaming culture that I have come to love.

Lately I have been playing around with jQuery, getting to know what exactly it can ease from my javascript load. I barely know javascript but with my programming experience i can see what the code is trying to do just don’t fully understand the syntax involved quite yet. I kept seeing jquery example of some interesting stuff so I had to learn more. I started reading the documentation and playing around with some samples took a little time to fully grasp whats going on but i am  starting to pick it up. It adds the unique opportunity to do some animation without bringing flash into the picture. Don’t get my wrong I love flash but for simple little effects that jQuery can do making a flash piece doesn’t seem worth it. As it stands I haven’t quite nailed down how I want to utilize this framework, I have played around with some effects but none quite seem to be what im after. I will continue to study and see what I can come up with, if I have time i will give some examples.