wordpress – Chris' Site

Back from Caborca

So I’m back from Caborca, but writing this post in San Diego now.

It’s been one whirlwind trip down south. We got down there about 6ish on Monday and went straight to this restaurant called “La Carret”. This place had the MOST AMAZING food ever! You get this neat little heater thing with tons and tons and tons of Carne Asada, ribs and cow udders on it. With tons of vegetables and stuff on the side and you make your own tacos. I seriously could have eaten a full one by myself! We typically had one for every 2 people on the table! Anyways, met with all the employees down there and had a good time chatting and what not. Got done about 9ish and went to the office to do some work and then got to the hotel by 11 I think.

Tuesday we got up, at breakfast at the hotel with all the co-workers and then headed out to the office. Apparently the truck we were supposed to be driving was in the shop, so we had to wait around to get that fixed. About 10 we got on the road to the first stop. Got there and found out that NONE of the passwords I was given before coming to Caborca worked! So I was basically LOCKED OUT of everything! I couldn’t do SHIT. So I get on the phone with the guy who PROGRAMMED the software and SETUP the servers/etc. He has NO IDEA what the passwords are. So I call my boss, ALSO has no IDEA what the passwords are. ARE YOU KIDDING ME! IDIOTS! Who does not WRITE DOWN THE FUCKING PASSWORDS.

So basically the whole trip was a wash. I couldn’t do anything that I was supposed to do. So we went onto the other sheds and had a good time, had lunch around 2ish and met up with the other 2 guys from the LA office. Found out that they both HATE my boss as well. In fact one of them got into a YELLING fight on the phone with him. It was quite hilarious! Other other sheds were fun and it was cool to see how the asparagus grows and get’s packed and what not. They also apparently burn off the fields before they start harvesting, which I find strange. But whatever!

The last one we were at right around sunset, so we drove across the fields to the base of this huge mountain, got there and found a HUGE nail in the tire, so we drove back to the farm shed real fast and stopped to change it. Well that’s when the fun started! We couldn’t get the spare tire to release and then they couldn’t get the TIRE to come off. There were 7 Mexicans POUNDING on the tire to get it off.

We again had dinner at the same place, had about 30 people there, with all of our growers and what not. It was funny because Dole came into the same place with their ONE grower, while we had like 25!!! LOL. You’d think they would have a lot more people then we are since they are such a HUGE company! Again got back to the hotel late and watched a movie and crashed, AFTER we got locked out of our rooms and had to fight with the stupid front desk people. Idiots fucking DE-ACTIVATE ALL keys every day and you have to go in and have them re-activated. How stupid!

Wed we got up and had breakfast at the hotel again and then off to the fields! Again had a good time, this was a short day and went back to one of the BIG sheds that was packing. It was cool to see it all in full force.

Went around town after that, saw the church again, did some shopping, etc. Had dinner at the same place and ate WAY to much.

Thursday was the drive home, which wasn’t too bad. Got home around 5ish, but called in sick anyways on Friday. It was a REALLY long week. And Friday ended up being REALLY long as well. People are complete idiots!

We couldn’t send ANY emails to Costco and the main phone number was NOT working at all. UGH. I also sent the boss instructions on how to add additional email accounts to someone’s Outlook. He replied back saying he couldn’t figure it out. He had ONLY followed the FIRST of 8 instructions!!!! UGH. What is wrong with people.

Anyways, so here I am in San Diego now… We went out to the shout house which was tons of fun!

Well, time to go! Adios!

The Greatest Generation

The Greatest Generation. I just finished this book on the plane. Amazing book!

I couldn’t even get through the foreword without crying! This generation really is amazing. I highly suggest checking out this book!

Veteran reporter and NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw went to France to make a documentary marking the 40th anniversary of D-day in 1984. Although he was thoroughly briefed on the historical background of the invasion, he was totally unprepared for how it would affect him emotionally. Flooded with childhood memories of World War II, Brokaw began asking veterans at the ceremony to revisit their past and talk about what happened, triggering a chain reaction of war-torn confessions and Brokaw’s compulsion to capture their experiences in what he terms “the permanence a book would represent.”

After almost 15 years and hundreds of letters and interviews, Brokaw wrote The Greatest Generation, a representative cross-section of the stories he came across. However, this collection is more than a mere chronicle of a tumultuous time, it’s history made personal by a cast of everyday people transformed by extraordinary circumstances: the first women to break the homemaker mold, minorities suffering countless indignities to boldly fight for their country, infantrymen who went on to become some of the most distinguished leaders in the world, small-town kids who became corporate magnates. From the reminiscences of George Bush and Julia Child to the astonishing heroism and moving love stories of everyday people, The Greatest Generation salutes those whose sacrifices changed the course of American history.

This book really gave me a great understanding of a lot of where my values lie and what I want to do with my life. It’s made me look at things differently and I hope that I can continue to learn and expand on my understanding of this life and where my life needs to go.

Zencart User Integration – UPDATE!

I am pleased to announce the second release of my zencart user integration plugin.

This second release addes a few small features.
1) Lost password recovery. The previous plugin had an error where if a user clicked the “lost password” in zen cart the password associated with the account in wordpress would not be updated.
2) Change password. The previous release did not update passwords correctly when a user changes the password.

Go and download the newest plugin here.

Open Source Madness!

Well, ever since I got dumped. I’ve had a lot more time to do some fun projects… Contributing to the Open Source Community!

So today, I am happy to announce 2 BRAND new WordPress plugins, 1 proof of concept plugin, 1 updated plugin, some code contributions to the Zen Cart community and a new web service for the VTiger community!

How exciting!

1) First is a wordpress plugin which allows you to use HTTP or HTTPS with your pages. If a page is accessed via HTTPS then all the elements contained within the page will also be HTTPS. It is required that you have used proper coding practices by using wpurl and url respectively. You can download HTTPS for WordPress here

2) Second is a wordpress plugin which allows you to track users who are logged in. This only tracks the UserID, the PageURL and the Date the page was viewed for users who are logged in. This is in very early development stages so at this time there is only data collection and no reporting features are available in this first release. userTracker is available here.

3) I have made some pretty big changes to the Private Post plugin which has been around for a while now. The new changes allow anyone who is logged in to view all private posts and pages. Upcoming features will support integration with Role Manager so that you can assign roles to specific posts. Check your WP2.5 Plugins page to update this plugin or you can download it from here.

4) This is a proof of concept plugin which will base protected content viewing ability on an outside system. In this case we have an internal software which contains a list of our WP users and the type of Support contract they have purchased. This plugin does a web service call to our software to get a list of the contracts for that user and then sets the users role automatically based on that list. So each time the user visits the site, the list and thus the roles are updated. Since this is dependent on our outside system, the plugin cannot be downloaded, but if you are interested in seeing how to handle this, please email me.

5) Is some contributions to the Zen Cart community. These contributions tie Zen cart’s users into the wordpress users. This way you can use the built in Zen cart registration, login and logoff functions to also register, login and logoff of wordpress users. Currently the only issue here is that when Zen cart does an auto logout, people will stay logged into wordpress. You can download this here

6) This is new web service for VTiger. This new web service provides three functions

1) a better way to create accounts and contacts then the built in webservice. You build an array of the needed information, pass it to the webservice and it will create the account and contact. It will return an array with the contact and account id’s.
2) Find contact based on email. You pass the email address and it will return an array with the contact and account id’s
3) Create sales order. This will create a new sales order with the users Shipping and Billing information filled in. It will return the sales order id. You can also add products, tax, shipping rate, discounts, etc to the sales order.

Upcoming on this web service will be creating an invoice from the sales order then emailing that invoice to a specified user. You can download the advanced webservices here. (As soon as I figure out this retarded system)