The Eternal Battle with Nature and Neck Deep in Spreadsheets

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I don’t know about you, but it feels like this summer is moving along faster than ever. My older daughter’s tennis and swimming lessons wrap up in a week, and her forms for preschool are due at the end of the week. County fairs have started all over the state, and the Iowa State Fair starts in just a couple of weeks. The weather is hotter than ever – temperatures in the 90s with heat indices over 110. The grass is nearly as long as it was a week ago when I spent an entire Saturday afternoon chopping down 7 foot tall weeds and mowing grass that in places was more than a foot long due to my neglect over the two weeks before. The eternal battle with nature marches on.

Since it’s been too hot to do much of anything outside, I’ve had plenty of opportunity to work on two major site build-outs over the last week. For the past three days, I’ve been cleaning up a massive database of rental properties. The group I’m working with was using some proprietary plugin through Joomla to list their properties. I decided, after looking through all of the options and listening to my contact at the company’s concerns about using another set of plugins, I’ve decided to build out their new site from scratch and custom-build the limited part of the content management system they were actually using.

Basically, they just need a couple of forms to work and a searchable database of their properties for prospective tenants to browse and for management at the property management service to add, remove, and update property listings. I’m translating a lot of the search functions and listing displays from code I’ve written for other sites in the past. The only difference between those sites and this one is the size of the database. I’m nearly done in spreadsheet hell – I truly couldn’t think of a job I’d want less than to look at spreadsheets all day. But, without time in spreadsheet hell, there would be no database.

To take a break from little rectangles with numbers, I made the trip this past Thursday over to the Kinnick Stadium Press Box to watch the UI Student Accelerator final pitches. I’ve missed so many 1 Million Cups this summer due to various reasons, so I didn’t get to catch most of the pitches until now. The ones I did see at 1 Million Cups were vastly improved on Thursday. A couple of pitches could have used a bit more polishing, but for the most part, the students did a great job getting their ideas across to the judges and the audience.

One of the teams from the Student Accelerator actually got into this year’s Iowa Startup Accelerator cohort, which starts here in a couple of weeks. I haven’t heard anything about a first day event – perhaps they are folding it into 1 Million Cups this year. Last year, they held a meet and greet in Cedar Rapids for the teams. I really felt like I got to know the teams going through the process, and learned something from them as they spent three months working non-stop on their projects – sort of an entrepreneurial contact high, I guess.

I’m looking to get a lot of things done before school starts for my older daughter. Once these Web site build-outs are done, my home office could use some tender loving care. I have tons of papers to file away and a couple of computers that I need to examine. My brother brought an old Macintosh LC that had been sitting somewhere at my mom’s house that I had inherited and played around with a bit during junior high, but never had the time or know-how to get inside the case and dig around a bit. I don’t think the thing has even been turned on since the late 1990s! My other mid- to late-1990s Macs have been cleaned up and stored away upstairs, in case either of the girls ever has an interest in electronics (or want to mess around with a pretty expansive library of games from that era.)

But first, back to spreadsheet hell. The other stuff will have to wait a while longer.