Denver.World Cup. Work.

Sigh. I swear I'll get better at blogging. Just get that blog time jitter because I am not the best at writing my thoughts down. In the past month or so quite a bit has happened.  To start , Game of Thrones was a wild roller coaster , so thanks for that George R.R. Martin. Naturally because he has traumatized me via HBO , I’m going to read his books because apparently I wasn’t traumatized enough through the show. So far there is a totally different connection to the characters and I’m enjoying reading their minds instead of watching their actions.

Work has gone well , I’ve made the full transition from software test engineer , to just a software engineer. I couldn’t be more happy to be honest. I’ve learned a lot about Scala , SSH and refreshing on Java. My current employer has given me the opportunity to move to Denver and I am so excited. I am moving up north come July 31^st ( Happy birthday Harry Potter). I am looking forward to the experience of living in a bigger city and working with new people.

Adding on to the good news , my favorite sporting event known to man kind has arrive and I couldn’t be happier. The world cup has started!! Oh my gosh. I cannot contain my emotions when speaking about it because I get too excited. The USA had a spectacular opening game against our nemesis Ghana. Clint Dempsey was on POINT scoring 30 seconds into the start of the game. I nearly fell off the couch. USA won 2-1 with the winning goal scored by Brooks whom is the first US sub to score in a world cup. We have a tough group ahead of us but I have faith. We play Portugal this Sunday , and even with Altidore out with a hammy injury I think we will do just fine. GO USA!

Even with all of this good news I still have some sad news. My cat of 17 years has passed away. This has made my current apartment a bit more lonely , but he lived a long and happy life. That’s all I can say because I will just start sobbing and no one wants to see that.

Like I’ve said 4 or 5 times before I plan on making this a common thing but I can’t promise much. Maybe with the world cup I will be able to motivate myself to write blogs because I can’t shut up about soccer recently, might as well blog it..

See yeh next time beautiful people of the internet.

-Hannah

#Twitter #changed #how #I #get #Info

This past weekend I was indulging in a bit of smack talk with some Minnesota Wild hockey fans about the game. All of which started because of a simple hashtag… God bless the world that we live in. I can directly talk smack to opposing team’s fan base from the comfort of my Pepsi Center seat. It’s glorious.

Twitter has been on the rise non-stop since March 2008. As of January 1 , 2014 there was 645,750,000 , with an average of 135,000 singing up every day. With 58 million tweets per day, whether it be mindless rants about One Direction, or the Breaking news in a foreign country, twitter is usually first to know everything due to its global users. Twitter is on the rise, and I don’t see it stopping any time soon. Thanks to the 140 character limit people cannot get long winded, and have to get right to the point. This isn’t Facebook where you can write a small dissertation about your opinion. Quick, short and sweet.  In today’s world we don’t have time to read more than 140 characters, because by the time that we have read any more than that a new breaking story has already occurred.

Now looking back at the Wild situation it was occurred to me that twitter has revolutionized the way that I communicate to social networks. Before I jumped off the Facebook ship I used to put hashtags in my statuses, not quite sure if it was out of habit or if it was because I was trying to attract people that have the same types of beliefs I do. Twitter’s hashtag has made it immensely easy to find people that are talking about the same things that you are. Good or bad you get to see the opinion of millions, and millions get to see the opinion you put on your profile. I am glad that companies have started to use twitter for direct feedback from the customer. @Avalanche uses it’s twitter account to spread news about game times , team news , and live updates during the game.

By the looks of it twitter is still on the rise and there is no stopping it. Move over Mark Zuckerberg, looks like there is a new bird in town #burn .


twitter stats from : here

Why not blogging?

Right so I haven’t blogged in a while I thought I’d catch you up on a few things.

•  I am no longer a tester , I am a Software Engineer now.
•  I make things do things and I feel magical.
•  I vow to start blogging more because I actually enjoy it.
• Going to blog random stuff… ranging anything from technology to skin care…
• I am going to the UK coooooool
• Summer is coming…..
• Joffrey is dead * spoiler alert*
•  Oh i have a window cube now... but i will still use this to check the weather

Cool. Now that I gave you the low down of the past two months… we shall continue on and act like I had never left. COOL…

COOL…

-          Hannah 

The FITBIT Sitch

So, about a month ago because I’ve been neglecting my blog, I wrote about how awesome my FITBIT was compared to my Up jawbone band. Well.. It’s still pretty awesome. But there has been a major drawback, well major to me at least.

Two things:

•       The FITBIT was made with nickel by the charger.
•      I am apparently allergic to nickel.

So currently I have this horrendous rash where my FITBIT sits. I have it covered with a Band-Aid at the moment so I can still wear my fitbit but dang. I am so sad. They’re doing a recall on it apparently. I have no idea if I should send it back or not, probably should but I don’t want to give it up.

If you have had an allergic reaction to the fitbit tell me what the heck you did to get rid of it because this Kermit the frog Band-Aid is clashing with my attire. 

FITBIT vs Jawbone UP

FITBIT Mobile app

So , I was an up user for a little under a year. I bought it after a friend had told me Jawbone UP was infinitely better than the Nike Fuel band because of the sleep monitoring tool. The whole sleep thing was the selling factor for me. I had often felt like i didn’t get much sleep , and this showed me how often I would wake up during the night. Which for whatever reason was really cool. I think it might have been because I like statistics and numbers. UP gave me that exactly.

September rolls around and i’ve had my up for 8 months or so, and we had been on load of adventures , St.Patricks day , traveling to DC *twice* , 22 hour road trip, graduation. It was safe to say that i was a very dedicated UP user. Up until mid september when my UP band entirely stopped charging for no reason whatsoever.  I left it on the charger for a solid 4-5 hours and right as i took it off it wouldn’t turn on. I’ve even hit a hard reset and did all that jazz. So I stopped using it entirely.

My family knows how important being active and my health is to me, so they bought me a FITBIT for christmas. I was stoked , not only did it record all the same things as the UP band did , but it also displayed it to me on a cute little screen on the actual band! It even sends the information to your phone using bluetooth instead of having to take it off and plug it into your phone like the UP band.

UP by Jawbone

SO COOL. I am obsessed with these active bands but what made me geek out over FITBIT rather than UP was the design of the mobile app associated with FITBIT. FITBIT just has an overall smoother interface to use and gives me the information upfront instead of me clicking around searching for it. This appeals to me because I am lazy in the sense that I don’t wanna waste time clicking through things, I would rather just see it right away.

Overall, the FITBIT band itself is better fitting , better looking and it has a digital display. FITBIT is the better option for both usability and mobile application. I highly suggest you get the FITBIT :)

Change your life one step at a time

How to BHappy!

Winter is such a cold and stuffy time of year. The weather is dreary , and most of your motivation goes out the window. If only there was something that would give me incentive or remind me to actually go out and live my life happily. OH WAIT! There is.

I came across the application called Always BHappy*It is at the Apple store , and in Google play*. This is an app basically designed to give you tasks to do with friends or family. Today's current task is to bring a group of friends together and do something funny.

Seeing as today I was basically going to stay inside and watch Harry Potter with my cat , I have actually decided to call up some friends and do something.

Right so the concept is pretty cool , what about the application itself? Right , well upon opening the app , you get greeted by log in page , where you can also link it up with your FaceBook , and after logging in , the application wastes no time on trying to get you up and going.

After a couple of minutes of browsing through the application itself I quite like the colors and the actual design of the whole thing. YOU CAN EVEN GET BADGES... this makes my competitive side kick into gear. Which is probably why I am now going out with my friends later. I see you Always BHappy. If the proposals , the tasks the app assigns you, are not enough to satisfy your happy thirst this app has you covered. You can get MORE proposals, which means a chance for more badges and excitement. Cool right?!

Personally, I throughly enjoy the concept of this application because so many people get caught up in the work world , that they forget how to relax and actually "BHappy".  The one thing that I would add to the application is maybe a how to. It took me a few minutes to understand what the actual app was doing , but overall I love the concept and design. I highly suggest you go download the "Always BHappy" app now!

Now that I have a bowling date with my friends I must go get ready!

Happy Saturday!

-Hannah

XML to JSON

Right , so I was going to blog about the fail of a night I had last night. I tried winging the creation of an application, but turns out that it’s really not a smart idea and you become unorganized. Lesson learned!

So instead of informing you about my failures, I’m going to show you my small triumph! Holla! Today work asked me to create a ruby script that fetches RSS feeds from various news sites and create a JSON out of the RSS feeds. Figuring this has a gem out there I googled the situation. All I got in return was a bunch of gems that halfway did what I needed, or made it x10 harder than it needed to be. So I broke it down into individual steps then created the ruby to go along with it.

1.       Get response body from URL *RSSfeed

2.       Change response body from XML to JSON.

3.       Output to JSON file.

---

require 'net/http'
require 'active_support/all'

s=Net::HTTP.get_response(URI.parse('http://rss.cnn.com/rss/cnn_topstories.rss')).body
response = Hash.from_xml(s).to_json
    file = File.new("feed.JSON", "w")
     file.syswrite(response)
     file.close

---

That’s all I want , pretty simple and not that complex. Other gems were going to have me build my own template and blah blah blah. Nah , so I looked a bit into activesupport ( used this gem in previous ruby scripts I’ve created) and it helps with the .from_xml . I’ve been searching for a while on how to switch xml to json for the web app I’ve helped create here at work. But dang.. It’s just so short and sweet and it makes me excited. :D

Hope this helps if you need it

-Hannah