chadsaunders.com

Skiing “The Beav”

Chad Saunders — Mon, 25 Feb 2008 01:36:10 +0000

Chris and Katie came up this Saturday and we had a great time skiing Beaver Mountain. The weather was great with sun, some snow, and was a little hot at times. I rented some skis and got to try out some nice, short, parabolic skis and they were really fun. Beaver Mountain had a nice, new triple that went all the way to the top. This was a great upgrade for the mountain with finally some padded seating. Now I just have to fight off the “Spring Fever” for another month or two until we can go catch some fish.

Valentine’s Day

Chad Saunders — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 07:06:40 +0000

Laura and I had a nice Valentine’s Day. Rather than fighting crowds we decided we’d enjoy having a nice dinner and relaxing. Last year for Valentine’s Day we cooked up some lobster tail and crab legs. We loved that so much that we thought we’d do it again except this time we had steak & seafood (King crab legs). Even though it was all really delicious we both thought the legs were better than the claws. Easier to handle and tastes better too.

Free PHP Flash Charts

Chad Saunders — Tue, 11 Dec 2007 02:42:43 +0000

I was looking for some good flash charts to use and found one that is free, customizable, sleek, and works with PHP! Open Flash Charts are great even though the examples on their site don’t do it total justice. With a couple customization options you can make your own flash charts look really close to Google Analytics flash charts. Now, I’m not saying they’re both the same, because they’re not. But Open Flash Charts are pretty close. They also have an active community so they are always adding new features and graphs. They also support not only PHP, but ASP, Ruby, Python, etc.

To install, just download the files and upload them somewhere where your website pages can include them. The only hard part of the installation is just figuring out the right path name to include the file open flash chart file.

Calculating Floating Holidays in PHP

Chad Saunders — Thu, 15 Nov 2007 03:20:18 +0000

Since I’ve spent so much time figuring out the best method for calculating floating holidays in PHP, I’ve decided to share this little function with everyone. I found the best calculation method and mixed it in with what I thought was a little more useful. Just feed in the needed parameters and you’re good to go!

function ordinal_day($ord, $day, $month, $year) {
$targetDay = date("w", strtotime("next $day"));
$earliestDate = 1 + 7 * ($ord - 1);
$weekday = date("w", mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $earliestDate, $year));
if ($targetDay == $weekday) {
$offset = 0;
} else {
if ($targetDay < $weekday) {
$offset = $targetDay + (7 - $weekday);
} else {
$offset = ($targetDay + (7 - $weekday)) - 7;
}
}
// Calculate the actual date of the holiday
$holidayDate = mktime(0, 0, 0, $month, $earliestDate + $offset, $year);
return $holidayDate;
}

The parameters:

$ord - The number of days. Ex. “The fourth Thursday in November” (Thanksgiving)
$day - The short abbreviation of the day of the week. Ex. “Thu”
$month - The month in number form. Ex. “11″
$year - The year in four-digit form. Ex. 2007

Weekend in Ephraim

Chad Saunders — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 23:33:06 +0000

Laura and I sitting on the “dock” at her parents house