November 29th, 2004:

It’s official. Jess and I have received our “1st Violation Letter” from our Home Owners Association manager.

It states:

bq. During a recent property inspection, the following violation was noted at your residence: *The grass and weeds in the flower beds.* The Savannah COmmunity Association kindly reminds you that Article 7 (Construction and Use Restrictions), specifically Article 7 section 7. It is the Community Associations preference that all yards be kept neat and clean.

This is quite amusing, first of all, on a grammatical level. One would think that these notices are most likely canned letters needing only the resident’s name and address to be filled in. Yet, the above paragraph has been represented to you exactly as it was received. First, one should notice that the description of our violation is an incomplete sentence. It has a subject, but no verb or object. Secondly, while the letter mentions that Article 7, specifically Article 7 Section 7, reminds us of something, the sentence simply ends never stating what we are reminded of.

It gets even better when one reads Article 7 Section 7 of the CC&Rs:

bq. 7.7. APPEARANCE. Both the lot and the dwelling must be maintained in a manner so as not to be unsightly when viewed from the street or neighboring lots. The Architectural Reviewer is the arbitrator of acceptable appearance standards.

That’s it. That’s the complete text of Article 7 Section 7. Since Jess and I have not received any information regarding what “unsightly” is defined as, it’s difficult for us to be in compliance with an unwritten rule. Furthermore, since an Architectural Reviewer has never contacted us to inform us of any trangressions in need of repair, it is impossible for us to be in “Violation” of anything stated in Article 7 Section 7.

What’s even funnier is that our lawn hasn’t grown more than an inch in the past month since it is getting colder and creating conditions unsuited to the growth of the particular variety of grass planted on our lawn.

Then, of course, the very best part is that, if one were to stand on the street in front of our house, and spin around in a circle, it is highly unlikely that anyone would deem our lot as unsightly when compared the the piles of trash, rock, broken fences, port-a-potties, and broken lumber that is present in 6 of the 10 surrounding lots.

Now that I look in my “flower beds” (we don’t have any flowers, let alone flower beds) I can see a weed or two. And due to inadequate mulch coverage and a terrible breed of grass, the lawn does have a runner or two embedded in the edge of the mulch. While this is hardly anything to scream about considering the current state of our neck of the woods, the recent rain, and my neighbor who insits on watering her lawn 3 times a day for 30 minutes each causing swamp-like conditions for at least half of my yard, it doesn’t look wonderful.

So, I’m undecided regarding whether I should write our Association Manager a letter myself informing him that I don’t understand the complaint, see no violation to Article 7 Section 7, and have never been contacted by an Architectural Reviewer or if I should just go pull the damn weeds and let him win this time.

I hate to let him win. This guy is such a jerk. Jess and I call him “God”, not out of reverence, but as a reflection of his own inflated ego.

Okay. Since it flopped two weekends ago, and last weekend was too busy with Turkey-Day and all… Let’s try this again.

*Who*: You!
*What*: Your cash in my pocket (aka: texas hold ‘em)
*Where*: The Plantation (aka: La Casa de “Farris Goldstein”:http://gentlenews.com/)
*When*: This Friday
*Why*: Cause you don’t have anything better to do.

RSVP here. Now.

I stumbled upon “Phpersistence”:http://www.phpersistence.org/ today, a PHP4 library attempting to duplicate the functionality of Java’s Hibernate.

I jumped for joy. Then I cried.

The code is actually pretty well written. It’s capable of allowing normal objects that haven’t extended any special classes to persist. But there are some pretty hefty problems.

99% of all the setup for what goes where and why is handled by a configuration file written in PHP. This configuration file is parsed by a PersistenceConfiguration class, the name of which is hard coded in the Persistence class. This means that you can’t feed configuration to Persistence in any fashion other than this PHP file. And this PHP file is a bit complicated. That’s a bit silly, but workable.

The DB connection can be pre-initialized or the class will initialize it for you. This seems to be pretty flexible. Unfortunately, the class itself actually only accept the pre-initalized format and some of the class init routines handle creating a pre-initialized object if it isn’t created already. The pre-initialized class is stored in a GLOBAL variable. Why? Why? Why? Why? In order to define the parameters for the DB connection, one must use a series of DEFINEs. Why? Why? Why? Why? But… so what. So there’s a silly global variable floating around. Big deal. The next part is the kicker.

You only have the ability to define ONE database connection. This means that all of your tables within a particular configuration of Persistence must be in the same database, on the same database server using the same username and password combination. While I’m sure the majority of users will probably use it in that fashion, it just seems silly to me to code that limitation in when it could be avoided so easily. And, since the database connection is found via a global variable, you couldn’t even get around the problem with multiple instances of Persistence and multiple configuration files.

So, if you need simple object persistence, and you don’t really care about global variables or silly DEFINEs and you are willing to store all of your persisted objects in a single database, “Phpersistence”:http://phpersistence.org might be what you’re looking for.