Ingredients

Most of these are just guidelines, do whatever you like. Add raisons, dried cranberries, different kinds of seeds…

• 1cup Unsweetened, unsalted, smooth peanut butter
• 1cup Shredded coconut
• 3/4cup Raw honey
• 2tbsp Cocoa powder
• 1/4cup Hemp heart seeds
• 1/2cup Roasted unsalted pumpkin seeds
• 1/2cup Sesame seeds

Yield: About 16 balls
Calories per ball: Approximately 226

Steps

1. Mix together honey, cocoa powder, and peanut butter
2. Add other ingredients one by one, mixing in. (Not the sesame seeds though! Leave ‘em out)
3. Roll mixture into balls with your hands, & then coat with the sesame seeds
4. Put in tupperware and pop in fridge (or freezer if you’re in a hurry) to harden
5. Enjoy!

If you want a robust syntax highlighter, it looks like Pygments is the way to go, but you just want a simple javascript solution, Prism is totally rad.

Sometimes I feel like I don’t write enough code outside of work, so I recently contributed a little bit of my own to Prism – CoffeeScript highlighting, which has been included as an optional add-on on the Prism download page, as well as a new theme, which can be found on github.

A bit of back-story for those of you who aren’t totally up-to-speed on my love life: Ben and I started dating in November of 2007, when we were both 20 years old. Our first ‘date’ wasn’t even a date – Ben was trying to organize an after-work pub visit, and everyone bailed but me. We split a pitcher of beer and just… talked. And I think we were both surprised to find how much we had in common.

It’s hard to believe that we’ve come all the way from that night to here. We are both SUCH different people from the ones we were that cold drizzly evening.

So.

For my birthday, my mom did something awesome – she paid for a night’s stay at the Oak Bay Beach Hotel, which is an absolutely stunning ocean-front resort. Ben and I have stayed in some beautiful resort-style hotels in the past, but none of them even came close in comparison. It is so fabulous there.

Ben’s plans went off flawlessly. The hotel has a really nice lounge area overlooking the ocean, filled with plush seating and an enormous fireplace. We each got ourselves a glass of single malt scotch and sat by the window. Ben told me that my birthday gift was a card, which we had to read together.

The card was more like a book. It was hand-made, with little ribbons that I had to undo to read each page. Every page extolled my virtues, in a careful lead-up to the final page, and a question: Will you marry me?

At which point Ben got down on one knee and pulled out a ring.

There was no doubt. We’ve talked about our future a million times, and getting engaged was more of a question of when, not if.

There’s something crazy though about looking down and seeing a ring on my finger. And knowing that I have to start planning a wedding. A WEDDING. My wedding.

Anyway. That is the story. We went out with a bunch of friends and celebrated afterwards – they’d all been notified beforehand of the upcoming engagement. Everyone was SO awesome with their congratulations and excitement. The hotel staff also seemed totally excited on our behalf, saying that we were the first couple to get engaged since the hotel re-opened after its extensive renovations ($52 million worth!) The entire night was perfect. Although I am slightly hungover today.

I am sure there will be many wedding plan blog posts in the upcoming months. We’re thinking sometime in April or May of next year…Destination wedding perhaps?

So far I have already received a free biscotti from where I get coffee every day, so things are off to a very good start.

Also, I know that birthdays are really only exciting the the person HAVING the birthday and fairly banal to everyone else, so… Well, I know. Sorry in advance.

The name “bull” was applied because of the dog’s use in the sport of bull baiting. This entailed the setting of dogs (after placing wagers on each dog) onto a tethered bull. The dog that grabbed the bull by the nose and pinned it to the ground would be the victor. It was common for a bull to maim or kill several dogs at such an event, either by goring, tossing or trampling. Over the centuries dogs used for bull-baiting developed the stocky bodies and massive heads and jaws which typify the breed as well as a ferocious and savage temperament. Bull-baiting – along with bear-baiting – reached the peak of their popularity in England in the early 1800s until they were both made illegal by the Cruelty to Animals Act 1835. Therefore, the Old English Bulldog had outlived its usefulness in England as a sporting animal and its active or ‘working’ days were numbered.

I surf it now and then. Some of the articles are boring, others are great.

Here are a few of the great ones.

• Barrel of a Gun (Jason Stirman)
• On Falling Over (Tom Coates)
• I almost got arrested for planting a bomb at planned parenthood (Wil Shipley)

Here’s a crappy iphone photo…

Ingredients needed

• 3/4 cup margerine (1.5 squares)
• 1 cup brown sugar
• 1/2 cup white sugar
• 1 egg
• 1 egg yolk
• 1 tbsp vanilla extract
• 1/2 tsp salt
• 1/2 tsp baking soda
• 2 cups white all-purpose flour

(of these three additions, you can do a little more of one if you want. Like maybe 1 cup chocolate chips, 1/2 butterscotch, 1/2 walnuts. Or 1 cup walnuts 1/2 chocolate, 1/2 butterscotch. Whatever.)

• 1/2 cup chocolate chips
• 1/2 cup butterscotch chips
• 1/2 cup walnuts

Instructions

Preheat oven to 325°

Melt margarine in microwave. Mix in the sugars, vanilla, and eggs.

Add baking powder and salt.

Add flour, one cup at a time, fully mixing in between cups.

Add the walnuts, chocolate and butterscotch chips.

Roll into balls, placing on baking sheet.

Bake for about 14 mins.

I am ripped away from my dream in slow motion as Ben flys out of bed at a record rate. I don’t even see it happen. One minute he is in bed, the next he is standing at the foot of it and shouting “JESUS CHRIST OH MY GOD”

I don’t know why, but my first assumption is that he has woken up with wild diarrhea and is about to run to the bathroom, but he doesn’t move.

“WHAT? WHAT HAPPENED??”

“I was having this dream… and I could hear this scratching sound… and then I felt something scratching my arm… And I opened my eyes…. and there was a RAT. ON MY PILLOW.”

At which point I also leap out of bed.

“What do we do???”

It’s presumably the middle of the night, after all.

“I want to try and catch it. Get my hockey stick.”

“There is no way you are catching a rat with a hockey stick. We’re going to need to set traps.”

“Check my neck for bites. I thought I felt it bite me.”

I tentatively check his neck. No bites.

“Let’s just sleep in the living room.” I say.

So we go into the living room, carefully closing the bedroom door behind us and blocking off the bottom edge with a rolled up towel.

Ben immediately curls up on the couch and closes his eyes (WHAT?), but I check the time and decide it’s close enough to morning not to bother.

I go online and tweet about it, because who am I to pass up a good tweeting opportunity? I can hear faint scuffling noises, like the rat is running around in the bedroom defiling our clothing or chewing on my makeup or something.

It’s funny how scared/grossed out I am by that rat. I think I’ve read too much about the hantavirus or something.

Anyway, as I’m sitting there thinking about how badly I just want to go to work and away from the rat, I hear more scuffling sounds. But they seem to be… coming from… the kitchen.

“Ben.”

“Mm?”

“It’s… I think it’s in the kitchen cupboard.”

The sounds are loud in there, as if it’s chewing on tinfoil, and it doesn’t seem to give a shit that I’m standing very close to it and talking quite loudly.

We poke around a bit with a broom and a flashlight, but obviously didn’t see any sign of it. The chewing sounds barely abated as we poked around, the fearless little bastard.

Anyway.

I went to work. I locked up what food I could in the cabinet my mom gave me, since it has better latches than anything else in the kitchen. I emailed the building manager to see if he has any spare rat traps (we can’t be the first tenants to ever have a rat in our unit, right??). I took out the trash and instructed Ben to take out the recycling on his way to work later.

I guess we’ll buy our own rat traps tonight if the building manager doesn’t have any.

Update: Building manager replied and it sounds like we’re on our own (in short, his reply was just “Ew.”) Now I just feel embarrassed! But I swear, I clean all the time, it’s not like our house is a rat haven!

Second Update… Ben called to say the building manager DID come by and brought rat poison. Situation being dealt with. Apparently there were a bunch of rat droppings behind the fridge that we get to clean up after work. Ew.

I can’t imagine sleeping in bed again. I want to go to a hotel or something. There’s a part of me that thinks that’s extreme overreacting but another part that keeps thinking about the rat. Climbing around on Ben’s neck.

Where it came from? I have no idea.

We’re on the 3rd floor, and our window has no screen on it, so if it was a wily climber it could have climbed up and through the window perhaps. Or maybe it was already in the building and squeezed in under our front door….

Anyway. Agh!

Final(?) update – By the time we got home from work, the rat was dealt with. Poor ‘lil guy. Much cleaning ensued.

I could probably stretch these stories out into an entry long ordeal each, but I’ll just list them off because I know you don’t care if I lack embellishment, right?

When the communal dryer in my building ate my $1.50

I emailed the building manager to let him know and he didn’t offer to reimburse me, but instead asked me if I had tried put in another $1.50.

I guess I could have emailed back and been like “Well no, but that’s not the POINT,” but I just said “No I used the other dryer instead (the unspoken being “LIKE A NORMAL PERSON WOULD”)”

Except it’s a $1.50, which isn’t life altering, and I kind of like the building manager, so I didn’t want to make a big issue out of it. But he should have offered, right?

When I held the door open for someone at a coffeeshop

They went in front of me in the line up, too. (I wasn’t in a rush & I didn’t actually MIND, but I could see Larry David’s incredulous face while it was happening.)

But it did raise the question: If you beat someone to a door, but wait and hold it open for them & let them in first, does that mean they get to go ahead of you in line too?

2012, I think, was a year for self-growth. I feel like I became a little bit better at a whole lot of of life-skills. I feel like this was the year I (finally) started to transition into adulthood.

But pushing aside the fluffy stuff, here is a concrete list of major things that happened for me in 2012.

Stoic

In early February, my mom picked me up at 5am and we drove for eight hours, took a 1.5 hour ferry trip, crossed the Canada-US border, and continued to drive until we arrived in Washington.

There, we (well, she. I was just there for support) adopted an extremely large dog. This was a much bigger event for my mom than for me (he’s quite a demanding kind of dog, it turns out; is prone to carsickness, and often has explosive diarrhea. In fact, the first thing he did after my mom brought him home was poop all over the international student’s bedroom.), but it was still an experience that stuck with me throughout the year. Me and my mom, on a small road trip with a large drooling animal in the back seat. Me and my mom, going through customs together and giggling nervously, worried that we’ll seem like terrorists.

It was mother-daughter bonding at its best, and Stoic is kind of awesome too, explosive diarrhea or not.

Employment

Also in early February, I switched companies. It was a huge decision for me – I felt a lot of guilt about leaving one company for another, but it turned out to be the right choice.

Working at MetaLab has been awesome. I’m surrounded by smart/nice/funny people, I learn new things every day, and I love my work.

Car

2012 was the year of my first nice car. Goodbye old white van that stinks of exhaust whenever you try to use the heater, hello 2008 Yaris RS! Not quite a Porsche but it might as well be to me. Driving that thing has been a dream.

This was also my first ever brush with borrowing money to make a large purchase (eek!) but I am paying it off at 3x the minimum monthly rate, so hopefully I can get it over and done with ASAP.

Weddings

The first family member in my age group got married this summer, and I can’t decide if it’s a big event or not. In most ways, I think it isn’t, but I definitely sobbed a little at the wedding when they showed old childhood photos and I suddenly realized that we’re not little girls anymore.

Friends and Family

I don’t know if others would agree with me or not, but I feel like 2012 was also a year of growing closer to the people around me. I know that’s totally cheesy, but I spent way more time (but still not enough!) with my siblings than I have since I was a teenager, and strengthened relationships with a few close friends as well. I’m hoping 2013 will lead to more of this.

Happy new year!

My work gave us a week off for the holidays, which is fabulous, but I just traded that in for a different kind of work.

I haven’t had a day of non family dinners or other kinds of social obligations since last Thursday. An entire week of socializing over dinner, sometimes with people I don’t know all that well… of staying up late, of drinking wine, of taking turns being the designated driver with Ben each night.

Christmas itself was nice. Not a huge fanfare of excitement – Ben got me a nice touque, some earrings, and some new ear buds (I lost my old ones). I got him the Game of Thrones book series box set, a pack of guitar strings, and a Toblerone bar. Very low key.

As a sort of joint gift to ourselves, we also got a gym membership, so our goal is to go to the gym twice a week and attend yoga once a week – the membership includes yoga, pilates, and various dance classes, so we figured we might as well make some use of them!

Ben also plans on taking up squash more seriously, but I suck at any sports that require actual skill, so he’s on his own with that one.

Anyway. Christmas 2012! Overall a success. How was yours?

Is there anything honey CAN’T do??

So here is a ramble.

Ben and I are kind of courting the idea of moving. I love our place in a lot of ways, but it’s not very pet-friendly and it doesn’t really have much to it. No in-suite anything, other than a fridge and a stove and some really nice ocean front views.

It’s fine for what it is, and I will be sad to leave it (possibly the first and last time I will ever have a home with sweeping ocean in front of it)… so I’m feeling pretty torn.

The way I see it, we have a few options:

• Buy our own place. But based on our budget, we’d have to buy a fairly cheap condo which might kind of suck. Definitely cannot afford a house. (The cheapest POSSIBLE house for sale in Victoria right now is $369,000)
• Move into a similar place that allows pets. This would mean comparable price but the idea of not upgrading at all is kind of depressing.
• Move into a more expensive but swankier place that allows pets. This would be awesome but then it’s like, why not just go with idea #1 for that price? Home ownership is probably more important than having a penthouse with a fireplace, right?
• Stay where we are for another year or two. Which could be ok. Difficult to say. I’m mixed between restlessness and wanting to just stay where I am.

I’m kind of leaning towards buying at the moment, but really, I’m all over the map. (If you’re wondering where Ben weighs in on this, he seems to have taken a back seat approach. He wants to move, but he doesn’t care about the logistics.)

Anyway, I guess nothing will happen right away but the idea is floating around out there!

Here are some then & now photos because I love then & now photos – 2007 vs 2012:

Us in early 2008 – Mexico. Looking all young and adorable.

This summer, looking all serious.

Not much else to say… maybe I could write about Vancouver but it just rained a lot and that was about it.

I will try to do something different in the near future, before I drive everyone away with my obsessing.

But for now, here’s another one.

I don’t know if they should be called cookies or if they should be called biscuits – they have a thick texture and are spongy like cake. They aren’t too sweet or heavy.

They are a very ‘adult’ tasting cookie.

Nutritional Information per Cookie

• Makes about 34 cookies

Honey is much higher in calories than processed sugar (1 cup of honey = 1031; 1 cup sugar = 774). So even though I feel like using honey is ‘healthier’ and more natural, it is higher in calories!

• Calories: 151.3
• Sugars: 13.8 g
• Carbs: 24.2 g

I ate so freaking many of these while I was making them. Baking is dangerous.

Wet Ingredients

• 1 cup butter
• 1.5 cups honey
• 2 eggs
• 1.5tsp vanilla extract

Dry Ingredients

• 4 cups of flour
• .25 cup of granulated sugar
• 1tsp baking soda
• 1tsp ground ginger
• 1stp ground cinnamon
• .5tsp ground nutmeg
• Feel free to fudge around with the spices. I don’t think you could go wrong by adding quite a bit more of something if you have a flavour preference!

Step One: Mix honey, sugar, and butter on stovetop

The most annoying part of the whole recipe – in a saucepan over a low heat stove, melt butter into honey and sugar. Stir with wooden spoon while it melts.

Once it’s done melting, put the saucepan aside to cool and move on to step two.

Step Two: Add everything but the flour

In a large bowl add the eggs, baking soda, ginger, nutmeg, and cinnamon. Whisk together and then pour your honey mixture over it.

Step Three: Add Flour

Add flour one cup at a time, mixing in fully between cups.

Step Four: Bake

I rolled my cookies into balls before placing on the pan. As you can see from the finished product, there are two looks – the round ones and the jagged ones. The jagged ones were not rolled into balls because at first I was scared that the dough would be super sticky from all the honey and didn’t want it all over my hands. Hint: It wasn’t.

Bake at 350° for about ten minutes. Keep an eye on them – they’re easy to mess up if you put them in for too long or too short.

Step Five: Eat

Best served with a hot pot of tea.

Warning: I am calling these cookies, but they are only mildly sweet. They are not a dessert cookie, and they are definitely not meant to be eaten alone. Eat with tea or don’t eat at all.

The roast I ended up using was freaking HUGE.

It cost $14.00 and it was so distastefully enormous that we didn’t even really want to waste money on it, but it was the only roast available and we’d already somehow gotten into this mindset that we were doing a roast, goddamnit, if it was the last thing we ever did, so we bought it.

(I wish I could take fabulous recipe photos like some people do. I don’t understand! It’s nighttime and we just have our crappy kitchen lighting. How do people do it?!)

So here’s what I ended up doing:

Ingredients

• Really enormous top round roast.
• 2 potatoes
• 3 carrots
• A bunch of garlic
• An onion
• Pepper
• Thyme/Rosemary
• Olive Oil

This is not where my problems ended, by the way. I only had a thyme/rosemary/basil/oregano mixed bag of herbs, so I just sort of scrunched up my eyes and sprinkled it all on.

And we don’t own a proper baking dish because one of us (let’s pretend it was Ben, although I honestly can’t remember) dropped it at one point not too long ago and it shattered, so I used my glass dish that I usually use for baking dessert bars.

I know, off to a great start, right?

The procedure

• Preheat the oven to 475°
• Take the enormous roast out of the fridge about half an hour ahead of time. I chopped the veggies & did the dishes while it sat.
• Chop onions, carrots, potatoes and throw ‘em in your pan. You can just do big manly chunks, no fine chopping required. Very fun.
• Throw a bunch of garlic cloves in there too. I peeled mine but Jamie Oliver seems to think that you don’t have to. Peeled was good, though. Peeled was very good.
• Drizzle liberally with olive oil, toss in some rosemary & thyme.
• The roast goes on top of all this. Drizzle it also and grind some pepper on it too.
• Turn the oven down to 400° and put the pan in.

I cooked my roast for 2 hours. Obviously the length of time depends on the size. I checked on it every half hour and sprinkled on more olive oil. I also poured in about .75 of a cup of water at two different intervals when the veggies started looking dry. I don’t think you’re supposed to do TOO much water, though.

Once you’re done cooking the roast, let it sit out for about fifteen minutes before you eat it.

How was it?

Unearthly. Very very good. The veggies were especially fabulous, so well cooked that they were almost sweet but not quite. The meat was less shockingly good, but it was well-done and could have maybe even been a bit rarer. It wasn’t burned or tough. It also wasn’t fall-apart tender, though. Don’t know if this is possible with roast beef or not.

I made some Yorkshire puddings to go with it from a pre-made mix (just combined with egg and water and bake for 18 minutes. Not too exciting or hard.)

Really awesome dinner. I recommend it for sure, although it does take a lot of patience and checking up on things.

1. Plain, unsweetened & unflavoured yogurt.
2. Honey (not creamed honey, just pure honey.)

So. Good. I couldn’t believe it. It’s my new favourite thing in the world.

I do about 3 or 4 spoonfuls of yogurt in a bowl and then 3/4 spoon of honey, which I swirl around. The honey tends to stick to the spoon so I will eat the yogurt off the spoon but never chomp down on the whole thing (so that I don’t get too much honey in my mouth at once.)

It’s amazing, go do it now.

P.S. – U like my cheesy photo frame?

Anyway, I changed my mind because I read a javascript article on .net magazine that was filled with errors and I was like “Ok clearly a lack of 100% knowledge didn’t stop THAT guy from writing something.”

And I figured that at the very least, I’d do a better job than he did.

So with that caveat in mind, after the jump you will find a basic intro to writing ajax.

What does ajax look like from far away?

When you’re submitting some data to the server through javascript, you can kind of pretend it’s like any other way of submitting data. Like when you submit a form. You have a bunch of inputs with names and values, and when you press ‘submit’, they are all sent to the server. You can imagine them as key-value pairs, where the input’s name = the input’s value. (Which is why in PHP, $_POST['your_email'] would be = someemail@hotmail.com)

Even though you’re doing it with javascript, it’s exactly the same idea. You’re just doing the sending manually, so to speak.

And from the server’s point of view, it’s pretty much the same thing. The server receives a POST (or a GET or a PUT, etc) with some data and it deals with it. And when it’s done, it replies with whatever. In a normal form this is usually a bunch of html, or a redirect to anther page that contains a bunch of html.

In ajax it usually replies with something a little more stripped down, like JSON. Then, you get to write javascript that reads that reply and decides what to do with it.

I should note that there are a bunch of other invisible parameters here. For example, there’s a status response. The server can respond with 404s, which you’re probably familiar with. Or a 200, which means that everything is a-ok and here is the page you asked for. Or 500, which means “ACK, you broke it.”

When you send your request, you can also specify what sort of reply you’d like. So you can request text/html. Or application/json. And if the server CHECKS these headers, it can respond correctly.

HOWEVER, it doesn’t have to check. You could also write a very simple page that doesn’t bother to see what sort of data you WANT, and just always replies with the same thing (how rude!).

If you’re interested in HTTP Headers, you can read more on wikipedia.

Ok, so what else do I need to know?

I use Chrome and I am attached at the hip to the web inspector that it comes with. Other browsers have similar tools but since Chrome is my weapon of choice, you might want to use it too for this tutorial.

What we’re most interested in is the Network Tab, which monitors all network activity so you can make sure your ajax is working correctly. This is SO useful.

Also useful is the console, which will tell you if you really messed something up in your javascript.

Since this tutorial is about using jQuery and ajax, I should note that if you’re not using jQuery, this ain’t gonna work for ya.

Some ajax tutorials tout that everyone should understand how to write ajax with javascript ONLY, so that they can understand the PAIN involved and how much jQuery handles behind the scenes for you.

But forget that for now, I don’t care if you can’t write an ajax request on your own.

You’ve written 680 words already and still haven’t written any code

Sorry! This is also why I hesitated to write this article

OK.

jQuery has more than one function to help you with ajax. We’re going to use the basic jQuery.ajax. You can read about the rest of them if you’re interested.

Part One: Writing your javascript.

So let’s say you already set up a basic html page. You can check out the one I made right here. We’re going to trigger our ajax request when a link is clicked.

This example is silly, by the way. It’s just to give you an idea of how it works.

I have a link with the class .submit-ajax so I’ll set up a listener for click events on it. When it’s clicked we’ll call the sendAjax function.

$('.submit-ajax').on('click',sendAjax);

Then we have to write a sendAjax function, which needs to do a couple of things:

• It needs to make sure that it isn’t already sending something.
• It needs to set up the data that it wants to send to the server
• It needs to actually DO the send.
• It needs to handle all possible responses.

So here is how our send ajax function ends up looking:

// Save a couple of variables outside the function ahead of time for use later
var $serverResponse = $('#server-response'); // The div where we will print responses
var $nameInput = $('#name-input'); // An input field for the user to type their name
var $emailInput = $('#email-input'); // An input field for the user to type their email

// The function
var sendAjax = function(e) {
    // Don't follow the link!
    e.preventDefault();

    // Save the link that was just clicked in a variable to use later.
    var $link = $(this);

    // Make sure that nothing is being sent already
    if($link.hasClass('in-progress')) {
      return;
    }
 
    // Set up form Data
    var formData = {};
    formData['name'] = $nameInput.val();
    formData['email'] = $emailInput.val();

    // Send the data to the server
    $.ajax({
      url: './response.php', // The file we're sending the data to
      type: 'post', // Type of request (could be get, post, put, delete, or others...)
      data: formData, // The form data we set up earlier
      accepts: 'application/json', // The response type we accept

      beforeSend: function (xhr) {
        $link.addClass('in-progress'); // set the in-progress class so that we can't double-send
      },

      // What to do if we get a successful response code
      success: function(data) {        
        // Populate the server response div with the information received from the server
        $serverResponse.find('.text').html('The server responded that you submitted the name <span class="name">' + data.name + '</span> and the email <span class="email">' + data.email + '</span>');
      },

      // What we do if we get an error response code
      error: function(xhr) {
        // Grab the server's error message response and convert it to a javascript object
        var errorResponse = $.parseJSON(xhr.responseText);

        //  Populate the server response div with the error received from the server
        $serverResponse.find('.text').html('There was an error when trying to communicate with the server.<br><br> Response Was: <span class="error">' + errorResponse.error + '</span>');
      },

      // We do this at the very end, regardless of success or error
      complete: function(xhr) {
        $link.removeClass('in-progress'); // unset in-progress so we can send again
      }
    });
};

You can check out the code in action and use the network inspector to watch what happens:

An example of success

An example of a failure

Part Two: Writing the server-side code

The person who emailed me requesting the ajax blog post also requested PHP. In a real-life situation you’d grab the data you receive, DO something with that data, and then send some sort of success message. In this example, we’re just going to regurgitate the data we receive. Easy.

<?php
header('Content-type: application/json'); // We're always replying with JSON
if(trim($_POST['name']) == '' || trim($_POST['email']) == '') {
  /* If we don't receive both fields filled out, we'll set the response header to an error response */
  header("HTTP/1.0 400 Bad Request");
?>
{
  "error" : "Please make sure both fields are filled out."
}

<?php } 

/* Otherwise, just reply with the data we received */
else { ?>
{
  "title" : "Your First Ajax Experience",
  "name" : "<?php print strip_tags($_POST['name']); ?>",
  "email" : "<?php print strip_tags($_POST['email']); ?>"
}
<?php } ?>

And that is it. The whole example. Not so bad, right?

Check out the example for yourself and play around (You can view the source of the example page to see how the html looks.)

Check out the javascript file

Things to keep in mind

• What if the data you receive isn’t in the format you expect from the server? $.parseJSON will throw an error. You may need to account for this in your code.
• What if xhr.responseText doesn’t have the content in the format you expect? Again, you may need to check for this in your code.

Other stuff to check out

• backbonejs, which abstracts communication with the server even further.
• Ajax on Wikipedia

Fun fact: You don’t. I don’t know why more people don’t realize that this is a total urban legend.

Here are some facts:

• On average, your body loses ten cups of water per day.
• This amount varies based on the climate you live in and the amount of exercising you do.
• Of those ten cups, you regain about FOUR cups by drinking absolutely nothing – your body absorbs more water through the food you eat.
• Getting your fluid through a diuretic drink, like coffee or tea, is NOT detrimental! You can obtain water this way, especially if your body is used to it. For every cup of coffee your drink, two thirds or more is retained as water.
• So if you get four cups of water through food alone, and you have a cup of coffee in the morning, that’s about 5 cups. Then if you have a drink with lunch and a drink with dinner, you’re at 7 cups. And chances are that you’ve actually drank more today. I’ve had 1 cup of tea, 1 cup of coffee, 1 cup of water, and 1 cup of soy milk today. And it’s only 4pm. So I’ve technically already hit my eight cup minimum without even trying.

Here are some quotes:

Advocates of the 8 x 8 guideline sometimes claim that thirst is a poor hydration indicator. They assert that many people are so chronically dehydrated they no longer recognize their bodies’ signals for water. Barbara Rolls, professor of nutrition sciences at the Pennsylvania State University, disagrees. Her studies, she says, “found no evidence that people are chronically dehydrated.” Although some drugs can cause problems with thirst regulation and the elderly may not experience thirst as intensely as younger people, Rolls maintains that most healthy people are adequately hydrated. – Source

Various reviews of all the scientific literature on the topic performed in 2002 and 2008 could not find any solid scientific evidence that recommended drinking eight glasses of water per day. An individual’s thirst provides a better guide for how much water they require rather than a specific, fixed quantity. – Source

Here are some links:

• shine.yahoo.com/summer-time-fun/do-you-really-need-8-glasses-of-water-a-day-2512002.html
• snopes.com/medical/myths/8glasses.asp
• health.com/health/article/0,,20409879_last,00.html
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drinking_water#Requirements