Status update for this week:

Got Five Dysfunctions of a Team finished. Most interesting dysfunction (at least as it applies to current environment): lack of accountability. We need more ownership!

The other books mentioned in my last update have been successfully returned to the library. I guess that's one definition of "finished" as far as the Finish What You Start book goes. Anyway, its off my coffee table and I can move on.

The tomato plants are going well: there are about 10 baby tomatoes and a lot of flowers. Rejiggered the non-topsy-turvey tomato plant with a overflow reservoir so the downstairs neighbors won't be notified Chinese Water Torture Style when I overwater it. Other than that, no more than 2 minutes a day of attention.

TV has not been consistently disconnected, but for the most part it only goes on at the end of the day and then it gets disconnected pretty quickly.

I wasn't making good progress on the Competition and on Saturday I went to meet my nemesis on his home turf. There we exchanged status updates and, between:

• A trip to the Concord Fry's;
• Managing the creation of some awesome homemade icecream;
• Consuming Pizza;
• A visit to a nice used book store (picked up AD&D Players Handbook, Dungeon Master Guide, and Monster Manual);
• An awesome dungeon crawl where we killed a viper, turned 7 skeletons, and let "Zero" the Wizard off with a warning.

I managed to steal all of Joel's runtime environment, his code, and he gave me a good understanding of the PHP ORM solution he's using: Doctrine. I feel like such a Slugworth to his Wonka... But all is fair in War!

Following the Super Happy Amy House, I spent Sunday morning getting the 'hello world' website a few steps farther. I cloned a few files, made a few modifications, and got my own Doctrine setup by walking in Joel's footsteps. By the end of the day I had:

• Got my own database going with just one table (user).
• Got PHP and Smarty and Context and a basic MVC framework going.
• Turned on mod_rewrite in Apache2 to get my restful URLs going through a common dispatcher.
• Sketched out the basic requirements for a 'functional site' that I think my customers will find useful enough to, if not pay for, at least try out.

Coded until 5PM and then went on a bike ride -- where, oddly enough, I encountered a tiny snake. Just missed running him over by accident... Was going to go back and check him out but didn't want to get Crocodile Hunter'ed. Might've been a viper!

Challenge goals for next week:

• Above all: maintain momentum.
• New user account creation.
• New club creation.
• User list.
• Club list.
• Clarify milestone 1 release criteria.

Thanks to Joel for making it a little easier to crush him in about 4 and 1/2 months! You're going to have to roll more than a few natural 20's if you're going to win this Challenge!