July 2008 Archives

Jakki passed the NCLEX! It was a huge relief for her, and for me by proxy. It’s official on the Washington State Dept. of Health site here. Jakki has her first shift as an RN tonight in the ER at Holy Family Hospital in north Spokane. Thanks to everyone who supported her, here at the conclusion of her journey.

Jakki and I are both waiting with bated breath for the results of her nursing boards. As a Geek, I grew weary of manually refreshing the Dept. of Health website. Enter Ruby. Without Rails, Ruby is still a fantastically useful scripting language. In about thirty minutes, I was able to write a script that grabbed the DOH page, parsed it with a handy rubygem called hpricot, checked to see if the status has changed, and if not, it goes to sleep for 5 minutes. When the the status does change, the script will launch FireFox and browse to the page. Maybe I’ll make it send me an email or a text-message too. Right now it’s a whopping seven lines of code.