an empty place v3.5

I just downloaded, installed IE 7 Beta and ofcourse, I restarted my computer - we all know how web browsers are crucial to stable system operation. Why should IE provide such functionality that it shakes the very core of the operating system? Any way, the very first thing I noticed was the search bar. I changed nothing.

Hmm... Google's even got the default spot in the IE7 Public Beta? Interesting.

The second thing I noticed was that when trying to post this, IE7 does not support Blogger's WYSIWYG editor. Oh well...

I knew last Thursday this was not going to be a fun weekend, I just didn't know how bad it was going to get to get. Thing One was sent home from his after care provider (its a small after hours sweat shop) with some sort of stomache thing. Well, it kind of alarmed me when he told me later that night he felt like he was going to "collapse". I would expect something like this from Thing Two, he's a Drama Queen, but not from #1. So I stayed home with him Friday and got a doctor's appointment right away.

We get into the Doctor's office first thing Friday morning and he gets tested for strep (the doctor jams a giant Q-Tip down his throat) and then for the flu (then that sadistic sob rammed another giant Q-Tip up Thing One's nose). Gagging and with watering eyes, Thing One takes it like a little trooper, thanks the man and asks for another. I've trained him well.

Turns out he has The Flu. Not "the flu" or "da flu", The Flu. The big nasty one; "and oh, by the way, here's a prescription for a medicine that must be taken within the first 48 hours of onset or it won't work and by the way, no one in the county carries it. How's Thing Two feeling? Here's a prescription for him too 'cause he won't be feeling good for long. You should ask your doctor for a prescription too." Yeah well, he was right, its a hard drug to find. I think I managed to find the only three bottles of it in entire area; I needed four to fill the 'script.

So, the rest of the weekend was spent cleaning and disenfecting (I totally feel for Thing One, every time he "got sick" it was a question of sitting down or hovering. And when he'd blow, half the chunks would come out his nose). At least my house is ubber clean now.

One thing I did get to play with though, BlogBridge. Awesome cross platform RSS reader. It will sync feeds between machines and the interface is excellent. Completely alters my view of what can be done with Java.

A couple years ago, M and I decided to do the Body For Life program together and try to help each other along. We made it about half way through the 12 week program before life stepped in and slapped us around. Well, last week we decided to do it again. The first day wasn't too bad food-wise and was to be upper body training. I went to the spa with M and helped her through her routine, but then there wasn't enough time for me to get in a workout. Because my weights, which have become community property, were living at my best friend's house I was out of luck. The next day M comes down with a migraine and there's no cardio that day. I forget exactly what the deal was but we decided to make it a trial week.

So this week became the official Week One of our second venture into B4L. I was able to get the weights back over to my place and got everything set up in the weightroom so "Hell or High Water" and all that. Yeah right. Monday's meals went great for M but I forgot mine at home and what I bought at the local grocer's sucked. Monday's workout never happened - we had M's nephew until late so neither of us got to workout. Tuesday's meals went a bit better but M came down with another migraine and Thing One was pretty sick. No workout. Today, I not only forgot my meals but I doubt very seriously I will be doing Monday's upper body, Tuesday's cardio, and today's lower body workout.

But there's hope, apparently the FDA has approved a super fat pill that, other than awarding you the nickname "greasey cheeks" will also block upto about 200 calories worth of fat (about 22 grams) per meal. That's like four Twinkies for free! What would happen if you added a carb blocker too? Oh the humanity!

The Things and I were watching DBZ (that's Dragon Ball Z to all you newbs out there) and little Go-watzhizface was escaping in some raft that appeared (OK, so they were watching it and I was playing with my PSP), caught some air and was surfing with some flying fish. Or something like that. Maybe that was two different shows, I don't know, I was killing terrorists. Thing Two thought the whole flying fish thing was neat and Thing One described them as having feathers. So I needed to prove that I was still smarter than they (thanks Jason for planting that seed) so with a few clickety clicks I was able to show them a number of still shots (and some of them were even of flying fish) and this awesome video.

And, like Mike, I too am having some car troubles of my own. A bit of Captain Fury surfaced Sunday morning while out and about and I slammed the door to my car. Not only did my window break in a rather peculiar way (it didn't shatter, no that would have added far too much drama; no it had to slide down into the door with a soft woosh) but also the center roof console, well, it fell out of the roof. It is difficult to maintain rage when surrounded by comedy.

I work in a building that overlooks one of the most beautiful sites in the area: The Pier. The HMS Bounty has been docked there for a while now, as it is every year about this time gearing up for Gasparilla. This year however, it got to see some action. All I have to ask is, "where was I?"

On another note, Slashdot has a mildly interesting thread running about how filthy our keyboards actually are. And this fella wrote an interesting app displaying zip code locations. What's more interesting than the app itself is that the image of the continental US that he is using is constructed entirely of the dots representing the zip locations themselves. Check it out.

This morning I take The Things to The Facility of Social Confounding and Bewilderment then I stop to get gas. It's been an extremely long time since I've paid in cash at Circle K so I was feeling somewhat awkward standing in line empty handed, waiting to prepay. I hand the clerk $60 for pump three and shortly after return for my change. For some reason however, I am compelled to have something this time when I get to the register so I grab a 1-liter of Diet Coke, 10 cents less than the 2-liter, and a couple BIG 100 COLOSSAL bars with a neat little sticker for $2.79. It's high but...

Why do they bother putting price tags on things in "convenience stores" when they have a scanner that is not going to ring up your items correctly anyway? I mean, come on, if I didn't know how much it was, when you ring me up wrong ignorance is bliss right? But when you tell me how much something is going to cost and then charge me otherwise, ignorance loses that happy-go-lucky feeling.

Picture this: the long time drug-addict-retiree behind the counter slowly struggles with the wrapper on a candy bar trying to smooth out the wrinkles and not blind herself while the violently strobing red stripes grope for its code in the craggy mountains of the glossy wrappings. When suddenly, with a stroke of luck a price registers in The Machine.

As a software developer/programmer/geek I have been "behind the scenes" of many projects. In fact, while most of my previous efforts with other companies have gone to select and exclusive clients for evaluation, the projects were cut before they could reach the market. Occassionaly I will get a call regarding one of my projects from years past asking to do more work (upgrades, enhancements, etc...) but all in all, I've never worked on project that has gone to COTS (Commercial Off The Shelf) until now. Its really a good feeling to be a part of a team of talented developers and have your projects realized.

At the end of a movie I like to sit and check out the credits to get a feel for the effort it took to put something like that together. There are a ton of people in these films. I've noticed that there seems to be at the very least, and typicaly more, an equal number of people behind the scenes as there are in front of the camera (including extras). It is simply amazing really. From assistants to caterers if you've had an affect on he production of a film, you get your name in the credits. Below is what I think the credits for an application would like:

Owner: Crotchety O'Mann
Senior Vice President: Ima Hymen
Vice President Marketing: Xavier Zelf
Vice President Technology: Mr. E. Mann
Senior Chief Architect/Principal Designer: Francis le'Artiste
Senior Technical Advisor: Wanda Doff
Senior Technical Lead: Cody Pendant
Senior Marketing Engineer: Lou Smoralls

Marketing Guy: Oliver Sudden
Marketing Girl: Pam Perd
Sales Guy #1: Lew De Behavoire
Sales Guy #2: Ray Neday
Sales Guy #3: Duayne Pipes
Sales Guy #4: Lou Pole
Sales Girl: Sally Mander

Product Manager: Sue Pervisor

IT Manager: Ulrika Garlique
IT Technician: Chaz Tize

Team Leader: Lee Vitout
Senior Lead Developer: Leroy Brown
Lead Developer: Hanns Offah
Senior Developer: Arthur Ritus
Developer #1: Noah Vale
Developer #2: Faye Kinitt
Junior Developer: Howard Ino
Intern: Billy-Joe Crappinispants

Catering: The Greek Place, The Chinese Place, Pizza, Starbucks

When I first started hearing about the PSP I thought is was going to be like the Game Boy: a novelty. Now don't get me wrong, I like toys, I like them a lot in fact, and they have their place, but the capabilities of most toys just aren't there to keep me interested longer than a comercial break. But then I got the opportunity to play with a friend of mine's PSP and there is a certain visual appeal to it. So today, I bought one and I've been able to do even more with it than I thought it could do to begin with. Music, movies, and images are nice additions to this bad boy but the Internet capabilities are sweet - its got its fricken browser man! I got it running through my 802.11b wireless router, browsing the web and playing SOCOM online. Not only this, but you can also creat an "Ad Hoc" connection with other PSPs around you to play in little P2P nodes; I plan to try this tomorrow.

I got the PSP Bundle which contained the standard PSP complement plus some: a cradle, hardcase, some cables, car adapter, lense covers, and disk cases. And oh yeah, a crappy game. Not sure if it was completely worth the extra money but hey, the PSP is just awesome and with the cradle I can hook it up to my PC and transfer files (music, movies, images, etc.) to and from it. Of the components it came with (not including the stuff in the accessory bundle) it came with head phones, a "remote", a 32 meg chip, a soft case, a strap, battery and charger, and a linse cleaner. About 13 years ago I found the Sony ear bud head phones at K-Mart and haven't worn regaulr phones since (I've always hated the feeling of the band wrap over/around my head). Why Sony couldn't have bundled the same head phones with their PSP is beyond me. The buds that come with it are like iPod buds (they're even white) and the wiring design is idiotic (you'd have to see them). No, I take that back, the "remote" is idiotic, the buds are just lame.

The remote is an inline control for volume and play control. Inline, as in, you plug it into the PSP and the buds into it. Besides, why do you need a remote for a hand held gizmo? A freaking remote! OK, so the ear buds are white, the inline remote is white, and the lame strap is white while the PSP is black and silver and the soft case is black with an embosed P S P. They couldn't even supply color coordinated accessories. And about this softcase, its pretty nice, but you can't put the case on "correctly" and charge the PSP at the same time. I mean, well, you can but the embossed side will be to the back of the unit rather than over the display as is assumedly intended.

Now that the pissing an moaning about the goodies is aside, I can start posting all about the good stuff! I have no reason to sleep... ever... again!!!

Have you ever had a bad day? I don't mean just a bad day, but a BAD day; where it seemed that everything you touched was doomed to fail in one irritating way or another? That kind of bad day that you would have rather there'd been some great cataclysm to bring your sufferring to one great climax so you'd be able to say, with out a doubt, "it can only get better." But that catastrophy never happens and shit just keeps going wrong all day. I had a day like that. In fact, that day was today (or yesterday depending upon your perception of time in relation to the distance between sunset and sunrise and the lack of sleep between them).

Skipping the fact that both of my home computers (the PC and the Mac) have crashed and are at the point of whiping the drives and reinstalling the OS. Skipping past all the problems I've endured with various web and sql servers failing for no apparent reason (actually, it was the MySQL client that failed but all of the data got corrupted anyway) over the past few days. Skipping the notion that I'd so arrogantly proclaimed I'd be cutting back on my willingness to work to excess. Let's just take a look at what happened today.

I made it to the office shortly after 8 this morning, an hour early (as per the norm so I can take an extra hour for lunch to workout) and I'd intended on focusing on what appeared to be a tricky Work Item. You see, as I've mentioned before, one of our products is a Word addin and it works on Word 2000, XP, and 2003. My item was very specific in nature and only affected Word 2000 so I needed to get that properly installed on my machine. With a fresh install, I try to open one of our documents and Word crashes. After numerous attempts across several documents and configurations I discover that I cannot open a document without Woord 2000 crashing. Its only on my box though. Uninstall reinstall; no change. Completely removing all Office installations and installing just Word 2000 does not fix it. After an hour and a half I finally find a doc that will open and why. "Fine, whatever, I'm over this." I cannot recreate the issue. Par for the course I know but I want to dig into it some so I launch Visual Studio. It immediately crashes.

Somehow, something got hosed when I (un/re)installed Office all those times and now my development environment is hosed. Something told me not to do it, but I tried the "Repair" option on the install disks hoping it would locate a file that'd been deleted, replace it and all my settings would remain unaffected. Don't use the Repair feature, its a bullshit item to fill space on the form. After two hours it still crashes. Uninstall and reinstall VS now. Two hours later I'm finally back on my feet. I babysat this stupid thing, skipping lunch and becoming more and more irritated as sands passed. Finally, I have a somewhat functional environment (Word still crashes on all but two files (and one of those every other time I try to open it)) and can now reproduce the error. After five minutes the problem is resolved, tested, and the ticket is closed. Irony at its best.

Well, all of my stuff is finally backed up on these machines and Windows has just finished installing on the PC. Time to shut this down and reinstall OS X. Laterz.