WangNet

I think I just saw the sun and some blue skies!

I reflect on this year and it was good. I am having some anxiety for this coming year knowing things I take for granted now will irrevocably alter by this time (hell by the middle of) next year. The world as I know it will be boxed up and stored away in a garage (metaphorically as well) and places of shelter will change but they won't be our places.. my places. The hardest change will probably be for Pete. I hope his little walnut sized noggen will accept it and he will adjust.

Now time to go drown out the anxiety in some Torchlight.

Clarification - this is not to say I do not understand the reasons and the methods... I do. I just don't have to like it rocking my boat.

I swear I am the best secret santa... my brother in law's two major gifts were a bottle of American Honey Wild Turkey (yum), and a remote controlled helicopter. Guess which one was used first and fascinated the crowd?

Happy birthday Mom.

Random introspective - the only saving grace of the NBC show "Heroes" was Hiro time traveling back to when he was a child and his deceased mother recognizing him and having the conversation with grown-up-Hiro about how his life is and seeing how he turned out.

Those weeks will never be gotten over just gotten past. Thanks Bruce Sr. for those words.

The world crystallized with the simple axioms to never forget the face of your Father or Mother. Thanks Stephen King for that line as well.

Work starts today. I am nervous for some reason. That's dumb. I should do fine.. but what if I don't? What if they hate me? Eeek!

It was a nice showing at Legal Lunch yesterday. I was missing my biggest fan and her discussions on the new WOW release. I tried to make others at the table fake some information but it wasn't the same.

So ends the time with Romeos... Maybe the group will travel further out mid town wise since they pick their friends by the locations they can eat out at.

On the plus side I was inspired on the way home for a potential verification that the external drive I was going to be putting together for a friend today was working by booting up the busted laptop on Ubuntu... that lead to a flurry of awesome ideas and I found a 'vista recovery only' disc online and I let rip the six hours of finding and repairing of the bad sectors... this lead to a few more repairs done.. the ability to BOOT to Vista and all I was left was a corrupt profile. Spanktacular! I was able to make the two 'recovery dvds' for this particular HP laptops as well (seriously though? Two hours to make two DVDS? Lame). End game I think this laptop was about nineteen hours of work to get it back to order.

I am unclear where these pictures were supposed to be hiding at so hopefully those weren't missing. I was able to swap profiles, clean up the busted one, and I think I am good to go on this laptop. Now I have no idea why the harddrive was belching out so many errors.. It's probably dying.. but I am unclear.

Off to solder my faceplate for my car..

Is it bad I started salivating (though the reviews were a bit tame).

3.3-GHz Phenom II X6 1100T Black Edition, a six-core chip that replaces AMD's first six-core CPU, the Phenom II X6 1090T, at the head of the performance hierarchy. Like its predecessor, the 1100T has an unlocked multiplier to aid in overclocking, and is intended for users who regularly take advantage of heavily threaded applications. The 1100T is priced at $265 (list), with the 1090T moved down in price to $235 to make room at the top.

AMD Releases Three New CPUs

I just got done installing MSSQL 2008rc 2 on my pc... so that makes two active databases (mySQL and MSSQL), apache, PHP, and some ISS hosting going on.. Tots not a nerd.

Impromptu family meeting was being arranged yesterday. Greaaaaaaaaat. These are always a joy.

Topics:
- sister's wedding photos,
- the car "duh-duh-duuuuuuuuh"
- cryptic "other things".

I do now that sister_1 and sister_2 had a chat about "the car" yesterday. I was given heads up that I might be drug into something. I wasn't. That means today's going to have about a fist full of extra special "fun" seasoning thrown at us.

Christmas present buying has been put on hold - this may necessitate no Christmas depending on the level of brawl and the content of "other things".

In a very applicable quote from McCroskey in the movie 'Airplane', "Looks like I picked the wrong week to quit sniffing glue.".

I was called about my start date - a week from this coming Monday since the PC is taking longer to order in than they thought. booooooooooooooooo!

That just means Legal Lunch can occur next week.. on a day that is not a Friday and during mentoring hours.

Nasa's big announcement was

Researchers conducting tests in the harsh environment of Mono Lake in California have discovered the first known microorganism on Earth able to thrive and reproduce using the toxic chemical arsenic. The microorganism substitutes arsenic for phosphorus in its cell components.
...
Carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus and sulfur are the six basic building blocks of all known forms of life on Earth. Phosphorus is part of the chemical backbone of DNA and RNA, the structures that carry genetic instructions for life, and is considered an essential element for all living cells.

Phosphorus is a central component of the energy-carrying molecule in all cells (adenosine triphosphate) and also the phospholipids that form all cell membranes. Arsenic, which is chemically similar to phosphorus, is poisonous for most life on Earth. Arsenic disrupts metabolic pathways because chemically it behaves similarly to phosphate.

"We know that some microbes can breathe arsenic, but what we've found is a microbe doing something new -- building parts of itself out of arsenic," said Felisa Wolfe-Simon, a NASA Astrobiology Research Fellow

NASA-Funded Research Discovers Life Built With Toxic Chemical

The news is I have a job. "Contract to hire" or as some call it 'rent-to-own'. Six month stint and no strings attaching me to pass up more lucrative or better jobs.

The major plus is I'll be learning web application development; specifically the ASP.NETs. Being .NET is an umbrella for web and desktop application development it shouldn't be too hard to get over the hump.

My concerns coming out of the interview is as follows:
- lack of stable environment. They keep their current version until a new version comes out and flip all new development to that area only to back propagate older apps as needed.
- Lack of stored procedure uses for their databases. Everything is "in code" so they don't have to track down versions, cds, and what not when fixing things. This goes back to the one above - if you have a stable database platform then this isn't really an issue.
- Testing is done by the developer and maybe the client. That's mildly concerning, but easily solved by budgeting time for testing.
- Questionable code reuse and design up front. I'll just have to be better at my game on this end.

All of these are really minor quibbles and I'll just need to get off my 'long term and enterprise wide' development thought process to a more loose and fast development.

To quote Krick "Let the bidding war begin!".

Interesting news will be forthcoming after 2pm CST today.