WangNet

I finally upgraded the version of the blog software... My original version was from May of 2008. Whoops... hopefully this is stable!

May go see:

Date: Thursday, April 21st, 2011
Time: 8:00 PM
Price: $30*
Venue: Convention Center
Seating Chart: General Admission
Reservations: 1-888-512-SHOW


Aaron Lewis is the lead vocalist and rhythm guitarist of the rock group Staind as well as a Grammy-nominated songwriter. His live performance includes the Staind hits "It's Been Awhile" and "So Far Away."

Click here to see a video of Aaron Lewis.

CONCERT INFORMATION
Doors | 6:30pm
Show | 8pm

TICKET INFORMATION*
General Admission | $30
Day of Show | $35

http://www.harrahscouncilbluffs.com/EventsDetail.do?detailName=aaron-lewis-detail&locationCode=COU

Okay.. it appears my p4 2.3gh, 1gb of ram, 6600 Nvidia AGP card, and no hard drive beigebox is not going to be my preferred mode of Mythtv'ing. I am going to have to rip out the power supply, slap that into this OTHER box (which I think that was the problem) another day. I am tired and my exuberance wanes.

The AGP card was producing artifacts, and the live cd would stall out and not go farther. The colors were also jacked up. Cest la vie. Maybe best buy will take the old salty bastard. I mean shit, those parts were a solid fifteen years old.

On a side note I randomly snagged another three bags of crap today. Huzzah! That will make my fourth bag of crap since 2006. Two in 2006, one in 2010, and now one in 2011. I should order more stuff to even out the distribution. Outside of my four craps I have purchase three other items.

Ugh I just had to find my mentee on the web to figure out if he wants to continue on or not. I found his facebook page, his online gaming clan's site (http://www.undeadmilitia.com/), the clan's facebook fan page, and his cafepress site. Let's see if he responds.

Man... what a stellar day. I woke up with a splitting hang over (thaaaaaaaaa-aaaaaanks American Honey - Wild Turkey), got that situated, and ventured off to get a passport. I had my paperwork in hand, but and I am in line behind some other 311 Cruise qualifier, who is behind a screaming child and two really snooty/snotty parents. They were getting a passport for their child and were freaking out that it couldn't happen right then! Ugh.

As I gawk around the postoffice I notice the sign that says "this facility is by appointment only". Fuck... oh well.. not much I can do now, but I have questions. I politely wait my turn and explain to Robert that I don't have an appointment, I will call for one, but I wanted to make sure my paperwork was in order. He looks around and asks if I am qualified for the cruise. I say indeed I am and it turns out so is he! He checks his appointment book and decides that he can squeeze me in! What a brother from another mother! Alas I didn't have my check book (damn you State Department!), but he let me jet home to get it. A quick speed trip home and back and I fork over my cash. What a bad ass! Robert was busy sorting crap when I got back (and some other old guy was working the passport desk), but Robert swung by and got my check with my paper work! Hell I don't care if I win this contest now as long as Robert wins. Mid air high-five! (no homo).

Now to go write some more php, javascript, and get this bad ass idea down for an upgrade to my site.

For the record it seems that once I get past thirty minutes out of bed with a hang over I am usually on a really up beat and peppy mode of life. I am not sure if that is the proper way to treat a hang over and I may have to consult a physician. Pffsst.. like I would go to a doctor... they are the lamest... especially eye doctors... Tots fist bump you baby-daddy-up-in-michigan!

I am back at poking some PHP/Javascript/Ajax/CSS work. I am dynamically creating tree notes and responding to their clicks with a popup. Hmmm... this could be interesting, but I may have to break down for my java script development in one IDE... my PHP/Database/meshing in another... and notepad for my css. This is getting tedious but freaking exciting. Juggling so much at once

Visual Bookshelf is pissing me off. I enjoy indicating to the world shit they should buy me with respects to books and what they should be reading.. but no.. this app is stupid dumb now. I won't even open. As soon as it comes back on line i am yanking my list and it up to either http://www.goodreads.com/ or http://www.librarything.com..

Who is using what? Any preferences? I may shy away from goodreads because it's like a new social networking site.. and librarything is written by a librarian. Maybe I'll make an app to interface with it. Yes! A way to funnel shit from visual bookshelf to library thing! I am suck the nerd.

It seems I was a hundred texts over my limit for last month. Yup.. I am declaring a ban on texting. I have a large idea who it might have been to. I shall extra my pound of flesh.

In no particular order:

The Wall Drug Store (Sd)
http://www.walldrug.com/

Theodore Roosevelt National Park (ND)
http://www.nps.gov/thro/index.htm

Dry Tortugas National Park (FL)
http://www.nps.gov/drto/index.htm

Petrified Forest National Park
http://www.nps.gov/pefo/index.htm

House on the Rock (Dodgeville, Wisconsin)
http://www.thehouseontherock.com/

Yellowstone National Park
http://www.nps.gov/yell/index.htm

Custer State Park (SD)
http://www.allblackhills.com/parks/custer_state_park.php

Yosemite National Park
http://www.nps.gov/yose/index.htm

Grand Teton National Park
http://www.nps.gov/grte/index.htm

After an interesting round of alcohol and chatter I have come to the discernible conclusion that my folks have done me a solid. A solid in the form of yearly summer trips of packing up the van and hauling ass across this great nation to hit, significant and memorable, monuments contain with in. Sure I might have bitched and moaned, but with out a doubt these are things I miss now . Be it the hundredth time of hitting Mount Rushmore (pre and post clean up)... rolling out of my tent in the middle of storms.. lost lures on water soaked logs... Yellow Stone... camping out in the shadow of the Grand Tetons.. and so forth. Amazing times.

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Yes.. yes.. I think I found out how to get fucking php, YUI ajax controls, and the Eclipse IDE to work together long enough to produce what I want. Aaaaargggggh! I shall stomp around in a circle with my fist up in the air yelling Rage Against the Machine lyrics!

Now time for a drink.

A few things...

1. It seems I am the primary local news source for The Doctor. Ha.. sucker.
2. I just was qualified for the 311 Caribbean Cruise (five days) with 89.7 the river. Me and a guest. W00t. I haven't won but I have a chance..

Oh fuck..

The 3-11 Caribbean Cruise Giveaway to Get Away is Wednesday, February 2nd at Lava Jay’s Bar & Lounge,129th & Maple St. The trip is March 3rd through 7th. All qualifiers must be present to win. Check in starts at 6:30pm drawing will be at 8:45pm.

I guess I know where I'll be Wednesday Feb 2nd.

3. I want this.. really bad.. Rapid prototyping platform. http://www.buglabs.net/

I should totally run away... that would be keen.

Ah yes... the boss seemed pleased at my ability to occupy myself. I was told they use the 'ajax toolkit' from microsoft for their fancy controls.. so I spent a while playing with those... then I moved to multithreading this application that takes an hour and a half to chew through 950 records (I was told that is pretty fast)... no.. screw that.. it'll be mulithreaded and then do it in half the time.

I have been fanicully tossing the idea around about scamming a cheap intel mac and writing some iphone apps... that or suck up an 'google android dev phone' (300-400) to write some apps for that.

I think that would be nifty.

Let's see.. Today.. I believe I had a total of two minutes of conversation with another person today. Basically to ask why the hell my pc was locked out... and that was it. It's very odd, if not zen like, how one can be when you are left to your own devices until the 11th... so I am off building a nice web app to access my previously mentioned outlook emails. I figure if I am shoving them into a database *someone* will need to search and find them, right? I also figured it was good experience making webapps. I really hate how limiting the out-of-box controls are.

Take the damn calendar tool. Very lame.. not as awesome as the desktop date picker... so I made up my own custom control that mimics the date picker pretty damn well. Expandable calendar... clickable date selection.. typing date selection (sort of)... and all of this rolls up into a nice search form with the option to download/open pdfs from the database. Go team me.

I also think this whole doodling in my notebook to burn 15 minutes during lunch is a great idea. The time sensitive drawings really forces you to focus.. that and not talking to anyone helps. Keeps the mind limber to jump during those fifteen minutes.

I believe yesterday, if you don't count the excessive time at the bar in the late night, I had only one good interaction with another being, and that would be Pete the Dog.

It's like I am at my own Walden Pond... surrounded by people!

That reminds me, I need to buy Walden Pond again. I haven't read that for a long time and I think my last copy caught fire.

Oh and I really desire to have an Asus tablet... I just cannot justify the grand for the really really super cool one. Maybe the 399 one.. It shall be mine.

The Millard South shooting sure as hell rocked my building today. While blithely sifting through data packets I heard hushed conversations of what was going on. After monitoring four major local news sources I had an idea and confirmed my best bud was okay. Sadly the assistant principle did tonight.

At the 'Box I proceeded to drink enough for me and my Lawyer. That and I abused the new digital jukebox. I have had an idea for a long while now that perhaps I should buy a Flip, or some sort of digital media device, to thoroughly document my group's/tribe's stories. Something to give everyone so that our stories are not lost nor discarded along the ways. This of course piggy backs an oft thought idea of what songs I would love to have heard at my funeral (in some indiscriminate time in the future). I think Alice In Chain's "Don't Follow" would be grand. Maybe MGMT's "Time to Pretend".

Alas these are ideas for a later time. I must focus on chipping away at my New Year's resolutions for 2011. I have already began my moleskine notebook lunch time charade and I have found it a positive. Hurrah!

Arg... I've been slacking off too much. F'n holidays and their constant barrage of drinking and people. Now forward plodding through the desolate months of January and February.

Work's been interesting... Interfacing with the reservation systems was the tip of the iceberg. Then figuring out how to crack into an Outlook email account... that account's being sent a digital copy of every freaking online invoice created so it get huge.. fast. Oh there's a PDF of invoice as well. My job is to write an app that access said account, read the whole email (attachment and all), parse out all the lovely bits, convert the base64 attachment to a byte array, and shove it all into a database. There was some optional compression from the gzipstream (system.io.compression) class, but that only saved 4kb on a 100kb file. Lame.. Oh and I wrote a nice shared method to rip this attachment back out.

So yeah, clean this crap up, get on top of the stupid formatting for the subject (which has variant information regarding the buyer, PNR#, and travel date), and then shove this into a perpetual task that will run every hour on the hour from now to the end of days.

Over all pretty boss. I think my boss was impressed on how quick I was able to do this. This saves some minor face from the debacle of my first attempt at updating rules on their homegrown emailer-rules-app.

I need to find a way to attach a pen to my moleskine notebook. I am going to be hip and trendy drawing in it during my lunches!