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2010.12.30 (23:26): new non photo blue

Category: To Buy
Posted by: modi123
fyi.. one of these days i need some of these..
Prismacolor Verithin (Non Photo Blue)

Staedtler Non-Photo Pencil
http://www.dickblick.com/products/staedtler-non-photo-pencil/
Category: Work
Posted by: modi123
I kicked some major coding butt today. I was going to start marching around in a circle fist pumping.

Basically I took over, what sounded like, a horrible project hooking into an outlook mail box, parsing each email in MIME format, snagging the pdf attached, and saving it all to database (and then deleting it). The guy was all up in arms about illegal characters.. so far I found one and that condition took care of any future ones.

We'll see how it flies with the boss tomorrow.

2010.12.26 (10:09): z0mg!

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
I think I just saw the sun and some blue skies!

2010.12.25 (18:50): That's all folks...

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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.

2010.12.25 (09:16): Merry Christmas everyone..

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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?

2010.12.21 (00:11): Never over, but past...

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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.

2010.12.17 (00:06): Day four -not out the door...

Category: Work
Posted by: modi123
It's like riding a bike with no handle bars... you damn well know you are doing it right when you are by yourself, but hell - when your boss says "that's perfect" it makes the world of difference. So far so good.. I dig what they are doing and I feel for the agents. It's all about hating the game not the player (stupid contract for hire).

2010.12.15 (22:28): Day three - a better bee...

Category: Work
Posted by: modi123
I think shit is finally clicking with what I am supposed to be doing. I was informed the 'page 1000' was my stipulation (though I may have blacked out and suggested it and thought it was my boss), but alas I got past that hump. I was explained how the main booking systems work and that the 'newer' systems are more or less emulators that sit on top of these and feed them commands.. Well that's not true in a whole sense, but more or less right. These two apps have webservices one can hook into to read and execute commands.. It brings me back to the Fraud Detection days with the 3270 'GUI emulator' that sat on top of the screens... made by.. oh god how do I remember his name - Brian Rink (and his coding monkey) - and my near chance at supporting that vb6 app. Golly gee.

Man there is a ton of acronyms and what not to get a handle on.. but I figure 72 hours isn't bad to start getting a groove for this. Hopefully Bossman will understand me not running this app tonight (god I would hate to ruin actual data!) and will be running it tomorrow.

On the bad side I am not sure if I will be able to cover my two days of forced unpaid vacation. Grr.. stupid holidays.



2010.12.14 (22:42): Day 2.. it's blue...

Category: Work
Posted by: modi123
Day 2 was okay.. I was wrong on the concept of 'pulling 1000 records from this table and process them' which I believe is 'pull all the records and start up a new connection for every 1000 to insert into a table'. Meh.. I'll see how that works out tomorrow.

This no home email is killing me. Really really it sucks.

On the plus side Falloutboy called me (*squee!*) and said there was talking of hiring people that now the existing systems and my name came up. He, rightfully, told them that would be willing to give the job a go as long as it doesn't require me to move to Denver. That would be nice.. working back at big Yella.

It does appear that the Fridays before Christmas and New Years is a 'day off' for T&T... and as such I will not be working which means no pay. I am unclear if that means I can work extra hours to make that up or not. I'll have to ask Dan the Man (a hold out from my old CB team).

Ugh. Sleet better not fuck up my bar night tomorrow. I am going on three days sans drinks... no Monday was a bust.. I was stressed and tired.

2010.12.13 (22:54): Day 1 of new job..

Category: Work
Posted by: modi123
Trying to keep positive about this new gig... I really don't like the concept of 'contract to hire'.

2010.12.13 (07:19): Duh duh duhhhh....

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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!

2010.12.10 (14:46): Sad.. last Legal Lunch...

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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..

2010.12.08 (11:17): Squee! AMD six-core chps!

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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

2010.12.06 (12:52): Tots not a nerd..

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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.

2010.12.05 (12:53): Well this should be fun...

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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.".

2010.12.03 (10:06): Booooo!

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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.

2010.12.02 (13:52): Well.. that's just spooky..

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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

2010.12.01 (19:32): Forty-one and done...

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
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!".

2010.12.01 (10:02): Forty-one days...

Category: General
Posted by: modi123
Interesting news will be forthcoming after 2pm CST today.