Jeff Billimek’s Journal at billimek.com
These are the top-ten google/yahoo/search engine search strings that brought people to billimek.com during the month of April, 2006:
20 - "desert eagle 50 cal"
17 - "tivo statistics"
14 - "zip line installation"
13 - "50 cal desert eagle"
13 - "mammoth mountain"
12 - "submarine"
10 - "underwater"
9 - "50 cal"
8 - "chattahoochee river"
8 - "billimek"
Chris invited me to go gaming with him and some of his friends. They meet every Tuesday at Clint's house. I know Clint, so there are two people that I know in the group.
It sounded like fun so I agreed. Today was the first gaming session. Prior to today I rolled up a character: a halfling rogue named Nokie Quickfingers.
When I got to Clint's house, it was Clint, his brother Drew, a guy named Joon, another guy named Tamon, and Chris.
Our gaming session went from 7pm to 10pm and it was a lot of fun. Right off the bat, our group faced combat and it went well. I had a good time and look forward to this weekly activity!
In the last couple of days of the free trial of the Amazon.com 'Prime Shipping' thing, I ordered a book that arrived today. I also ordered a new video card from NewEgg (I love NewEgg). The video card is an ATI Radeon x1800xt with 512MB of RAM.
The packaged arrived and one of the admin's brought the boxes over to my desk. I worked late - until about 6pm.
I was running late, so I rushed home, changed my shirt, collected Jen, and headed out to dinner. We made plans to have dinner with Mom & Jim at a Mexican restaurant called Nuevo Laredo because my aunt Chris and Uncle Wayne are in town.
This was the first time in a long time that I've seen them and Jennifer has never met them before. We had a nice time at dinner and the food was great.
After dinner we went back home and I was excited to install this new video card. The cooling fan is much louder when the card is under heavy load.
I tried out Oblivion with all of the bells and whistles turned on (including HDR). It looked great and ran much faster than with the old video card.
There was a departmental (Enterprise Applications) get-together this afternoon over at the Techwood building to celebrate Cinco De Mayo.
Since I'm new, I wasn't sure if I wanted to go since I won't know anyone there - no one from my group was planning on going. Fortunately Bob T. told me that he was going to go, so I had a good reason to go too.
After arriving at the beautiful techwood campus for the first time, I parked in the large parking garage underneath the complex and headed over to the courtyard area.
There were some tables setup outside with catered Mexican food, along with beer and margaritas (we were each given two drink tickets to 'buy' whatever type of beverage we wanted). I had some chips and queso - it was good.
As it turns out, I didn't get a chance to talk with many people, so Bob and I explored the campus a little bit. We walked through some building with closed doors bearing large signs warning that there may be a live broadcast going on inside.
Near the entrance was a 'control room' with dozens of television monitors against a wall and a couple of guys doing something inside. All of the televisions were tuned to different stations and it looked pretty cool.
I left after a couple of hours and on my way home, I discovered a cool back way to get to Marietta Street for a fast way to get home.
It's been a very busy week at work. I'm responsible for implementing some 'resource copy' functionality and I'm still not done with it. I'm going to have to work on it this weekend. I informed my boss about this.
I left work early at 3pm in order to get home in time to go to Athens, GA with Jen, Katie, and Chris. As soon as I got home, I went to the grocery store with Jen and we bought some supplies to take to Dave's house tonight.
Shortly after we got back from the store, Katie and Chris came over to pick us up. It began to rain just as they arrived. Katie drove us, in her car, up to Athens. It took a long time to get there due to it being a Friday afternoon and raining outside. Traffic was pretty bad.
When we finally arrived in Athens we went to the famous 'Grit' restaurant to have some dinner. I had the noodles dish and it was very good. Everyone seemed to be happy to have dinner at the Grit.
After dinner we drove across campus to Dave's house. He was having a party today and we were all invited. Aside from Dave, Kate, and Chris, I didn't know anyone there. They were all kung-fu people.
The highlight of the party for me was one on Dave's friends. He was an older fat Italian guy who looked as if he literally came straight out of the 80's. When I saw him, I thought at first that he was dressing up as if this was an 80's party. That was not so. According to Dave, he is like this all the time.
I really wish I had a picture of this guy. He was wearing stonewashed jeans, a tight-fitting white undershirt, a huge American-flag belt buckle, a white headband, and lots of gold chains. He was carrying around some old-looking film camera and drove up in an 80's model conversion van. Seeing this character was the highlight of the party for me.
Jennifer and I had some turning-leaf merlot that someone brought. It is decent wine. Most of the people at the party were younger guys who were still students at UGA.
We left around 10:30pm and went to bed as soon as we got home (around 12:30am).
It's been very nice out recently. Despite being the month of May, the weather has been spring-like and I want to take advantage of it before it gets too hot outside.
So, when I woke up this morning, I convinced Jen that we need to go walking on the Silver Comet Trail. We had a great time. It was cool and clear and sunny out. It was also nice to be out and about early in the day. I had a great time.
When we finished with our long walk (I think we ran part of the way too), we went back home and had some lunch.
I spent the rest of the day working on the things that I need to get done for work. I was having a hard time getting as much done as I would have liked. This will burn me tomorrow.
I spent most of the day working from my laptop on the little writing-desk in the living room. I'm pretty happy with the setup. I plug my work laptop into the LAN and leave it turned-on with the lid closed (headless) somewhere in the study. With that setup, I can 'remote desktop' into it from any other computer in the house.
This works great in that I can 'attach' to the laptop and keep working from where I left off from either my personal laptop, or the desktop computer downstairs. This is advantageous also because I don't have to use the tiny screen that my work laptop has.
The only downside to this arrangement is that cleartype is disabled over a remote desktop session. I've grown to love cleartype and it is painful to see the jaggy-looking fonts when using the computer remotely.
While I was working upstairs, Jen was using the desktop computer in the study. She was playing with Mambo and her new domain. I think she's having a good time with it.
My work tasks were more complicated than I thought, and I was up until 3:30am getting all of the work done. It's going to be a rough day on Monday.
I only got about 3 1/2 hours of sleep last night. I was very tired today.
After trying to sleep in as much as possible, I made it into work around 9am and left early around 2:30pm.
On my way home I tried to get a haircut (my hair is really long and hard-to-manage right now), but the place is closed on Monday. I was near Publix so I bought some flowers and a card for Jen.
I went home and took a nap. Jen got home at some point after that. We decided to go out for dinner tonight. We drove over to Ivy Walk and had dinner at South City Kitchen. Jen didn't like it at all. I don't think we will be going back.
After this we drove over to Hobby Lobby down East-West Connector, but they were closed. We went to the dollar store instead.
Shortly after we got home, I went to bed as I was exhausted.
I had a really good night's rest last night and slept quite soundly. It felt so nice to catch up on some sleep.
Work was better today and to make things even nicer, I was able to go to lunch with Melissa to the Thai place called 'Spoon'. I had the spicy basil stir-fry and it was very good!
Jen was out with some girls tonight and when I got home, I only had about 45 minutes to make myself some dinner before needing to head out again.
I went over to Clint's house for another gaming session. It went later today and lasted until 10:50pm. It was a lot of fun and we accomplished a lot.
This afternoon, and throughout the time I was at Clint's house, I had a pretty bad headache and didn't feel so great. I think it was related to the spicy Thai food I had for lunch. When I got home I took some Tylenol and went to bed.
The sidebar on the right-hand side contains some imageblocks from my photo gallery. Before today they were rendered with the following code:
(in sidebar.php)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 | <div class="sb-pagemenu"><br /> <h2>Random Image:</h2> <ul>< ?php @readfile('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. '/jeff/gallery/main.php?g2_view=imageblock:External &g2_blocks=randomImage& g2_show=title'); ?></ul> <h2>Most Viewed Image:</h2> <ul>< ?php @readfile('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. '/jeff/gallery/main.php?g2_view=imageblock:External &g2_blocks=viewedImage& g2_show=title'); ?></ul> <h2>Most Viewed Album:</h2> <ul>< ?php @readfile('http://'.$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']. '/jeff/gallery/main.php?g2_view=imageblock:External &g2_blocks=viewedAlbum& g2_show=title'); ?></ul> </div> |
This basically tells the gallery software to display a random image, the most viewed image, and the most viewed album.
By default, the @readfile command-block is supposed to reference the URL of your own website. However, I try to keep things are portable as possible and thus make use of the special $_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] PHP variable. This way, the same code will work anywhere without having to hard-code a domain-name.
I noticed some pretty bad performance issues with this on billimek.com. On the mirrored test site on my own linux box, this didn’t happen. After some testing and analysis, I determined that the @readfile function behaves very slowly on my hosting provider. The main page would take about 10-15 seconds longer to render with these image blocks in place than without.
Not wanting to remove them, and not wanting to have it render so slowly, I looked for another solution. After some searching, I came up with an alternative approach.
I created a brand-new file (in this case, called g2imageblock.php) which utilizes the gallery embedded functionality to get to the image blocks instead of the readfile method:
(in g2imageblock.php)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 | < ?php /* setup the embedding options... */ require_once(dirname(__FILE__) . '/../../../../../../jeff/gallery/embed.php'); $ret = GalleryEmbed::init(array('fullInit' => true, 'baseUri' => '/jeff/gallery/', 'g2Uri' => '/jeff/gallery/')); if ($ret) { print 'GalleryEmbed::init failed, here is the error message: '. $ret->getAsHtml(); exit; } /* random block.. */ list ($ret, $bodyHtml_randomImage, $headHtml) = GalleryEmbed::getImageBlock( array( 'blocks' => 'randomImage', 'show' => 'title' ) ); if ($ret) { print 'GalleryEmbed::getImageBlock failed, here is the error message: ' .$ret->getAsHtml(); exit; } /* most viewedimage block.. */ list ($ret, $bodyHtml_viewedImage, $headHtml) = GalleryEmbed::getImageBlock( array( 'blocks' => 'viewedImage', 'show' => 'title')); if ($ret) { print 'GalleryEmbed::getImageBlock failed, here is the error message: ' .$ret->getAsHtml(); exit; } /* most viewed album.. */ list ($ret, $bodyHtml_viewedAlbum, $headHtml) = GalleryEmbed::getImageBlock( array( 'blocks' => 'viewedAlbum', 'show' => 'title')); if ($ret) { print 'GalleryEmbed::getImageBlock failed, here is the error message: ' .$ret->getAsHtml(); exit; } ?> |
The above file is setting some variables that will be used elsewhere after the above file is included. Note, at the beginning of the file, I use some ugly-looking ../../../../ relative-pathname-convention to reach embed.php because I want to keep things as portable as possible. In retrospect, I could probably also reach it using some built-in PHP variables string-splicing instead.
Next, I rip-out all of the existing readfile code from sidebar.php and replace it with something simpler:
(in sidebar.php)
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 | < ?php include (TEMPLATEPATH . '/styles/lt/g2imageblock.php'); ?> <div class="sb-pagemenu"><br /> <h2>Random Image:</h2> <ul>< ?php print $bodyHtml_randomImage; ?></ul> <h2>Most Viewed Image:</h2> <ul>< ?php print $bodyHtml_viewedImage; ?></ul> <h2>Most Viewed Album:</h2> <ul>< ?php print $bodyHtml_viewedAlbum; ?></ul> </div> |
Now, the image blocks render almost instantaneously and I don’t have to worry about the readfile problems anymore.
It was a beautiful day outside today. Despite being May, the weather was cool and clear and sunny. I love this weather so much!
As soon as I got home I dragged Jen out to go walking on the Silver Comet Trail. We walked for quite a while - it was very pleasant.
Afterwards we went home and Jen had a voice mail from Katie. Chris asked her to marry him today! We both knew it was coming so it wasn't a huge surprise but it was exciting nonetheless.
Jen and I had some wine and I was up late playing the trial of D&D Online. It doesn't seem nearly as polished compared to World of Warcraft.
Like every Saturday, Jen and I went to the gym this morning. I was pretty tired and didn't have a good workout. While we were at the gym I saw Jeff N. from work. He was there with his girlfriend.
After working out, Jen and I stopped by the comic book store so I could buy some dice. However all I had was my drivers license and my AMEX card (since we were going to the gym I didn't take my wallet). They don't take American Express at the shop, so we'll have to come back another time.
We got home and Jen took a shower. I took a nap for a few hours - it was great to get some extra sleep. After taking a nap, I showered and got ready for dinner tonight.
Jen and I took Katie and Chris out to dinner to 'Chops' in buckhead to celebrate their engagement. We had a nice time. It was pretty crowded (it looked as if a lot of people were there on prom) and was very loud. The steaks were, in my opinion, not as good as Stoney River. So that combined with the atmosphere makes me think that Stoney River is better.
We had a brunch for Mom at a nearby hotel today. It was very crowded as they had a lot of people in the large area where they have tables set up for Mother's day. We had a lot of food - it seemed like too much.
Afterwards Jen and I went home. I took a brief nap (little naps during the day are pretty nice!). Later, Jen left and drove up to her parent's house to spend some time with her mom.
I stayed home and spent most of my time doing coding and tasks for work.
I ended up working late today. Instead of leaving at around 4:30 like I normally do, I stayed until about 6:30pm instead.
It was pretty much steady work all day long. I'm wrestling with implementing this one requirement and am having a hard time with it.
When I got home, Jen prepred a wonderful dinner. After we ate we headed over to Publix and did some shopping.
Work has been very stressful lately. I'm having a hard time with it. I know it takes some getting used to, but there definitely seems to be a lot more stress than I'm used to.
It's that knot of pain you get in your sternum and I hate it.
Part of the problem is that I'm still not 100% comfortable with my skill level in the stuff that I'm now coding and the other part is that there is a mounting list of coding tasks that I need to get done with deadlines.
I've dealt with these types of issues before but for some reason it's a lot harder this time around.
Instead of going to lunch today I went to a presentation given by the IT department here at Turner. A guy from Microsoft came in and talked all about the Atlas framework. It was pretty informative and they served pizza.
The thing I seem to notice about some of these technologies is that some of them present much better than they actually are in practice. Usually demos are given on really simple examples and it all works fine and is really great. However once you try to apply it to a real-world application with some complexity, it isn't so simple to use after all and can actually be a huge pain and time-sink to 'fit' into your app.
Tonight Jen and I watched 'Flightplan' with Jodie Foster. From the previews it looked like a decent movie (don't they all?) But this movie was a disaster. It reminded me of 'Panic Room' but on a plane.
The 'twist' and the villain were not believable at all. I definitely do not recommend this movie.
It was super busy today again at work just like the rest of the week. I'm feeling pretty bad about all of the work. I'm getting things done but not at the pace in which I think I should.
Finally at the end of the day I made it past a big obstacle and actually finished some work on one of the cursed stored procedures I've been working on. My unit-tests went perfectly so I'm feeling pretty good about it.
After Jen and I had dinner we went to the gym.
I worked late again today and didn't leave until about 5:15pm. Shortly after I got home, Jen and I headed out to Six Flags.
Tonight, after the park closes, is 'Turner employee night' at Six Flags. Parking is free, we get into the park for free, and we get $10 in 'bug bucks' that can be used anywhere in the park. It's a pretty cool deal.
It wasn't as crowded as I thought and there were virtually no lines for most of the rides.
We rode:
I had my wonderful awesome sunglasses with me and Jen advised that I not wear them during the rides in case they fly off. Probably a good idea. So Jen offered to store them in her leg-pockets of her cargo pants. Well after riding Mindbender we discovered that one of the temples of my precious sunglasses broke off! There are little plastic 'posts' that hold the temples in place and one of the plastic posts broke off.
This happened to me when we were hiking in Olympic National Park in Washington Sate last fall. I was very distraught then and I was very distraught now too. However back then I was able to get the sunglasses replaced free of charge at REI (where I bought them) so maybe I can do the same again.
After we rode Mindbender and were in line for Batman, I saw Brian and his brother. We linked up with them and rode Batman together.
Next we rode Goliath. The line was pretty short and we didn't have to wait long at all. I suspect that this will be the only time in a long while in which I can ride Goliath with a short line. While we were in line for Goliath, I saw Matthew G. somewhere else in line. I used to work with Matthew at Delta years ago. Shortly after he quit he met and married a girl who works at the CNN Latin network, so I assume he was there with his wife.
Goliath was a lot of fun. While writing this I looked up some info on Goliath and discovered that it cost them $22 million to build. It also goes up to 200 feet in the air before the first drop. It's a huge coaster!
Next we rode Superman (probably still my favorite) and then did Bumper Cars afterwards. After doing the bumper cars (it wasn't as exciting as I remember them being), Jen and I split a small-size of dippin-dots that cost us $5.
We were pretty tired out and decided to call it a day. As we were heading towards the entrance to the park we saw Scott E. with Brian.
After we got home, I stayed up pretty late doing a lot of research on some gmail stuff that I'll write about in a lot more detail tomorrow.
Jen and I went to the gym this morning to work out. I didn't have as good of a workout as I would have liked. Afterwards we stopped by a comic-book store and I bought two sets of dice. Jen was away for most of the day at her Mom's house.
I spent pretty much all day long working on a new email solution for billimek.com.
Prior to today, Jen and I were both using outlook to connect to the linux box (turing) downstairs via imap. It used fetchmail to retrieve email from the site5 server which gets all mail sent to billimek.com.
We both have gmail accounts but have them set to simply forward email to our primary billimek.com accounts. There isn't necessarily anything wrong with this setup but even with IMAP, I'm sort of tied to using the Outlook fat-client. I looked into IMAP-enabled webmail solutions (squirrelmail, horde, and roundcube) and none worked to my expectations.
Weeks (or months?) ago I signed up for the Gmail for your Domain beta that Google launched. Well last night I got an email saying that I've been accepted into the beta test program.
This presented an opportunity. I like the gmail interface enough to use it as my primary email client. Even though one can set up their gmail account to send mail from a different address (i.e. from jeff@billimek.com instead of billimek@gmail.com), some email clients report these types of emails as 'from jeff@billimek.com on behalf of billimek@gmail.com'. This is a dealbreaker for me.
So I did a lot of research and thinking about it and decided to pull the trigger and migrate over to GFYD. Last night I added the appropriate MX entries on the DNS server for billimek.com over at site5. This was a painless process and I had no trouble with it. I also added some SPF records to allow google, site5, and the domain for turing to be valid senders for email from billimek.com.
The DNS settings took a while to propagate so it was a good thing I initiated it last night. Today it was all switched over correctly.
Jennifer prefers to continue to use Outlook on the PC downstairs (freeside) so I set up her account to auto-archive mail as soon as it is downloaded via POP. So she can still check her email on the web until she uses outlook to retrieve it. I also modified her outlook settings to not auto-check email every x-minutes so that way if she stays logged into outlook it won't keep downloading new mail for her.
This approach keeps all emails archived on the gmail server so she can still get to it after-the-fact and search, but she uses Outlook primarily, so she isn't using any of the labeling or filtering capabilities. We also do nightly backups of her outlook pst file so she has a lot of redundancy in her email retention.
I, on the other hand, prefer to ditch outlook altogether and use only the gmail interface. Because I have thousands of emails going back to 1997 in my imap store, I would like to have them imported into my gmail account. This is one of my issues with gmail: There is no way to correctly 'import' email into your account. This would have been a deal-breaker for me too, but there is a kludgey way to get email imported with a program called Google GMail Loader. All this does, though, is forward emails to yourself. But it's better than nothing.
Using GML I imported the thousands of emails from my IMAP store and labeled them all with the 'Imported' label. From there I also labeled them so that way what I had in some folders (i.e. sent, receipts, etc) were labeled the same way.
One big problem with this approach is that all of my imported emails all have the same date (the date I imported them) on them now. This makes it frustrating to search because all emails from 1997-today are all mixed together in the search results when normally they would be sorted by date.
I planned for the future by labeling the all as 'imported' so when (if) a better solution is available to import old email (i.e. google finally adds imap support or provides a mechanism to import email), I can blow away all of those old imported emails and import using a cleaner method.
In addition to this, I set up my account to have POP access so I'm still downloading a copy of every email I receive at gmail to my local IMAP store. They are all unsorted and it will be a big pain to go through them if I ever switch back, but at least I have a local backup just in case google turns evil.
The gmail for your domain is really cool. I can add users, email 'aliases' (i.e. 'jennifer' also gets to 'jen'), and email lists. I created a special email account that will go to both Jen and I. There are also some customization options, including adding your own custom logo. The 'mail.billimek.com' logo earlier in this entry is the logo I have for our gmail account. So in the upper-left-hand-corner of the screen when logged into our gmail or google calendars account is the custom logo.
I added a special redirect rule for mail.billimek.com to go to the login page of the special gmail account. I'm pretty happy with it so far.
I usually don't use my cell phone a whole lot. Not as much as some of the people you see with a phone glued to their ear all the time. However today I used my phone a lot.
After work I called Mom to coordinate meeting for our wine pairing dinner. Next I returned a call to Craig ans we chatted for quite a while. After speaking with Craig I called Larry.
Jen and I had plans to participate in a wine pairing dinner over at a restaurant called 'Aspen's'. We've been there for dinner once before and wasn't too impressed - we like Stoney River better. But today they are having a wine pairing dinner thing and we were invited to come along.
We got there a bit early and had some time to kill. Jen wanted to pick up a couple of cheap things from the dollar store so we stopped in there. We were at the restaurant before Mom and I called to let her know about the reservation and where we were sitting.
It was the four of us for dinner and we had a pretty good time. It was quite different than the Stonebridge wine pairing dinner. It seemed more 'fancy' (and was thus more expensive if I remember correctly) than the Stonebridge dinner, but it also seemed a lot more commercial. Some marketing people from Whole Foods were here promoting the wine. When one of the marketing girls came by our table to talk about the wines, she didn't know anything about them! All she could do was give us order forms to fill out. The problem was that you still had to go into the store and buy the wine anyway so we weren't too sure what the point of the order forms were.
Overall I think that Jen and I prefer Stonebridge, but it was nice to see something else and we had a good dinner too.
I worked a little late today - until about 5:30pm. As I was leaving the office and getting into my car in the parking garage, My sunglasses broke again.
After they originally broke when Jen and I were at Six Flags, Jen attempted to fix them by gluing the tiny plastic posts back on with gorilla glue (we didn't have anything else). It seemed to hold but today the plastic post broke off again. I was very sad. I was forced to wear my older non-polarized sunglasses during the drive home. It was hard to stomach.
I hope home and grabbed a quick bite to eat before heading out to Clint's house for our weekly gaming session. I had a good time.
I worked from home today and was able to get a lot done.
A little before lunch time I left the house and drove up to Jen's office. We made plans to have lunch and also go to REI. We went to REI first. I was able to return my sunglasses (for a second time!) with no questions and no problem. The REI return policy is really great.
I decided that I should probably get a different pair of sunglasses this time since the ones I've had before have broken twice. I looked at their selection and didn't see anything that caught my eye. I looked again at the Native Eyewear sunglasses. It looked as if the hardtop model that I had before was updated slightly. The newer (2006 model?) version of the Native Eyewear 'Hardtop' sunglasses now has metal posts holding the temples in place instead of plastic tabs. This is a good thing! I guess they recognized a flaw in the design with plastic and upgraded to metal.
Armed with this new knowledge, I decided to get the newer version of the same sunglasses I had before. I was so incredibly happy. It felt so good to put on nice polarized sunglasses again.
Jen and I had lunch at Roly Poly (we always have lunch there when I meet her up here). It was good.
I went back home and ended up working all day long since Jen was going to have dinner out with her parents tonight. We didn't have much food around the house so I ran over to Wendy's and got a spicy chicken breast sandwich to have for dinner.
Jen got home around 10:30pm. We talked for a little while and then she headed up to bed. I stayed up for an hour later continuing to work and then went to bed. I got a whole lot done today.
Casey called me this morning and told me that they were all having a celebration for the '3.0' release of the Revenue Pipeline project over at Delta Technology. This is what I primarily worked on up until I left Delta at the end of February. Carole wanted to extend an invitation to me to come celebrate with them. I thought about it and decided to go down there.
Around lunch time I left the office and drove down to the Delta Technology campus. I haven't been down there since I left. I had to wait at the guard house for Casey to come sign me in. The guards recognized me and we chatted for a bit.
The celebration was outside in the 'Feld Pavilion' (some of us also call it the 'Feld Crypt'). It is named after a former CEO (Charlie Feld) of Delta Technology who instituted a lot of change. I think he's now an executive at EDS.
There were a lot of people there. They had catered BBQ and it was generally a good time. It reminded me a lot of the previous types of gatherings we've had outside in the pavilion in the past. The current DT CEO (Shirley B.), the project VP (Garry D.), and the project director (Alonzo H.) all gave speeches.
I had a great time talking with old co-workers and catching up with people. Most were interesting how things were different over at Turner. I also talked with Ningyu C. for a long time.
Afterwards I headed out and went back to work. I didn't leave until about 5pm.
I went home and saw Jennifer working on some Joomla stuff. She's having fun playing around with the website design for her personal domain.
Because it's the last Thursday of the month, we left the house and headed up to Tom's house (since he is hosting it this month). While we were driving (Jen was driving), I read synopsises of some different books to Jen so we would both have an idea about what book we want to read next.
We stopped at a dress shop so that way Jen could pick up the bridesmaid dress for Lisa's wedding. While we were there, we browsed at the selection of wedding dresses and found one that Katie may like. I used my Motorola V3 Razr phone to snap a photo of it and then emailed the picture to me, Jen, and Katie using smtp.gmail.com (since I recently upgraded to GFYD it's easy!).
Jen and I made it to Tom's house and found out that out of all of the book club members, only Tom and Terri read the book. The book is called 'Emotionally Weird' and it SUCKS! No one likes the book. It's a horrible book.
We didn't really have much of a discussion about this disaster of a book and all voted on the next book. We ended up selecting 'The Alchemist'.
Jen and I went home and looked at Audible and iTunes for 'The Alchemist' audiobook. I've never bought anything off of iTunes before and was unsure if Jen and I would be able to both put it on our iPods since we have our own personal iTunes libraries on the PC. Stupid DRM stuff makes things so complicated! I wanted to hold off on making any purchases until I could research the issue further. I like to research things.
I also showed Jen a website describing how to do rounded corners with only CSS. She was pretty excited about this.
I slept in some today and it felt great.
When I got to work, I droppd my car off to get washed in the parking garage underneath the Inforum (the buildling I work in). It's pretty convienent to get your car washed while you work.
Larry called. He's settling into his new job. But it turns out that they have a pretty draconian corporate internet policy. No instant messenger traffic allowed at all (I think Larry's used to being able to communicate with brokers over IM to initate orders), they also block a lot of websites. I thought it was bad at Delta, but this sounds worse. He can't get to his gmail account and he even cannot see billimek.com. I'm not sure what is so nefarious about this site that it needs to be blocked.
I had lunch by myself at the little cafe next to the park. I had a BLT and read the newspaper while I ate. It's nice to relax at lunch and catch up on depressing world news.
There was a big meeting this afternoon between all of the developers. Aparantly we need to make a change to the data model and it has some implications to the project since we're basically in testing mode right now. We all talked about it and then also developed a work schedule between now and tuesday. It looks as if I'm going to have to work this weekend. I also made tenative plans to work really late next Wednesday.
As I was leaving work Jennifer called me and she was very upset. There was a problem with her bridesmaid dress and there wasn't time to get it fixed in time for the wedding so she was on her way out to try to get it fixed somewhere else. She wasn't very happy.
When I got home I started laundry and cleaned up around the house.
Jennifer and I went to the gym this morning at the usual time. She's in a class that begins at 10am so we get there around 9:30am. While she's in the class, I'm on the treadmill running and listening to one of the Wheel of Time audiobooks on my iPod shuffle. After I run for about 30-50 minutes I hit the weight machines. Usually I finish everything I want to do and have to wait a while for Jen to get out of her class.
After going to the gym we went home and I made a protein smoothie for Jen and myself. I used frozen strawberries, frozen bananas, soy milk, and protein powder. It's quite good!
During the day today I did a bunch of tasks for work. This evening Jen and I went out for dinner. We went to Orient Express in vinings. It's our favorite Chinese restaurant. We both had General Tso's Tofu.
After dinner we stopped by Home Depot to buy some supplies for outside. Jen's having a fun time growing herbs out back on the deck so we got some more items to help with that.
The rest of the evening was taken up with us watching 'The Brother's Grimm'. I didn't care too much for it.
A lot of today seemed like a repeat of yesterday.
Jen and I went to the gym again this morning. This time we both ran on the treadmill together. Afterwards we went home and I made a smoothie again (I love those!).
I also helped Jen out back on the deck with her planting project. She's growing a forest of basil, mint, and cilantro. The mint is for mojitos and the basil is for Italian/basil mojitos that Craig told me about.
Most of the rest of the day I was occupied playing with the official 'beta 2' release of Microsoft Windows Vista (formerly codenamed 'Longhorn' - I like the name longhorn better). I had a lot of problems with it not really behaving correctly. It seemed to install fine (no errors or any indication that anything was amiss) and I could login and sort of use it, but a lot of things were broken.
I eventually tracked the problem down to a DVD drive. Now I don't quite understand how this is technically possible, but this is what happened:
I have two NEC DVD drives. One is a 2510a and the other is a 3540a. I think a while back I loaded a hacked firmware on the 3540a which was supposed to make it better. I burned the Vista ISO onto a DVD+R media using the 3540 drive. I also installed it off of that burnt disc running in the 3540a drive. This was the installation that caused me all sorts of problems. I decided to re-install (again wiping the target drive and all that stuff) but this time I loaded the DVD from the other DVD drive (the 2510). This time it seemed to install fine and everything was working correctly.
Now this doesn't make a lot of sense to me and the only explanation I have is that the hacked firmware was a bad idea for the drive. Jennifer had also been reporting some problems with that particular drive. I made a note to re-flash it with the stock firmware to see if that fixes the problem.
After getting Vista (beta 2) installed and playing with it for a while I wasn't too happy with the quality of the build. I know it's a beta and all that jazz, but this was a public release and it performed like crap.
Later this afternoon Scott, his girlfriend Kristina, and Jen's mom came over for dinner. We grilled salmon, corn on the cob, and asparagus (Jen made a special bacon-wrapped one for me). I had a nice time.
Today is Memorial Day so it’s a holiday from work. I took the opportunity to sleep in really late - until about 10am.
Jen has been looking into buying a new dining-room table. The one we have right now is very small and can only accommodate four people. She wants to get something that is expandable with a leaf.
We went to the gym around noon and worked out. When we got home I made a smoothie. As we were each taking a shower, we noticed that there wasn’t much hot water. I went downstairs into the garage storage room to check out the water heater.
One thing I did notice was a red ‘reset’ button on the thermostat had been tripped. I pressed the button and with a ‘click’ noise, the water heater began to creak and moan as if it was heating up. Looks like the problem was solved. I’m slightly concerned as to why it was tripped in the first place though.
Jen was downstairs a good portion of the day working on her website. I used my laptop on the little desk upstairs to get some things done for work. I also watched a couple of episodes of ‘Texas Ranch House‘ on PBS. It’s a pretty good show.
I also decided to migrate completely over to Portable Firefox. Even though I don’t run FireFox from a portable device like a thumb drive, I still like having everything contained within one directory. I have this living in a special ‘System’ folder off of My Documents with some other things like Trillian settings and SecureCRT settings.
This makes migrating to a new OS very easy. The real benefit of running Portable FireFox for me is that I can have the same extensions and settings identical across all of the computers that I use (desktop downstairs, my laptop, Jen’s laptop, and work laptop).
Keeping it in sync is necessary of course and I use unison for that. However I wanted to get fancy with unison so I finally added it to run every two hours via cron on my laptop to keep Portable FireFox in sync with the desktop downstairs.
However I don’t want to be attempting to run unison when I’m somewhere outside of my local network. So I whipped up a bash script that will attempt to validate if I am in the local network or not. This is the solution I came up with on the fly. Perhaps there is a better way to check?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 | #!/usr/bin/bash # The purpose of this script is to easily determine if this computer is # apart of the local network in my house. # Not sure if this is necessary, but just in case, we 'prime the pump' # by pinging 192.168.1.1 in order to make sure that arp will report it. ping -n3 192.168.1.1 >/dev/null # Call arp on 192.168.1.1 (the gateway for the home local network) # and then pipe the result to grep, looking for the MAC addresses for the # router (one MAC address is for a wireless connection and the other is for # a wired connection. arp -a 192.168.1.1 | grep -q -e "00-00-00-00-00-00" -e "00-00-00-00-00-00" # If either MAC address is found to be apart of 192.168.1.1, then we know # that we are in the local network and can go through with unison. if [ $? = 0 ]; then unison -batch -silent fi |
This evening Jen showed me the website that she’s been working on - it looks great!
We watched ‘The Squid and the Whale‘ independent movie this evening. I didn’t care for it because I don’t like depressing movies.
I had lunch today with Melissa and Michael (Turner recruiter guy) today at 'Spoon'. I really enjoy the spicy basil strifry at Spoon. It was somewhat awkward having lunch with Michael because he's the guy that I negotiated my job and salary with.
It was a very late work day for me and most of the other developers on my team. We all set up our laptops in the 'Augusta' conference room and all worked together on current issues with the project. In the Inforum they shut off the AC at 6pm sharp. So things got a little hot after 6pm.
I didn't leave work until about 8pm when some of the other developers were leaving too. In all it was pretty productive and I got a lot more done that I originally thought I would have.
