Month: May 2008

Submarine Shopping

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It is hard to find the perfect gift for people. I needed to find a gift for my friends Jayson & Gretchen for their house warming party next week. What do you get? Some kitchen appliance, a painting, alcohol? Who knows. I ended up going with the fun and frivolous gift. They have a pool, so I went searching for a submarine to drive around in it. The selection for remote control subs wasn’t that great but I was able to find something nice on Amazon that got good reviews. I look forward to seeing if the kids can sink it this weekend.

The Submarine

Starting Over

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Monday I start a new job. I am excited and nervous all at the same time. Consciously I know the decision to leave my previous job was the right one, but my sub-conscious mind keeps asking if I made the right choice. I know it is my way of worrying about how things will turn out, and keeping me on my toes. Change is good, but it can also get your worrying. People like routine. A new job is an entirely new routine. It is starting over somewhere that you know no one. In a way it is a clean slate, but in another way you have to prove yourself to everyone all the time. As always I am cautiously optimistic. Only time will really tell if I made the right decision, but I have always gone with my gut instinct. It hasn’t always been right, but it is rarely 100% wrong, if that makes any sense?

Ok, enough worried rambling. I am going to try to get some sleep and think about less deep topics to write about.

The Waiting (For Updated Technology)

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After extensive pondering between what mobile phone I will continue to use I ended up with no clear decision. I got rid of the Centro, the Treo 680, & the Treo 750 is in a box ready to be sold. I am still using the Nokia E61i but recently I am not happy with it either. It went from being reliable to being very unreliable. I go to type stuff on the QWERTY keyboard and the keys that also can be the numeric keypad don’t work. Cycling through all the shift and alt functions don’t get them to work. A reboot is the only thing that works. Then there is the fact that I cannot always make calls after I get out of the subway or regain service. I get network busy even when I have 5 bars of signal. Incoming calls aren’t affected. In fact once I get an incoming call the phone works fine. Even after a reboot it doesn’t always work right. It is driving me crazy since I rely allot.

I am frustrated enough to want to replace the E61i with something, but I can’t just yet. I am waiting for the rumored new iPhones to come out in June. That and the very soon ability to buy and install programs onto the iPhone is my only hope for a stable smart phone. My problem is I am never good at waiting for new stuff to come out, but my goal is to hold out a bit more.

I am about to wipe the E61i and reload only the basic applications I use on it. SInce I went months without any real issues like this, logic tells me that something recent that I installed is causing the issues that I am having. I am not sure what, but it has to be something. I am going to wipe the phone this weekend and hope for the best. It is either that or throw it into a wall:)

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Skype With My Parents

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I got my dad a new computer back in January. When I did I also bought a web cam. The idea was to set him up with Skype so he can talk to me and my sister with the video chat. I thought it would be fun to have especially since Carrie and the kids (and Michael of course) are almost two hours away now. Well I tested the setup by myself when I had the computer at my place when setting it up, but never had my dad try it. I setup skype to auto start and configured everything so all he really needed to do was hit accept when an incoming call came from someone on his buddy list.

Last weekend I finally got around to giving him a test call. It worked almost flawlessly. He didn’t have the speakers setup right so audio was messed up in the beginning but then it worked for a little while. I then started hearing some nasty white noise, but the video was fine. I think the issue is on my end, but I need to test a connection out with my Macbook & iMac to be sure.

It was fun to do. I hope to actually use the setup. I wish more people I know actually have skype so I could utilize it more. Unfortunately I have lame friends who only primarily use AIM:(

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XP SP-3

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I am installing Windows XP SP-3 for the first time tonight. I am putting it on a Virtual Machine running on Fusion on my new iMac. Up until now I haven’t had the chance to give SP-3 a try, and since I have some free time on my hands I am going to tinker. Hopefully it wont blow anything up, but if it does who cares! It is a VM after all. If it does work, I should update the Sysprep image I have of a clean install of XP. You never know when you might need it.

Unemployment, For Two Days Anyway

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I am technically now unemployed for two full days. I am finished with my old job, but the new one doesn’t start until Monday. I haven’t done anything today since I was “resting” from going out last night. I didn’t get much sleep last night so it was nice to nap a bit this afternoon. Other than that I really didn’t do anything today. It feels good. I say that on day one of my mini vacation. I know by Sunday I will be begging to do anything at work.

I talked to my sister today. I don’t know what to get Zachary for his birthday. Her response was to ask how much money I want to spend. That is a tough question. I will get him anything he wants, within reason. He is only two. An expensive gift will really not be appreciated by him. Now getting something nice for Morgan if she asks for it would be appropriate! I am stuck. I will wait and see what Carrie thinks of for the little guy. I don’t want to be like my dad and buy whatever he wants for the kid even if that means it is something for a 3 or 4 year old and he is only 2.

I am thinking of getting out a bit tonight. I wanted to do a little shopping but I am lazy. It is almost 6pm,and I do have 3 full days to do shopping. Hmmm, what to do. Let me go ponder that for a while until I decide to sit around and order in dinner and not go out!

My Last Day

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Today was my last day at work! It has only been about 15 months but I am moving on for various reasons. I will miss this job. I will miss the people I work with, and the fun atmosphere but if you know me the reasons for me leaving have been obvious for a while. The opportunity that I am going to looks really promising so I am very excited. I am taking a whole 2 days off. I start the new job on monday.

My desk has been cleared out since Monday. I have be in limbo for the past two weeks so in that way I am glad it is over, but like I said I will miss this place. A bunch of us are going out after work to see me off and to celebrate Josh & Ben’s birthday.

I am now off to my exit interview, but as my boss said he would be shocked if HR gave him any feedback he didn’t already know. He is right, I have been completely honest with him and like several other boss’s I have had in recent history I would work for him again!

Non Glamourous Blog Updates

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Since I have given my two weeks notice my boss has not asked very much of me. I have completed most of what I can hand off to other people, and now I am in limbo until my two weeks are up. I am helpful when I can be, but since my last day is tomorrow I am pretty much out of the loop already. In my somewhat spare time I have tried to keep busy. I have put some time into some much needed cleanup of my blog and website. If you read this site and know me, you know that I haven’t said who publicly. If you do know me you see huge hints at who I am, but I haven’t ever been public about it. Over the past year however I have talked less about my work and more about general technology and stuff going on in my life. I have talked about general projects I work on, but nothing detailed that would get me into trouble. This is a departure from a few years ago when I was very detailed and vocal on the blog. Those expressive posts about work have mainly been moved to a private blog I have dedicated to work that is outside the public eye.

Over the past few days I have gone through and vetted out many of the remaining detailed posts from years past that talked more about work interactions vs what projects were going on. There are still tons of posts regarding work, especially early years at “Widget Tech” (still anonymous for now), but the more personal stuff has been moved private. I still will write about anything I want, but I will be maintaining the public/private blog for the foreseeable future.

You may be wondering why this matters? Well in the near future I would like to be less anonymous and more open about who I am on this site. I will see what rules my new employer has on blogging, if any to be sure that I observe them, but above that I want to be open about who I am. Most of the people I know that do blog are public about it, so I shouldn’t let one incident many years ago prevent me from constructively expressing myself online.

On that note, I had installed WordPress on my hosted account like I mentioned I would last night. I even imported all my posts from Typepad and tried to mimic all the widgets I have on my Typepad account. The end result looked pretty good, but not good enough in my and a few close friends opinions. That means I stick with Typepad. Hey, if you know me you know I blow more than the annual subscription fee in going out on a weekend!

One change that will happen when I make my identity more public will be I will move my domain that I use publicly to this blog. I will also try to en corporate the last remnants of my “traditional” website pages into this site also. I have drafts of some pages already, and one ore two are already posted. Allot of these changes are not really important but time consuming. I used my time this week working on them. I also switched the theme again. This one is more a darker blue, and less pastel. I am not sure if I like it better or not, but it will stick around for a little while.

The Moveable Type Experiment

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Last week I had installed Moveable Type 4.1 community edition on my hosting account. This week I am uninstalling it. I liked the way it looked, and it was easy to use, but I ran into a fundamental issue with it. I cannot publish my content. I tried to import my content from Typepad to the new MT4 site I created to see how it looked before I decided if I was going to switch or not. The import worked fine, but I have not been able to publish the new content since I brought it into MT4. I don’t know if it is an issue with the server I am on at my hosting provider, an issue with the software, or some configuration issue I caused, but it just doesn’t work. I don’t think I configured anything wrong since everything works fine except for the publish. I see content going back to 2005, but the publish never completes. I have posts going back to 2003. That leads me to think the publish is just choking on the server it is on. That is a problem.

I only have a few more days to tinker with this before I don’t have free time anymore (new job starts Monday). I am going to give WordPress another try. At this point I think it is just easier to leave everything on Typepad and not worry about dealing with configurations. I like to try new stuff out, but for real world use the hosted service seems just easier.

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Mothers Day

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It’s Mothers Day! I went with my mom to my sisters house for the day. My dad had gone out with my sister Saturday night since she was visiting with them on Saturday. My mom had stuff to do around their apartment so she wanted to go Sunday morning. That also meant that I didn’t have to sleep over. I can’t sleep in my sisters house. Not sure why, but I have trouble.

We had a good day. Hung out and did some work around the house in the early afternoon. Than Mike’s sister, husband, kids came over. Andrews sister also came with her husband and kid. It was a full house. We had a BBQ. It was a bit chilly out but Ross cooked while the rest of us were inside. I did get to spend some time outside with Zach and Morgan. Photos are over on my Flickr profile.

Overall it was a nice mothers day. There was allot of driving in the car but it wasn’t so bad. I got home around 10PM, but I didn’t have to go into work first thing anyway so it wasn’t so bad.