scott

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.

Anthro Desks Rock!

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On Tuesday I received my new Laptop Cart (its like a mini desk for me). I wanted something I could wheel a computer or TV on that I could keep in my bedroom. I don’t have a TV in there, and there is no fixed spot that would be good to keep one. I figured having something that I can move would be cool. I had been using the 19″ LCD TV I won at my company holiday party on a plastic cabinet that has wheels, but it is really flimsy. I order the cart from Anthro. They are the same company that I got my computer table from. The Laptop Cart even matches the computer table. See mom, I do pay attention. Anthro makes some fantastic stuff.

2008-05-08_imac_unboxing_01 2008-05-08_imac_unboxing_10 My New iMac

It took me 20 minutes to assemble the cart. Now I need to setup the TV on it when I get some time. With the cart order I also bought some cable management kits for my computer table. The cable management kits are an idea so simple that I haven’t seen many other companies offer. The desk is modular so it took me 10 minutes to add the cable management. It was so simple and looks so much better than cables tied together with velcro. I love companies that actually make good stuff that works! I would recommend them (and I have) to anyone.

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My Attempt At Social Networking

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I announced last week that I gave my two weeks notice at work. Lets face it, once I gave notice there was a whole lot less to do at work than there was before. That is saying allot when one of the reasons I am leaving in the first place was I am bored. One of the things I have wanted to do but never really had the time was to sign up for one of the social networking sites (Facebook, Myspace, etc) and search out long lost friends. I have used Linkedin for several months, but that is more for professional use than anything else, so I wanted to try one of the real social networking sites out. If you knew me you would think I would be one of the first people to use a site like that. I am in the technology field after-all, and a fan of the new and interesting. For some reason I have been slow to adopt new online social concepts like online dating or social networking. I think it was because when I was actually interested in that stuff I was so far ahead of my time that everyone I knew would make fun of me about it. Now it is acceptable.

I signed up for the two big sites Facebook, & Myspace. As it turns out I already had a Facebook account that I never did anything with so it was easy to start using. My initial assessment of both sites follows almost exactly a study I read about both sites. It basically did a study of who uses both sites and said that there are distinct general demographic differences between the two. After my brief experience I am believing in what I read. I am not going to get into the details, but I ended up using Facebook. Myspace looked like it was designed by a 16 year old, and was too busy a site for me. It seems most of the people I know thought the same thing. After a brief search I only found one friend on Myspace and that was because I knew she was on it. Within 20 minutes on Facebook I saw like 30 people I knew.

Too me the whole idea of using a site like Facebook is to find friends who I have lost touch with. I had a list of a few names I wanted to look up. I actually suceeded in finding a few people, and in the process found several others I had not thought about. The funny thing about this process is you end up getting invites or hello emails from other people you may not have found, but who have found you. Here in lies the problem for me. I am horrible with names. It is hard to remember a name of someone you knew 5, 10 or even 15 years ago. I have already had to reference my college and high school yearbooks to verify that I knew someone. Sad I know, but it is true.

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Six Weeks Wait For a Watch Band

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When I turned 30 my dad gave me his vintage 1969 Omega Speedmaster. I haven’t used it much since I have always been afraid of damaging it, even though my dad wore it in surgeries for 30 years. In the few months that I did wear it I began to scratch the underside of the steel watch band. It was scraping against the desk when I typed. I have a similar problem with the Titanium X-33 I use as my day to day watch.

Recently I have wanted to wear the Speedmaster Professional more often, but I don’t want to mess up the original band any more than I already have (I really haven’t damaged it, but with continued use it will be messed up). I decided to go and try to buy a leather band that I can swap for the steel one I currently have. Well that was easier said than done. I went to Tourneau on Saturday and was basically told if they could get me a band it would be 6-8 weeks. I say if because since they couldn’t find the serial number on the watch they couldn’t validate that it was authentic. They claim that Omega won’t let them order anything without a serial number. I informed the lady that watches as old as the one I have don’t always have the serial number on the outside. For some reason I read that older models had the number inside the watch, if at all. She said it didn’t matter. I just shook my head as I provided my contact information in the hopes that Tourneau can order the band. If they can, I have no idea what color it can come in, or how much. I just don’t get some businesses. Is this company thinking in their head and saying lets take a loyal customer who has paid a premium for a product that double digit percentage of the population are stopping from buying (yes with mobiles and other electronic devices less and less people are buying watches) and make it harder for them to pay money for an accessory. It sure feels like that.

Oh and to be clear, I will blame the store not the manufacturer in this case because the sales lady didn’t handle the situation well at all. Places have to learn how to treat their customers better.

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Trying Moveable Type 4

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I have been continuing to play around with blogging software on my web hosting account. I finally decided to no longer be lazy and try an install of Moveable Type. WordPress is was easy to install on my hosting account because my provider Site5 offers a simple install script that takes about 2 minutes to run. You need to know nothing about linux software installation. I on the other hand know a little (not much but a little) so I decided to stop procrastinating and try the personal edition of Moveable Type. I was surprised at how easy they did make the install from the last time I tried to do it. Of course that was 2 versions and several years ago.

The point is I was able to get the software installed with no major issues. So far it looks good. I am comparing Moveable Type with WordPress, and my currently hosted blog at Typepad. What I am noticing is that Typepad has allot more bells and whistles built in, vs either of the other platforms. For example, the widgets make life easy. Moveable Type & WordPress both have widgets but neither of them are as nice as what Typepad offers. That of course is only my opinion.

The verdict? Well it is probably too early to say, but besides the cost involved in hosting my blog with a service provider like Typepad on top of my normal mail and site hosting I think that Typepad is still better. The major sticking point I have right now is that I cannot use custom themes with the current package I have on Typepad. I don’t really want to pay the extra fee per year to get the ability to use custom theme’s, but I want to play around with them. I am leaning to just trying out the themes I want on the MT4 install I just did, and if I find one I really like I can always pay to upgrade Typepad.

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