thoughts to blog

I found some old hard drives in a box that I wanted to get rid of. Random sizes from 20GB to 40GB from different times in my life… they all contained various images, movies, music, and documents. I kinda wanted to go through the stuff and throw away the hard drive… which led me down a really interesting path…

1. 1) Find an external enclosure for 3.5” HDD


2. 2) Found the Vantec NexStar GX…


3. 3) Plug in hard drives… shit, they are all NTFS and I’m on Leopard.


4. 4) Install MacFuse and ntfs-3g


5. 5) Plug in any NTFS drive, auto mounts on my desktop! w00t


6. 6) Stop Time Machine so that it won’t backup that much data…


7. 7) Copy data to laptop HDD


8. 8) Sift and sort.

Which brought me to a point where I have to decide where to put those documents, images, movies, and music… I use iTunes so the music is fine… I don’t keep movies around, so I’ll probably delete them… but for images and documents, I have traditionally stored them ONLY on my thumb drive and Flickr… I don’t really like this approach and I generally don’t have my thumb drive unless I have my laptop, plus it never gets backed up. I guess it’s time to move them to a HDD…

So now to move them to my laptop HDD… but what about my Flickr images? Found FlickrBackup which downloads all of my flickr images… it’s slick! Only took about 10 minutes to download 500 images (all original)… Not bad at all!

It still feels weird having all of my documents on one drive on my primary laptop. I know it’s being backed up and all, but it still feels strange. I feel like I should have a drive in the sky to help me when I my drive on my laptop fails and my backup drive fails as well…

Everyone’s been posting their own thoughts and I’m still sifting through the grit… My readers, what do you do?

:: tap tap :: Is this mic on?

I have some ideas that I’d like to share… if somebody is listening out there, leave a comment!

• Twitter: oh how I love to hate you… and hate to love you… but you really need to make a twitter100.com + Cover Flow interface.


• Verizon Wireless: Why don’t you release a WIndows Mobile 6 update… I’ve been a loyal Q owner for 2+ years and I want more…


• Dear Google, please release your gmail notifier so that I can work with multiple accounts… kthxbai


• Microsoft, Visual Studio 2008 is pretty nice… C# 3.0 Rocks… ASP.Net 3.5 MVC Rocks… But can you add a little feature for me? Can you make it really easy to hit one key combination to find a type, member, or method? Everyone else has it (read: Eclipse + TextMate)


• Apple + Google… you really need to learn to play nice together with iCal and Mail. It can be done relatively painless but its still not all the way there (reminders?) +1 for Spanning Sync


• Can someone make a reliable, easy to use Flickr synchronizer for OS X? That would rock!


• Wallpaper Clock… you’re super sweet… but can you not take up 24MB of RAM?

These are just little features or things that I think would make *my* life easier…

So one of the things I enjoy doing is looking up local information online… and when we moved down to Fort Worth, Google became my best friend again. Sorry girls…

And I came across this gem: Food and Fort Worth… a blog written by Francis Shivone

He has a great sense for food and posts the right content for his audience, with a little personal flare.

For example: Best of 2007… time and time again Becca and I have come to this post to check out what we should do for dinner or a fun night out.

So if you live in Fort Worth, definitely add this to your subscription list…

My weekend was great… here’s why:

Friday

• Saw Cloverfield… freaking great movie. It’s like Independence Day + Blair Witch Project + Godzilla… Must see in the theater due to visual and sound effects


• Had a fantastic dinner date with Becca at Aventino’s…


• Came home and played some Lego Star Wars : The Complete Saga on the Wii. It’s fun and the levels are short enough to play for a few minutes here and there.

Saturday

• Slept in.


• Went to Target and grocery shopping…


• Took Lucy on a nice walk.


• I baked up a Waldorf Red Cake (aka Red Velvet Cake) from scratch entirely…


• Becca and I cooked up a mean jambalaya from scratch… spicey shrimp, chicken, and andouille sausage.


• Watched Superbad… McClovin!

Sunday

• Cooked up a nice breakfast of eggs, bacon, and corn bread.


• Had a Chai Tea Frappuccino


• Bought 2 pairs of shoes… some nice white shoes (of course) and some walking / running shoes for our adventures with the puppy.


• Came home and chilled.

In 1991… I was in 5th grade at Perkin’s Elementary School in Burlington, IA…

We didn’t have much money growing up, but all I wanted all year long was a pair of 1991 Air Jordan’s…

Clothes was always one thing that my mother never liked to splurge on. Raising 3 kids on my father’s salary wasn’t easy and as long as the clothes provided covering and warmth, they were what we wore. It’s not like I wore potato sacks or clothes with holes, but I wasn’t wearing Levi jeans or Nike shoes or BK Knights…

But in 1991… after using my curly blonde hair and gorgeous blue eyes, I convinced my grandparents and parents to let me have a pair of 1991 Air Jordan’s for my birthday AND christmas present combined…

It worked… I got the shoes, wore them every day, washed them every day, and kept the box to store them at night at the foot of my bed.

I was the luckiest kid alive

For those who don’t know, OLPC is the “One Laptop Per Child” program going on where partners are trying to construct a laptop, simple enough for a child to use and cheap enough for countries to purchase for their children. The initiative is taking some heat lately form the press, orders falling out, and even competitors…

It’s an interesting project and I have not had time to formulate my own thoughts on the situation. I did, however, get a little envious of their “give one get one” initiative. You pay $400 (price of 2) and they send you one and one to a child in a developing nation. It ran a custom OS built on linux that has an interesting user interface and core set of applications, with a chance for people to provide applications for the project.

By missing their “give one, get one” campaign, the laptop is going to be a little out of reach for a while… for me and potentially the child my laptop would have gone to.

But have no fear, they have put up VMWare images of the shipping versions out on their wiki site. Sweet! Now I can fire up Parallels, run their Transporter tool, and have my own “OLPC” on my MacBook Pro.

Here’s a quick screenshot:

The UI is very unique, almost hard to use (since I have been using standard interfaces for what seems like an eternity).
Wireless and RSS functionalities built in. Creative applications galore: painting, audio, audio processing, writing, calculating, reference materials.
Neat “Neighborhood” feature… nothing like prepping these kids for the next social network!

At any rate, play around with it, and donate $200 to get one out to a kid (I will eventually).

So I’m doing a little unpaid link whoring again for drop.io…

They’ve added some really neat features recently, so I decided to create one for my blog: http://drop.io/thoughtstoblog

Voice

Every drop now gets a unique phone number and extension so that you can dial in and talk. The conversation goes right to your drop as an mp3

Try it: call (646)495-9203 x 16328 and leave me a voice message!

Widget

Subscriptions

You can now subscribe to a drop via RSS or email! Sweet!
http://www.drop.io/thoughtstoblog.rss

User Stories

They took the time to produce some really funny social networking stories, check them out

Previous Features

And of course, they had some really neat features already: unique email for drop (thoughtstoblog@drop.io), bookmarks, video, mp3, pdf, etc.

There’s an exciting new language feature in C# 3.0 that let’s us bring some tastes of dynamic languages into our statically typed world…

Type Extension Methods - static methods that can be invoked using instance method syntax. In effect, extension methods make it possible to extend existing types and constructed types with additional methods.

I released some source code over on Google Code that demonstrates the capabilities (requires Visual Studio 2008 (or Express)).

svn co http://developstuff.googlecode.com/svn/extensions

Check out what you can do (note, include the dll that I built and you can have these for free):

// DaysAgo, MinutesAgo, YearsAgo, SecondsAgo
DateTime daysAgo = 10.DaysAgo();

// ToHumanReadableString
Assert.Equal("10 days ago", daysAgo.ToHumanReadableString() );

// Within (range testing for ints and decimals)
Assert.True( 16.Within(15, 17) );

// Null checking without doing if(thing == null)
object o = null;
Assert.True( o.IsNull() );
Assert.False( o.IsNotNull() );

// String Conversions
Assert.Equal( 5.5M, "5.5".ToDecimal() );
Assert.Equal( 5, "5".ToInt() );
Assert.Equal( new DateTime(1981, 2, 18), "2/18/1981".ToDateTime() );
Assert.Equal( new DateTime(1981, 2, 18), "2/18/1981 00:00:00".ToDateTime() );
Assert.Equal( new DateTime(1981, 2, 18), "February 18, 1981".ToDateTime() );

// String Ranges
string longString = "This is a long enough string to test.";
Assert.Equal( "This", longString.First(4) );
Assert.Equal( "est.", longString.Last(4) );
Assert.Equal( " is a long enough string to test.", longString.From(4) );

// String sentences
int[] ints = new int[3] { 1, 2, 3 };
Assert.Equal( "1, 2, and 3", ints.ToSentence() );

Interesting huh? That’s just the beginning, I’ll probably be adding methods to these all the time, so check back in for more updates.

(And yes, I know that these are in Ruby / Rails… but we can have our fun too!)

Quite possibly the best non-gourmet burger I’ve ever had…Kincaid’s Hamburgers on Camp Bowie in Fort Worth….

The burger is so simplistic and tasty, but when you combine it with the atmosphere (“Where friends come to eat.”)… it makes it taste a whole lot better!

That’s right bitches…

It feels like something is wrong…

With no extra exercise, I’m now down to 165 lbs as of this morning…

I’m eating normally… I know I have been rapidly dropping weight, but 165 lbs?

So I ran a little experiment with ads… just to see how much I would make with my very small readership.

Turns out, that from September of last year until now, Google Ads have netted me $2.30.

With 2,154 people visiting the site every month…

Page Impressions: 26,174

Clicks: 34

Page CTR: 0.13%

Page eCPM: $0.09

Total Earnings: $2.30

Yay! I could get two items from the Wendy’s 99 cent value menu!

Pffft… those ads are now TERMINATED!

(p.s. I know that ads suck, so that’s why I’m getting rid of them… and I also know that you can make money if you have a lot of readers, but I don’t and I don’t really care about it…)

As you have seen from my previous posts, I was involved in a charity event with Microsoft over the weekend.

The quick recap:

Our charity, Volunteer Center of North Texas, needed a web front end to a SQL database that they have been keeping up since they started. Currently it’s a set of Access DB screens on top of the data. Yuck!

I am proud of what we accomplished, though it’s nowhere near being completely finished, I feel as if they have a better start to their technological needs. To help them finish, another non-profit company has graciously donated consulting time to each of the projects for wrap-up and setup. Their sole purpose is to help 501c3 with the often expensive tasks of IT stuff. Wish I could remember their name…

At any rate, here’s a quick breakdown of what we accomplished:

The site is built using ASP.Net 2.0 and SQL Server functionality. No other third part components are required.

The back end is driven by a powerful, unit tested DataMapper pattern implementation, more documentation here http://martinfowler.com/eaaCatalog/dataMapper.html, which provides developers with a nice object model to work with and abstracts (or hides) the database entirely.

The front end is powered on ASP.Net 2.0 and features search functionality that is more efficient and easier than what was provided in their Access database GUI.

High-lights:

• Meeting more developers in the area.
• Being able to help charities (duh!).
• Learning more about ASP.Net from other developers.
• We crammed a lot into the last half of the weekend…

Low-lights:

• We had a rough start.
• I worked from home, that provided some pitfalls, but overall the communication was always open.
• The first half of the weekend was focused slightly on feature sets and defining things, instead of digging into the core code right away.
• It felt a little disorganized, but that’s because I was remote and we couldn’t quite grasp our team feel until Saturday evening.

Overall, the weekend was a huge success… and I’m sure lots of people got the help that they needed!

This weekend I have the privleage to showcase my technical talents at a Microsoft event, We Are Microsoft.

A competition for the brains and a test of patience, skills, teamwork, and endurance. It runs all weekend long.

My team has selected to help out the Volunteer Center of North Texas, an organization who hooks up volunteers with other organizations in need. A very worthy cause.

Their problem? They have a SQL database and an Access front end that they use to collect and store information. Our task is to build a web interface to replace the aging Access front end and end their troubles!

Let’s hope that we can be successful… and share in the glory as the other teams help out other charities!

Carrot Ocarina - The Legend of Zelda: Song of Time

Land’s you in daddy’s lap while he finishes out his day at work…

(p.s. She’s fine… she’s got hookworms and a respiratory infection, easily curable)

I have been an emotional wreck since we got Lucy…

I haven’t been able to keep control of my feelings and emotions. When she came into our life, she completely changed everything. The struggles that I have been having are common amongst new puppy owners and I knew a little bit about what was coming (having adopted a few other pups throughout my life) but while working from home, this has really made things hard!

Sleeping at night is tough, while she’s in her crate, she’ll wake up twice during the night. She whines for a while but she’s still such a young puppy that it’s hard for her to hold her bladder for the entire night, so we have to let her out for now.

The test of patience is a super hard one… Ignoring and not reacting to the whining… the puppy biting… the lack of general interest in listening to you… and the constant need for attention and toys for teething.

There have been thoughts of giving up, but luckily I have a lot of people in my life that remind me that I really don’t want to…

I’ve had a lack of sleep… I’ve lost 3lbs in 3 days (no appetite)… and all my attention has been on Lucy and not Becca… which has frustrated me as well…

There are struggles with thinking that I’m a monster for taking this on and fears of not being the “perfect parent”…

By far the biggest struggle is the balance of time and attention. In my life I have work, puppy, my relationship with Becca, my own personal time needs, and anything else you can think of that you take for granted.

It seriously is like having a child… so I guess this counts as our test run?

And for a rare time in my life, my emotions have gotten out of my control and I have been in need of advice. It doesn’t happen often that I express all of my true feelings and look to people for the exact right answers about life and it’s difficulties…

So far, the advice I have collected and through my own thoughts, I have come up with a list that helps me out:

1) She’s a puppy, she’ll bite, play, pee, and whine… It’s been less than a week…

2) It’s ok for her to be crated. Crate training is so incredibly tough mentally… but it works and is helpful.

3) She’s a puppy (repeat) and not a human, you’re her master and she can work with your schedule. It just takes time and training.

4) It’s all about training and time with a puppy…

5) Make a schedule, stick to it, and she’ll get trained on it.

6) Especially for those who are always home (either by choice or by work), GET OUT OF THE HOUSE! She’ll be fine sleeping in her crate for a few hours…

7) Staying super positive. Dogs can read your mood and I think that she was sensing that my patience was thin…

Every day is getting better… it’ll be a tough long process, but I’m sure that the rewards will be worth it.

I really appreciate the emails and advice that people have given. Gretchen, Jessica (my sister), Laurie, and of course Becca have been fantastic and they are making it possible for me to feel better about myself and the situation.

On the way back from lunch with Becca… I caught wind of this beast:

For those of you who are not car people, it’s a Lamborghini Gallardo… which costs from $150,000 up to $300,000 for some Spyders…

Makes me smile :)

Adorable Lucy… Finally got to pick her up today, after the vet fixed her and gave her all her shots…

I’m like a new father… and she’s doing very well on her house training!

And yeah, after spending some time with her, I have now realized that the vet was definitely right and she’s an Aussie (She is mouthy and has the triangle flop ears)… I’m sure there will be more pictures and stories to come…

Absolutely fantastic game!

The story was superb… there were plenty of awesome cut scenes that were rendered in real time… and the actual game play was pretty straight forward with little puzzles here and there.

The best part was the use of the stylus on the DS, you could go through the entire game only using the stylus… and it all made sense!

Perfect for afternoon breaks or small increments of game time.

The only gripe I would have is that the bosses were not that difficult… but in the end I’d rather not be that frustrated (since I’m getting all of that from Call of Duty 4 Veteran Skill)…

Absolute must play for any Zelda fan!

Everyone, please welcome Lucy to the family…

Becca and decided that we wanted to get a pup… and how crazy is it that our land lord emailed me saying that her brother found a pup in North Dallas… so after a lot of phone calls, 72 hour waiting period, shots, and checkup… I could finally have the papers signed to bring her home! She’ll be getting fixed tomorrow and we can bring her home on Saturday!

Expect more pictures to come, Becca and I are super excited!