thoughts to blog

tied to the bedposts, and for some strange reason the cat was licking my shoe ...

Strange? Yes, that would be one of Greg's interesting comments for the day... gottalove it.

This post might come as a strange one, possibly some word vomit... At any rate, Gregand I were discussing a young fair lady that he is currently trying to court and it mademe think a lot about past, present, and future relations with females. Recently in thelast month, I have been meeting more girls than I have for the last two years combined,reminds me of my college days... but they all take place in situations less suitable forfinding a lady to date... Gluek's is my favoritehotspot and I have met a LOT of girls there... but Kristie, Sarah, and Kerri definitelyshine above the rest... I have met some girls at Epic... Heather, Laura, 2 strange girlswho I can't remember their names for the life of me... and even a few in Chanhassen...Naomi and Elise.. yet not a single one has called back or I have had enough interest topursue them. I get looks when I go out, it's not like I don't get noticed or have theopportunity to take things further, as my boy Mick says.. “What's wrong with youJake? You always approach/get approached by girls and you never take it further thanconversation/dancing.. Grow some balls.” I don't necessarily think that's theproblem... and Greg would say... “Well no shit that's not the problem, the problemis that you want to be with Jackie and you're not dating around because you're waitingfor the right moment...” ... My old friend Jamiee would say.. “Maybe it'sintimidating since you have soo many friends that are female or you're always talking toa girl..” I can't help that, it's my character.. which might be the best answerwe've seen so far... but at any rate, I think this whole bundle of thoughts has comebecause it's been almost 2 years to the day since I have dated a girl... I go on theselong spurts of not dating someone... I miss treating a woman like a woman, I missplanning intricate, thoughtful dates, I miss cuddling, talking, and all of the other“girly sensitive” stuff... once again, I remind you that I'm just freeflowing here.. It happens... Then you watch movies like Hitch, The Girl Next Door, TheNotebook, etc which constantly remind you of how NOT perfect your love life is and thatas hard as you try, it never happens like in the movies... Then I was at a parade thisweekend and saw the cute little girls and their fathers, that's a whole other story...yeah I want a little girl... I want to be the daddy that's wrapped around her finger, Iwant to have her little gorgeous eyes starring up at me.. OK enough “girlyman” talk... Good luck on your plan Greg...

let's move onto something different... I started playing with Avalonrecently... it's a new framework that will ship with Longhorn (eventually) yet works with.Net2.0 on Windows XP and 2003... It's part of WinFX (Avalon+ Indigo+ WinFS)which will become the new Windows API... If you think about it, there have only been afew API changes.. there was the Win16 (DOS).. Win32.. and now WinFX ... I'm not convinced that an XML definition of UI structure is going to pushthe adoption of a new API. Maybe it's because there isn't any real designers for Avalonyet, or maybe it's because I feel like I'm writing HTML / ASP.Net markup... but Avalon isfeeling extremely different to me. I dropping controls on the Windows Forms Designer...I'm not a big fan of writing out HUGE chunks of XML for the UI. Seriously, if you look ata more complete UI written with some XAML, it looksgawd-awful. take a look for yourself. Definitions for code-beside files and other wireups aretaking place just like ASP.Net syntax. Yay, way to bring a technology from mid 90's tofull bodied applications of 2005 - beyond.

Guild Wars... can't stop playing it, nothing much new there... started playing asJacko the Dark again, the Necromancer / Ranger combo is starting to work out reallywell... I can shoot down shit from far away then run up and steal their corpse for anumber of different things, healing myself, others, or raising some minions to do mydirty work for me. Completely self sustaining... My Warrior / Elementalist is pretty farup there, but he's in a rut right now... Now if Neil was to start playing again, it wouldbe sweet... but he's too “busy”

Site updates: Well I think I've made my decision, I'm going to move www.whoisjake.com to a new server. Sadly enough thatmeans there will be some downtime... the good thing is that I will be forced to do somedevelopment outside of work, hone my skills (as if they needed it, heh)... but it will beRuby on Rails based this time around, hopefully I will write things appropriately so thatall the links and shit still work. This comes with some challenges.

1) Figure out how to reroute *.aspx requests to proper Rails requests... inorder to keep the links working - thinking mod_rewrite for that, or possibly a customhandler for ASPX pages that will do lookups to reroute to old content.
2) Migrate old content from blog over to new system.
3) Translate current RSS feeds usage into Rails outputted feeds.
4) Implement the core features that I need for the site.
5) Site redesign (this, as you all know, will be the toughest)

With all that said, it might be time for me to get to work.... do the whole Scrum thingand get the week started.

Anyone listening out there?