Bobbis.net

That was a really long and exhausting weekend. I will summarize by each day what went on:

Friday
The previous day the equipment for the MUG server showed up and got installed. Friday was configuring and moving stuff over. A few server hiccups happened as well that day at work. I also delivered my computer to be repaired for hard drive clicking. After work I worked at cleaning Gaila's apartment while she was working. Neither of her roommates were around as they had moved weeks before. Also, her apartment was near some rail road tracks which had the side effect of making the walls really dirty.

Saturday
Continued cleaning and packing Gaila's apartment (Sunday afternoon carpet cleaners were coming in). Gaila's dad's car broke down, but he was able to bring his truck without much delay for loading furniture. Took the truck to parking lot at my place and got a tarp to protect the contents for the night (or two). Gaila loans her car to her dad so he has something to drive while we have Gaila's stuff stored in it. Gaila and I returned to her apartment with my parent's van for moving the rest of the smaller stuff, but didn't get started because Gaila's car crapped out and we had to give her dad a ride back to Boone. Crashed at home while Colin was packing with Meri's help (thanks Meri).

Sunday
Returned to Gaila's apartment to finish packing, and clean the apartment. Got things all vaccumed and cleaned. One of Gaila's more dependable roommates showed up to clean the kitchen while Galia was at work and I ran around town finding stove-top drip plates and patching paster for holes (ACE Hardware is a good place to find supplies for moving). Things finished up and we headed over to my apartment where Colin was moving across the parking lot, and we helped.

Monday
Gaila met with the management company for final inspection in the morning while I cleaned up messes left behind from Colin's move out and arrange furniture so that we had space to put stuff. Gaila also delivered food to her mom's place for her other job in Roland. We then helped some one move into their ground floor apartment so they could move their truck in exchange for their help unloading our truck. We took some time to arrange stuff in the apartment to get more room. We then got help taking the old couch out to be delivered to someone else. After getting back we helped the people who helped us take the couch out move into their apartment (turns out this person was moving in with the first person we helped), they also helped move stuff from the van. We returned the van, took showers and have a wonderful meal at Cafe Northwest because we deserved a treat for the long weekend.

Things still need to be sorted out and arranged inside the apartment, plus laundry needs to be done. To top it off, Colin and I will be leaving Saturday morning for WWDC.

Anyway, that was my weekend.

So, I have been playing around with Drupal for a while now at work, and have been using this site as sort of a test project for me to get my feet wet with this CMS system so that the college web sites can be moved to it eventually.

As you can see, I took this opportunity to kind of revamp the design. Search will work for everything on my site, not just blog entries and comments. I've added RSS articles to the side bar. You will have to register for an account and login in order to submit comments now (spam was getting really really bad).

Submitting a quote currently isn't working, and I think I have the RSS feed linked to the right place. I have imported the comments, but couldn't figure out how to make them display the presence of a comment when not viewing the individual entry.

Please let me know if there is a problem with the site.

So, again, I neglect to write in here. At least this is my home page so I'm reminded every once in a while that I haven't done anything here. So, what has been happening?

The big thing recently was Nick and Maggie's wedding. Most people who read this know how that was like, but it's worth mentioning. Apparently they didn't waste time updating their Facebook profile. I got a nice book from them for being a groomsman :) .

I found out that I didn't get the current opening at Source Allies, but I still have a lot of time to find a job. Once I get back from WWDC, I will start the serious job hunt. I even managed a little bit of job networking at the wedding even, but it's not something I'm likely to pursue.

Yesterday, I learned my first cousin, once removed (One of the twins if you know my family) got a collapsed lung so I went over to Marshalltown with my parents to visit. It sounds like she will recover pretty good. If you need to lookup what relation you are to a member of your family, I found this nice chart on Wikipedia.

The following time until school starts is going to be very busy. Gaila and Colin will be moving sometime during this week/weekend, parts have been ordered for the MUG server, I'm trying to learn Cocoa basics before WWDC, I have to get prepared for WWDC, which means I need to get my laptop HD replaced soon. I still have a bunch of stuff left to do on my summer goals list, some of which will have to be pushed back to sometime in the fall. It's going to be crazy.

So, I got a lot of things done this week so far. None of it really on my summer goals.

I managed to raise my credit card credit limit, purchase almost $2000 of flight tickets and hotel stay. Tell my credit card company I did such insanity, talked with a financial counselor, and consolidated my current student loans. This was all done between Monday morning and Tuesday at 5 (most of it on Monday).

I guess all the flight tickets and hotel stay can lead to enjoying my last summer in school.

I just finished re-making the AmesMUG web site. It is almost completely database driven and includes an RSS feed and some pages. Check it out at amesmug.org. It is still running on my server at work, but I will be able to transfer it easily to a new server once that gets off the ground.

I'm trying to get things going on a new server or new components for the server, but things are not really going anywhere since none of the current officers responded to my emails. I found a 160GB HD on NewEgg yesterday for $30 each. I should have just bought them instead of waiting for people to respond to my email, now they are no longer available at that price.

I have a phone interview with SourceAllies tomorrow at 8 PM. I hope to do well, but I can't accept any offer until the fall when I have a chance to look at a bunch of other places.

Yesterday was an interesting day. When I woke up I found my PowerBook crashed and the hard drive clicking. Not a good thing. I take it in to work and was able to clone the drive with no problems. So far the problem hasn't surfaced again, but I hope I will be able to get it replaced before the warranty runs out.

While cloning my drive using my Mac mini, I was also attempting to install the Windows Vista beta on parallels (it don't work) as well as doing a few other things. With all this activity I managed to lockup my computer for about 20 minutes where the clock wouldn't update and iTunes wouldn't play, but the machine didn't crash!

While my computer was not accessible, I got a call concerning a possible job in Des Moines. I recognized the name the person identified himself as but I couldn't remember from where. Turns out he was the guy I talked to at career fair last fall from Source Allies. Before he was able to identify the company he was from and any contact information, my cell phone crashed (gasp!) and reset. Luckily he called back immediately and I am to expect an email about a possible phone interview. Since I was going to do stuff in the job market, I figured it would be a good time to update my resume. I also got permission to use one of my MIS professors for a reference, which I think will work out really well.

Yesterday afternoon I caught wind that Apple has awarded the WWDC scholarships, but haven't notified people yet. Sure enough, I found the WWDC coupon in my assets and applied it for a ticket. I will be going to San Francisco again this summer August 7 through the 11th. I'm also thinking about adding a few more days either before or after the conference to have some time to sight see this time, perhaps even with Gaila. I notified Colin of the availability of the scholarship, but the Internet at the apartment was down so we couldn't figure out if Colin is going (though I can't think of any reason he wouldn't be selected).

I subscribe to an RSS feed for The Daily WTF. Basically it's a web site that posts once a day about odd programming things people encounter. I had an encounter posted once before (blog posting).

Anyway, just by looking at all the stupid stuff people do in the real-world make me want to believe that I will not have any problems in the real-world when I get a career. I know my limitations, and I probably undersell myself. It's just that when people in the real-world end up working on a simple problem for several days and don't end up even Googling it, much less looking in the documentation, makes me think anyone with little to no experience can do better.

It's not just The Daily WTF that makes me think about this. Sometimes my classmates make me want to think that they don't have an enthusiasm for their field of study and are in it just for the money. A lot of them make me think that they do whatever is required for the school work then go out to the bar or something unrelated to the field. Having hobbies in the area and especially having a job in the area gives me a competitive advantage in experience a lot of other students are missing out on. I have met other people in class that also have jobs and hobbies in computers, and they are very easy to work with. Working with people who have experience provides each of us an opportunity to learn from each other rather than being the only source of knowledge in a group.

When I'm learning something in class, I have enough experience to know the topic being taught is only the tip of the iceberg. Some people may think it's everything they need to know and consider it enough to put on their resume. I know I have been exposed to COBOL, C++, Visual Basic, Windows Administration, Oracle, etc in class, but I don't believe I know enough in these areas to present them as skills on my resume. I learned a lot about TCP/IP during my summer class, but I'm not about to put it on my resume to lead the reader to believe I know how to handle TCP/IP stacks programatically or configure CISCO routers. Then again, I'm sure some of my classmates will think they know it all and get themselves in trouble when they encounter it in their jobs.

I suppose I'm just a little anxious about where I'm going to be in six months. I don't think there was a time that I didn't know what I will be doing a year down the road. We'll see what happens.

Updates to my goals. Some with comments about the status. This list will be updated throughout the summer.

• Learn COCOA (see last year's goals) - bought two books on Amazon, setting Tuesday and Friday nights as lesson time
• Get Linux file server running again - Screw wasting time with Linux, Installed ATA card in G4 tower, now it serves
• iPod connection for car stereo
• Mac mini media center
• Cell Phone / PDA
• Re-do bobbis.net - Yeah Drupal
• Move hosting
• Move off of iastate email
• Loose some gut with the bike and horseback riding with Gaila - Have been biking a bit with Gaila, no riding yet.
• Gaila and I move in together
• Job hunt
• organize filing cabinet
• Get professional clothing - Halfway there, need some pants
• Enjoy the last summer in school
• Consolidate Loans

I finally fixed the times on here. I was looking for an easy fix to this, but ended up tacking on 7200 seconds (2 hours) to the system time when inserting new stuff into the database and also changing the code to deal with time as a string instead of an int. Fun stuff.

Let me know if you find anything wrong with the site. I will eventually be moving my site to a pre-made CMS. I've already got my mind set on Drupal, so we'll see how that goes.

I hope everyone had a good Memorial Day weekend.

I have finished moving bobbis.net to Dreamhost. I still need to move some other sub-domains and domains I am hosting on yogurt to here, but the big move is complete. If you encounter any problems, please let me know.