Bobbis.net

Since my interview with Startly has been postponed until Friday, I had some extra time today to finish up some work on shaim.com (NOT SHAME) . Actually I had to put a few finishing touches to the site because someone decided to make the site go live before I was satisfied with the result. Currently IE6 Win does not display the avatars next to the news items, the HTML does not yet validate, the use of the mozilla rounded corners makes the CSS not validate and makes it display with ugly square corners in anything that isn't mozilla based (renders in recent versions of Netscape, FireFox, Mozilla, Camino). Otherwise, it is my best HTML and CSS work I have done so far. Hopefully in the next couple months there will be a useable version of shaim available.

If you are wondering what shaim is, just click the link and read the description on the site. It's not shameful, it's shaimful.

I'm just now getting spam on my blog. It took years for spam to show up here. So far today I have gotten about 60 or 70 spam comments. I have enabled moderation, so I will need to approve your message for it to appear. Eventually I will make it so registered users will not have to wait for my approval. I might just take this opportunity to re-write the entire site when I have time.

So, I thought the keynote was today (Monday), but apparently the keynote is tomorrow (Tuesday) at 11 AM central time. I won't be in class during the real keynote :)

I just got a call from Startly Technologies asking me for an interview in West Des Moines. For those who don't know, Startly is the remains of CE Software and they primarily do development for the Macintosh. I interview on the 19th.

Today, Gaila found that my disposal drain in the kitchen was leaking when running water. I get home around 5:30 and look at it myself. When I decided it was beyond my expertise and available tools, I called Jim and Lisa. Lisa had a plumber sent over immediately who showed up within 15 minutes, replaced the disposal unit and as an extra bonus replaced the shower head in the bathroom. It was 7:00 by the time all was done. Here, I was expecting not to see anyone until Friday.

In other good news, I finally have the apartment's wireless connection bridged to my router. I ended up borrowing a switch from work to see if that would allow me to connect the WET11 wireless bridge to my DI-624 wireless router (the bridge would not work directly plugged into the router). I now have an identical switch on order from NewEgg so I can keep this setup and return the switch that came from work.

I hope everyone had a good New Years. I had a party at my place. Gaila, Nick, Maggie, Mel, Nicole and Colin were there. We watched Airplane! and played Trivial Pursuit - DVD Pop Culture 2. All was fun, and hopefully we can have a get-together again soon. Perhaps when Walter comes back in town sometime this week?

Since I had a party here, Colin and I (and Gaila) cleaned the place up so that it would be presentable (for the first time since before we moved in if you want to include our rooms!). On the first, Gaila helped me re-organize my room to open up the space, which had a positive effect to my wireless signal in the new location of my desk :-D .

Anyway, enjoy the pictures!

So, it has been long time again since I have posted. Sometimes I am just too busy, or not busy enough, to post. Since I ended up getting sick today, I though I might take the time to update this thing.

Finals finished for me on the 14th. My parents' anniversary was on the 15th. They were nice enough to invite Gaila and me to Outback in Ankeny. The rest of the time between then and the Friday before Christmas was spend working on the scholarship system at work for a release on the 26th (the 23rd and 26th were university holidays), and shopping.

Christmas weekend was actually really relaxing. I went to Ottumwa with Gaila to be with her family Friday through Sunday. The only problem with that weekend was that Becca (Gaila's sister) was sick and confined in the car on the way down and back, probably the cause for me being sick now.

Monday Gaila and I celebrated Christmas with my parents. When in Ottumwa, Gaila's uncle had given us a framed animation cell from the movie Fantasia for us to give to my dad who collects animation cells. Gaila got some new boots and I got the stuff crossed out on my wishlist plus socks. I got Gaila a gift certificate to the Apple Store for the education price of an iPod shuffle. I ordered on the 22nd with 2nd day shipping so that it would arrive in time for Christmas at my 'rents' but they didn't even get the thing out the door until today! I called Apple today and got them to refund my shipping cost.

Looking for a simple drawing program like MS Paint, but for Mac OS X, and don't want to buy Photoshop or deal with other over-sized options that take forever to load? Seashore seems to do the trick. From the looks of things, it is based off the GIMP and is a native application. There is even an SVG plug-in available.

My Management 370 professor (Dr. Hunger) wrote a book on management. We do not use his text for class for some reason. In lecture he often comments about what the author of our text says and sometimes adds to what is in the text book or even tells us not to pay attention to some definitions. Though when it comes to test time here is a question.

The textbook listed five contingency factors that influence organization design (structure). Which of the following did Hunger add to the textbook's list?

a. Organizational life cycle
b. Technology
c. Environment
d. People (L)
e. Size

Is the instructor testing our knowledge of the material or our knowledge of who taught us what? Which is more important? I hope I do not run into many of these in the final. I will not remember who said what for information that was presented to me 3 months ago.

The weekend was a nice break from school and work. Ottumwa was pretty good. Not that many people there since one family went to Missouri family and another couple had to work. Food is always good there. We came back Friday night.

Saturday Meri called wanting to do something while she was in town. Meri, Gaila, Colin and I went to see the 10:40 PM showing of Harry Potter which let out just after 1:00 AM. It was nice to see her and hear what is going on.

Today brought back school and work. I still have a project at work due on the first. I have a current events presentation Friday, a games demo on Thursday, LANFest on Friday and a CS Club meeting on Wednesday that I want to go to. I also got another wireless access point to bridge the wireless in the apartment. Hopefully it will work this time. I'm also way behind schedule for jasonrearick.com, though the hard part is over, it's just having to find time to get it done. Oh yeah, and a 331 project due sometime.

Shaim (previously #aim) has been advancing quite well. Chris got OscarLib file transfers done at speeds that blow away GaimLib. OscarLib will probably have a test release in early December. Development on the client application Shaim will start planning again from scratch after finals centered around a plug-in system. Also around that time I will be in charge of the web site. We had discussed getting shaim.com just before break, then a domain squatter decided to gobble it up on the 25th before we even had the chance to get it. We have settled for shaim.net now.

Colin has started thinking a lot about ATX lately too. Last night we stayed up too late discussing stuff about ATX. He wants to start work on version 2 while I would like to see a stable 1.x before seeing anything started with 2. I wish I could actually do something with ATX, but I have been too busy to pickup Cocoa lately. I should stop any more PHP projects after shaim and just begin only working on learning Cocoa in my spare time.

Anyway, it's time to go home and setup a wireless bridge and chip away at homework and studies and what not.