Bobbis.net

It doesn't seem like it has been that long since I've last posted, but it has been 13 days so I probably should update people.

Starting off, the weekend before last was quite interesting. Friday night Gaila and I ate a Perkins and rented a movie to relax. Not much going on.

Saturday was the day of the tornado. Luckily, we were both at my place when it happened, but Adrienne was in Story City (she's fine). They had to evacuate the stadium because of the weather (ISU won the game). One house in Ames was destroyed, though compared to other towns like Woodward, we were lucky. Surveying the damage on Sunday we found that the tornado came within half a mile or so of Gaila's apartment. It had snapped a thick power pole and demolished a nearby house.

After the storms and making sure Gaila's mom was okay, we went to Outback Steakhouse in Ankeny. We called ahead to reserve our spot on the list and was presented with an hour and forty-five minute wait, so we drove down to Jordan Creek to check out the new iPods with video and the 30" Apple Cinema Displays. I only had enough time to drool for 10 minutes before we had to leave for Outback.

Sunday we actually went to church. The reason for actually going to church on Sunday morning was there was a free Thanksgiving dinner after service. The food was great. After church we went to survey some of the damage done by the tornado then went to the play "The Pavilion" done by ISU Theater. Dinner that night was at Legend's.

Last week was busy with getting projects worked on and stuff. Work has been busy doing support stuff rather than programming stuff that I should be doing right now.

Last night Gaila and I went to Nevada for a Thanksgiving potluck with her mom. Free food is good. Tonight we are showing up at her mom's place for some beef stew before heading down to Ottumwa for Thanksgiving Thursday and Friday.

Have a good holiday.

Attention everyone.... EXCEL IS NOT FOR DATABASES! With this said, I would like to extend thanks to whoever made the CSV format, FileMaker Pro 7, and the command grep. Getting the information I needed out of Excel with several hundreds of duplicate records and fields being defined in both rows and columns made chucking into MySQL a pain. Now I can throw this into a database and make it all nice and web-based by December 1.

Also, whatever you do, do not create an in-house web CMS for a large organization unless you have a couple of dedicated, full-time developers to work on it for a considerable amount of time. There are plenty of pre-built solutions that can make things a lot easier. I don't know why the college decided to do this, but I know it's going to make my life really miserable. I already do other little coding projects (scholarship system, account review system, computer support data system) plus answer the phone when no one is around for various workstation problems and maintain a handful of servers, while only being half time. A good pay check and resume building is a good thing.

I have had 2 tests this week, 1 test next tuesday, and a project review today for a group programming project that is due after fall break. Plus there is MUG and I am attending MIS club meetings now just about every other Thursday night. I've also got to remember to record my spending for 4 days sometime. MUG has been tagged to do a Garageband demo sometime at the end of the semester plus LANFEST is coming up along with finals. Busy.

Also, this last week, I got my car fixed. Some of you remember how my car rattled a lot and my steering sounded like a really loud donkey. I got both of those fixed yesterday, so now my car is not the same as it was. It just feels weird not to have those sounds when driving around.

Also, this weekend, Gaila and I will have been officially together for one year. We decided that we were a couple in the very early morning hours of November 14, 2004. The weekend's weather outlook looks good, so we are planning on have a fun weekend together.

It's time for me to get ready and go to my 5:00 meeting. Later.

Tis the season to be a greedy college student. The following is a list of items that I would appreciate as gifts. Most of these are probably out of price range, but one can dream. This is mainly intended for the 'rents so they can have easy clickable access to what I want.

• Some fairly formal clothing. Being a business major, I need to look sharp every once in a while.
• StarWars series on DVD
• Harold and Kumar go to White Castle (Thanks Jason)
• Back to the Future Trilogy
• Nintendo Game Cube with Mario Cart
• Mac mini or gift certificates to the Apple Store
• Dry Erase Board w/ Eraser and markers
• New electric shaver
• Small outdoor gas grill
• iSight
• Family Guy Volume 3

This is really all that I can think of at the moment. The list will probably grow.

My cousin in West Des Moines runs a boutique business out of her home. Basically a bunch of gift baskets, purses, and whatever for sale to individuals or corporate gifts. I have been hired to put together a web site for her business so people can shop online and FAX in their orders. There was also a deadline to get this done by today as an advertisement for the site is to be included with billing statements of Greater Iowa Credit Union customers. Anyway, all the information for her products haven't arrived yet, so it may be a little lacking on some information or not all the products are listed. Once I get rest of the info things will be good. You can check it out now at www.ksboutique.com.

Also, last night I was called right after school to go to my 'rent's. They had lost Maggie, my aunt and uncle's dog who is being watched by my 'rents while they are wintering in Texas. I walked around the neighborhood parks and walked around the corn field behind the neighborhood for an hour. When I came back, I asked if mom had checked all the rooms in the house to make sure she hadn't gotten herself stuck in a room. Sure enough, she was locked in the bedroom. At least I got a good meal out of it.

Tentative Schedule for Fall '06


Revised 10/28

Wikipedia is like the spark-notes for just about any useless knowledge, like that required for Hist 201 (Western Civ.).

Wednesday my mom had an angiogram in the morning and Gaila and I were planning on going to Grundy Center to pick up some fire wood for her mom. Mom's angiogram turns out clear, but the trailer we were going to borrow was full of trash and not available. Dad also found that he has another detached retina. Thursday, I had to take time off work to drive down the Mercy with Gaila so we could drive my parents back (Mom was instructed not to do anything stressful for a few days). I then find that dad was supposed to have a checkup appointment at 9:00 am today, so I spent the night at home so that I could sleep in. Once I woke up the doctor calls and reschedules for 1:00, so I go to work. Later I drove dad down to Des Moines and now I have returned and am typing this waiting for my 2:00 class to start. After class I'm due to pick Dad up in Des Moines.

Sometime tomorrow, Gaila and I are finally going to Grundy Center to pick up the wood. To make things worse though, both of my parent's vans are breaking down. We'll see how the weekend goes.

In the mean time, I found this pretty funny web site about WTF-type stuff in IT. Also, angiogram shows up as a misspelled word in OS X, but is defined in the OS X Dictionary. Odd.

Again, it has been a while since I have posted here. Since I left off, the 6th and 7th I stayed home sick with a sore throat and body aches, but I did manage to go out with my brother, his friend and Amaris on Friday, which was fun.

Wednesday, Apple announced a new iPod Video and iMac with built in "media center" software called Front Row, which is only currently available on the new iMacs. I would really like one for the Mac mini so that I could put together a cool media center for home.

Wednesday Gaila got what I had the week before with the sore throat and aching. She is only now recovering from it.

Finally, on Saturday we were able to officially move our office. I have recorded some images of the move which include some of my new work space, the server rack in the hallway and in the elevator.

Sunday the Internet in the apartment went out and nobody is around to complain to until Monday during business hours. I hope they fixed it. I left them an "urgent" message (whatever that means) yesterday, but they haven't gotten back to me. Colin had to go to work in order to do his on-call work.

Anyway, time for class, then home.

It has been a while, again, since I have posted. The latest news is that my brother and his girlfriend arrived Saturday from New York. Sunday was the family gathering so they could meet everyone. Lots of food and and so much chaos as usual. Gaila was gone to Minnesota for a bridge tournament, so she got to miss out on the family goodness.

My office was supposed to be moving on Saturday as well, but they haven't finished the air conditioning system. They got the part they needed two weeks ago and we have been waiting to move up there since August of 2004. There is only one little piece that needs to be done before we can move. Meanwhile, FP&M are making visits to measure and plan for making our current office into a classroom. The new move date is now October 15. Which reminds me, I need to get some scholarship work done really quick now.

Over the end of the week, I got subversion working for ATX. You can now download the latest development source of ATX via subversion at http://atxproject.net/svn/atx1/trunk/src/ . When ATX 2 gets going you will be able to find it at http://atxproject.net/svn/atx2/trunk/src/ . You can also browse the repositories at http://www.atxproject.net/websvn/ . Speaking of open source projects, #aim (an entirely C# AOL IM client started by a friend of mine) has been announced on SA and appears to be going well.

Wednesday was career fair. I wasn't really expecting much for anything, but I was willing to give it a shot. Wednesday morning I found that my nice "suit" didn't fit anymore, so I have to take some time between class to purchase a new outfit.

I made it to the career fair at about 5:00 PM. Most of my time was spent browsing around the floor of Hilton. I stopped by the usually places like General Mills and Cargil, but they seemed way too discouraged at anything that was below a 3.00. American Century Investments seemed they were in need of some IT Interns, but they are based in Missouri and do a lot with COBOL, and from the looks of their web site, they are not very advanced in the technology or even organized, which leads me to believe the IT environment there is not very pleasant.

I was on my way out when I realized there were a bunch of employers on the concessions level. These were mostly the smaller companies that actually had their IT people there instead of the generic HR person who doesn't know half a thing about computers. There I met two potential leads. One is with Atanasoft (I know, really bad PUN), a development outsourcing company located in the ISU Research Park. They primarily work with database systems. It seems like a good opportunity for me to get my hands dirty with coding. I have an interview with them Friday afternoon. We'll see how that goes. The other company also seems really cool. Source Allies is a consulting / outsourcing company that deals primarily with open source solutions and web applications. They seemed very enthusiastic and interested in me. I feel like if they could provide me with an internship, I could learn more about web development, but I suppose that will also mean I won't get very much into application development. They weren't looking for any internships, but they did seem really interested in me.

Anyway, I have class at 8 AM so I should get some sleep.