Bobbis.net

This week has been uber busy and that made it feel really long.

Over the weekend the MUG server went down. Both drives in the mirror have failed, and I have been trying to recover the data all week. Right now there are no mailing lists, and I have a small informational site hosted on my server to let people know about LANFEST, VEISHEA, and the server problems. We are discussing perhaps getting a new server or buying new drives and possibly a hardware RAID solution as well as implementing drive monitoring and a real off-the-server backup solution.

I am also starting work on three more group projects on top of the semester-long group project for 432. I need to research policies and treaties affecting hunting and fishing for the Ojibwa tribe by Sunday for a presentation on Tuesday. I also have a research project to work in in the next week about motivating retail employees for English, and an entire web site (admin system, and all) due by the end of the semester. I almost have the system for Kim's site done, but this week has prevented me from working on that. Only three more weeks of classes (2 weeks of projects) and then finals.

LANFEST is tonight. I'm not expecting very many people to show up, but whatever. Without being able to announce it on the mailing list and having to plan for VEISHEA stuff as well as the server issues, AmesMUG is doing a lot of work.

Last night at MIS Club, Earns and Young came to talk about their technology risk auditing division out of Des Moines. From what I gathered from the presentation, it seems like a very cool job. I will probably be pursuing that, and other job opportunities starting this Summer.

Speaking of summer. Gaila and I will be going to Mexico the week after finals. We will be going as part of the cultural immersion trip organized by the ULC.

In other news, I have registered myself to go to WWDC again in August. Colin is registering to go as well as a few other people who are seriously considering it.

While messing around with a computer over remote desktop, I found that you can access information about an OS X computer from the login screen. Useful information like: hostname (default), serial number, network logins, date and time, and IP Address are accessable by clicking on the hostname below the OS X logo.



Also, while opening the Matrix Diagrammer in Oracle Designer for my project in 432 I came across this startling error. I wasn't doing anything to configure preferences or even opening a diagram, I was just opening the program that deals with Matrix Diagrams.



First of all, I have no clue why it needed to be doing anything with the registry, and second of all why does an error message tell me to use REGEDIT to manually edit the registry. I have no clue what it was supposed to do in the registry much less how I was supposed to do it manually. Another thing to add to my hate of Oracle.

Gaila and I just saw V for Vendetta tonight. It is a very very good movie, and would encourage you to see it if you haven't.

This time around for registering for classes was probably the easiest time I have had registering for classes. I had my schedule all planned out last night with the class reference numbers ready to go for my 7 AM registration time this morning. At 7, I punched in all the right numbers. The only problem I had was that the registrar's office had my graduation date set as SPRING 2006 instead of Fall 2006. AccessPlus has shown that I was slated to graduate in the fall, but apparently AccessPlus and the registrar's office are not the same. This caused a problem when I tried to sign up for Management 478, which is the Business College's capstone class that is only available to seniors who are graduating in that term. A quick email to my advisor quickly remedied this problem and I was all signed up by 9:00.

My summer class is MIS 435 (Business Telecommunications). It will be every weekday for 2 hours from May 15th to June 9th. Below you can see my tentative Fall schedule.



From the looks of things, fall should be a fairly easy semester. English 335 is Film, where you watch movies in class and perhaps do some reflective writing on them (It sounds a lot like my Perspective in Media class I took my last semester in high school). Otherwise, Monday Wednesday and Friday I should be working (I still have to figure out how to do only 20 hours with this schedule), and some of the extra time during the day should be devoted to continued personal learning (Cocoa, AJAX, Widgets).

Hooray for my last semester! Time to look for a job.

Well, spring break is over. I didn't get very much work done. I was expecting to get a lot of work done on Jason and Kim's web sites and install the hardware I ordered from NewEgg, but I ended up getting sick on Thursday (same thing Gaila had) so I didn't have much energy for the last part of the week. Even now, I'm still not feeling the greatest, but am able to drag myself through the day. This weather isn't helping much either.

I have decided that I will redo my site once summer comes around. By redo, I mean an overhaul. New design and, more importantly, a new back-end (perhaps some pre-built CMS). I will also move over to DreamHost (or something equivalent) since I will be graduating in December, I will not have a reliable place to host. So, Colin, this means you might need to move to another hosing provider by December 1. I can probably hook you up cheap with wherever I end up going to. This isn't something that's going to happen immediately, but just some plans about what I need to do.

Another summer goal is Cocoa. When summer starts, don't let me forget this! I need to set up a time for me to work on this daily so that it's a routine and I can start working on it bit by bit. I thought this semester would be great for learning Cocoa, but it appears that the 12 credits I have are really time-consuming credits. Since WWDC is not until August this summer, it should allow me enough time to get comfortable and be able to comprehend some of the developer sessions rather than hanging out at the IT sessions.

If I have time, I would also like to learn JavaScript/AJAX (as well as Dashboard Widgets, which is basically little AJAX apps).

The break has been going pretty good so far. I have been able to relax and not have to worry about work or school (for the most part) all week. Gaila was sick with the crud for most of the week, which wasn't fun. I have gotten a lot of work done on the back-end for my brother's web site. Yesterday morning my Palm Pilot reminded me that I had a meeting for MIS 434 which I had totally forgotten about. The meeting was okay and wasn't stressful since that was the only thing going on that day (at least for class).

Last night Gaila's mare foaled. I decided to stay around with her and Nicole at the horse barn to play some traditional trivial pursuit. At 12:03 AM the mare foaled and had some problems suckling. I ended up leaving at around 2:00 AM and was in bed by 3. Gaila didn't get home until 4. I had to wake up this morning to catch the bus a 9:30 AM. I'm very tired, but I think it was worth it. There will probably be pictures soon once Gaila gets around to it.

Tonight I napped really well after work and watched Spaceballs with Gaila. After the movie I was able to direct TUAW to a new iTunes + iPod ad that was released today. I am "reader John". I'm surprised no-one found the ad faster than I did.

Anyway, I'm going to continue to relax for the rest of the evening.

update foaling pictures

Spring break is finally here. This weekend was relaxing. The most I did was go out with Gaila to the horse barn to check on her mare that is due to foal this week. I installed her 200 GB HD and a stick of RAM to make her computer usable. I installed Red Hat on my linux machine at home and ordered an ATA controller card, cable, firewire hub, and a USB card (for Gaila). Hopefully, by the end of the week I will have my file server back up and running and it will have some space. I still have to work on Jason's web site and Kim's web site over the course of the week.

While at work today, I had enough time to go through my computer and clean stuff out and organize my files. I managed to be able to see my desktop image and kill close to 10 Gigs of space. I think my next task will be to clean my desk or organize my iTunes files.

A lot of stuff has been happening lately. School is busy with a huge MIS 432 deadline coming up Friday that, I would say, we are only at most 50% done with. This is my primary source for stress. I am looking forward to getting work done over spring break. I will be working full-time and I have several projects that can get started and a lot done with during this time. At home I will be working hard on ksboutique.com to, at least, get a shopping cart system done, and I also forgot about my brother's web site and finishing the back-end to that.

I am slated to graduate in December if everything goes as planned. I will be taking a class this summer and another 12 credit semester in the Fall. Looking over my degree audit, I believe I can get a benefit from transferring in my 5 DMACC credits when I took the A+ course in high school. I have an appointment with my advisor on Thursday to sort things out.

Also, today Gaila was being helpful this morning wrangling up laundry to be done at my parent's place. She was driving my car and managed to pop the tire off the rim and puncture it. So, she had a very interesting morning getting that fixed while I was in class. I really appreciate her doing that.

Anyway, I have spent enough time posting stuff here. I have a bunch of work to do.

So, in conclusion, the Indians called corn maize.

Proof of this amazing breakthrough can be found here.

This semester is turning out to be really really really busy. I mean really.

After recovering from being sick I had a week of school and work to make up. I missed two days of class-time to work with my partner on the 20 minute American Indian presentation. MIS 432 (you'll hear me rant about this class a lot) had a milestone to be worked on and handed in. 432 also had a complex Oracle diagram assigned and due given three days (including the weekend) to work on. Both the milestone and the diagram had to be done in our groups where nobody has time to work on stuff. We ended up meeting on Monday from 8 pm to 10 pm just to work on the diagram. In the next two weeks we have another milestone and 2 more assignments for the group to work on.

Also Oracle really sucks and is really frustrating to use. I also spent some time figuring out how to connect to the college's Oracle database from either the office or home, but found client configuration to be convoluted. I figured out the client configuration (at least, I think I did), only to find that they have the port fire-walled.

Business communications had a group presentation assigned and given in the past week. The presentation was kind of crappy, but it wasn't really hard since there was plenty of information on the subject.

American Indian class was probably the worst. My partner for this project lives and works out of town, which made getting together to work on the project very difficult. Also, missing a week for time to work on this did not help as well. Another thing was the topic was hard to find credible information and enough information to fill 20 minutes of presentation.

The only other class I am in is MIS 434 (e-commerce). So far it has all been lecture and nothing outside of class. Though this Thursday we have started our project. The project is for the 5 of us in the class to create a web site from scratch for someone who wants to sell ceramics and advertise herself for a graphic design job. The project sounds like it will be interesting. However, some of the stuff we have been talking about doing appears to be a little bit out of the league for the people in the class, and will prove to be a challenge even for me.

So, that covers my class stuff. At work, it is scholarship time. The scholarships are closing and I have had a flood of questions and people not reading directions on the application. Most of these are handled by someone else, but there is nothing that can be done to make sure that I'm not bugged every year. Also, I just found out that the web server wasn't collecting stats correctly since April. If someone can tell us about this problem we can do something about it. Also I have been working on several other small projects at work including the CMS.

There really hasn't been much time for a personal life. Gaila and I see each about every day. We have lunch and hang out at night. My parents went to Texas last week so I had to house sit and take care of Maggie.

With all this stuff going on, I haven't even had time to continue work on my brother's web site, start working on ksboutique to intergrate with PayPal, and I haven't even had enough time to crack open a Cocoa book.

On V-Day, I was really busy. I found time to get Gaila a card and little horse statue between school and picking my parent's up from the airport. Gaila was able to redeem her Apple Store gift certificate for an iPod on our way to pick my parents up. They were nice enough to reward us with a meal at Outback.

Tonight Gaila is working (late now). We are planning on having a late dinner and relaxing tonight, laundry tomorrow, and on Sunday we will meet up with her family in Des Moines to see the Lipizzaner Stallions. I hope things are going okay for everyone so far.