Bobbis.net

This week is sucking a lot. Starts out on Sunday with a aches and cold. I miss class on Monday and Tuesday. Force myself to go in on Monday to take a test. Today, I feel slightly better, but would have rather stayed home and slept off the tail end of this cold, but I have an assignment due in English and I now have to take the career fair tonight more seriously since I have learned that I will not be getting the internship at Startly.

Today is also Gaila's birthday. Since I was sick all week, I haven't been able to get her a present and I'm hoping to take her out to a nice place for dinner tonight after career fair. Though I bet Cafe NW is still not open yet. Even if it is, I would probably not enjoy it to the full extent.

Anyway, I need to get ready for class and then career fair. Hopefully my week will turn around.

Many people have been asking how my classes are going. I have to say, I'm a pleased. I am currently taking another 12 credit semester. I am taking MIS 432 (Systems Analysis and Design), MIS 434 (E-Commerce), AmInd 201 (American Indian to satisfy my US Diversity requirement), and Engl 302 (Business Communications). 432 is with the same instructor I had for 331 last semester and I expect to be just a challenged and pleased with that class. 434 is a really small class (only 7 of us) meeting at 8 AM on Tuesday and Thursday. So far the instructor is cool and the lecture is more of a class discussion than it is a lecture. AmInd is going to be pretty easy. A couple of projects in that class will take some time to get done, but it will mostly be busy work. Engl 302 seems like it will be my least favorite class since I am not very interested in the subject and there will be busy work (writing memos and letters, etc.). The fun thing is, I am not in a class that has more than 50 students. No large lectures is a good thing.

The interview Friday went okay. I was not the greatest on the technical questions, but I feel we got along pretty well. The working environment seems good. Jeans and t-shirt, small staff, and cool products. I should hear a response after they interview other people, which will be in a couple weeks. In the mean time, I should go back over what I have done in the cocoa book I borrowed from Colin and continue to work in it over the course of the semester.

I still have one more PHP project to work on this semester outside of work. I will be creating a shopping cart and integrating it with PayPal for my cousin's web site KSBoutique.com so that she will be able to take orders over the Internet.

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.