Bobbis.net

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.

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.