GOVERNMENT SCHOOL IDIOCY

boortz.com: GOVERNMENT SCHOOL IDIOCY
I just can't stand this kind of idiocy. If this were my child, I'd be suing over something this incredibly stupid. I'm probably going to wind up facing something like this at some point, having 5 kids. I just hope I'll be able to afford the attorneys fee's. Hopefully this zero-tolerance nonsense will go away before I have to deal with it, but I will do my part if I have to. I think a lot of this crap has to do with the tendancies for school administrators to be liberal leaning, hence a push toward communal thinking, so if you don't fit into the commune, you get the boot. This type of thinking is going to end up hurting the truly intelligent kids out there, as they will be taught that thinking "outside the box" is bad, and they will all learn to be good little sheep.

If I didn't live out in the middle of nowhere, I'd be pushing Deanna hard to home school the kids. I want them to have the interaction with other kids tho, and I think that would still be somewhat difficult to do in my area. I have heard about home schooling groups that get together once a week or more to get the kids together and go on field trips and such. I'll have to look into that and see if there are any in my area.

boortz.com: Nealz Nuze Today's Nuze

boortz.com: THE AARP DECLARES WAR ON YOUNGER AMERICANS:

"The solution? Privatization! If you own your own account it can't be taken from you or your family and given to some stranger living in a retirement community in Palm Desert, California. If you have the misfortune to die before the law allows you to start withdrawing retirement benefits from your account the money goes to your family. Isn't that the way you would want it? Wouldn't you want that money to be spent to make your spouse or children rather than someone you didn't know and who might not have even given you the time of day if you had known them during life?

This is absurd, folks. We're supposed to be living in free country that recognizes property rights. You own you, not the government. You work for you, not for some stranger. In a free country your government should not seize your money by force and put it into a phony 'retirement' fund that earns you a sub-par rate of return and to which you have no legal right beyond what politicians are willing to grant. When you die the money you earned during life shouldn't be seized by government to be transferred to another individual you don't know while your family scrambles about looking for a way to keep their home and pay for your funeral, but that's exactly what the AARP is fighting for."

This boggles the mind. This is basically a form of slavery, where you as the worker are coerced into giving up part of your time to the government to cover social security for people who are retired. As Boortz has said before, if any other company were run the way social security were run, it would be considered an illegal pyramid scheme (which is exactly what it is), but since the government runs it, there is nothing you can do about it, except write to your congressperson. Please, anyone that reads this, write to your congressperson and let them know that you want social security reform to go through, preferably with all of it privatized, but we take what we can get. Also, any retiree with a conscience should tell the AARP that they also want social security privatized, it's just not going to work the way it is.

MCSD
Still slacking on the studying, my goal is to get my final test taken this month, I gotta get on that.

RMS
Got a couple quick things pushed out this morning, administering the important message, and cleaned up the login control.

No child left unmedicated

No child left unmedicated
I've seen a lot of articles on this piece of legislation, and I can't believe that President Bush, supposedly a man for "less government" is having anything to do with this. I've sent multiple letters to my congressmen urging them not to support this, and I hope you will do the same. This is one of the most disturbing pieces of legislation I have seen in a long time.

RMS

Finally got the Calender portion of RMS site integrated with Yaf.net's security mechanism. Wasn't too bad once I figured out how the authentication scheme works, and it was definitly knowlegede I'll be using again, esp. seeing how I'm planning on taking the security test for my final MCSD exam. Speaking of which, I've been slacking on my studying for that, but I did do some today. What I learned from the Calendar was in some of the questions on the practice test I bought ($22 well spent), so I definitely feel it was time well spent figuring that stuff out.

Caught up on looking at my Deviant Art watch list, only 250 things I had to go thru...What I get for leaving it for so long. I definitly need to get a new digital camera, and start using it. Or at least start using the old one.

Deanna had to go to WV yesterday to help her dad go thru her grandfather's stuff. Her brothers girlfriend just had to go along and see what she could grab. I was hoping Frank would tell her not to go, but oh well. They brought home a bunch of stuff, some furniture, pictures, china, crystal, etc. I know that must have been hard to do, going through someones things after they die. I'm going to have to go look at some of the stuff my Mom and Kenny saved of grandma's sometime, just to look through it. That will be hard tho, even though it's been over 2 years. I try to do that kind of stuff in small steps, I'm not good at it.

Thanksgiving coming up, that should be good. We're doing lunch at Debra's house at noon, and Kim is doing something at 4pm. My mom said she doesn't know if she's going to that or not, and doesn't want to come to Debra's (I think because of someone's girlfriend, the same one that pushed herself to WV). If she doesn't go to Kim's, we will at least go by there that afternoon to see them. If she goes to Kim's, we'll drop by as well. I'll try to talk with Chuck about his artiste web application he wants to get done.

I went by Chuck's house last Friday to secure his wireless network (was wide open). Played some X-box while I was there, kicked his butt on some fighting game, it was pretty cool. David said he was going to get us one of those for Xmas, as well as the gamecube Debra is getting us for the kids. Should be fun :)

Well, still haven't been able to talk to the people down the road about buying their little piece of land that is between the property we want and the road. I need to get moving on the house building, we have been here way longer than we thought, and haven't even started yet. I think I will call the builder today and find out what the next step we need to do is, I think we can safely say that we will get the land, but even if we don't, that only affects the driveway, which I'm not worried about all that much.

Work is going ok, nTelos stuff is coming along, but slowly. Takes a while to figure out where (and if) the data I need to send to the mainframe is being kept in the web objects.

Home business is going well also, The Lockup is doing a "soft launch" (not my words) of the site this weekend with part of the functionality we have developed. Supposed to do testing and complete implementation of it next week. Thus I have been spending most of my time doing stuff for Harmony Web, and haven't been able to do much for RMS last week. I may try to get some work done on that today, all I really need to do at this point is get the security for the calendar and yaf integrated, hopefully not too difficult.

Nealz Nuze Today's Nuze - FairTax

FAIR TAX UPDATE
Boortz is trying to push the FairTax plan with a book, I hope it works. It'd be wonderful to actually keep the money I earn. That, along with being able to control at least part of my social security pyramid scheme would put Bush down as one of the greats in my book.

Business is going ok, Harmony Web is having issues with the service provider that The LockUp is using to provide them with web services. Sombody keeps screwing them up. There was supposed to be a soft launch of the new services at TLU this weekend, hopefully that will still go, but unknown at this point.

I put part of RMS's stuff live for them last Friday, now I have to work on plugging into yaf.net's security system so the calendaring piece will have some, right now anyone that knows the URL can do anything to the calendar, but it's not exposed on the web site anywhere. Dunno about the way YAF is doing security, wish they had used something standard for it, but they are rolling their own. Hopefully I won't have to make changes on that side, hate to do that and then not be able to upgraded in pieces.

Haven't visited DeviantArt in a while, probably have a couple hundred messages to look at. Ugh.

Thanksgiving is looking good. Going to be having lunch at Debra's at 12, then dinner at Kim's at 4, so will get to see both families.

Debra got basically laid off this week, the are making her an as needed employee, I think in some effort to not have to pay unemployment. Whatever, stupid people don't realize she can still collect reduction of hours to 0 benefits. She'll probably look for something part-time locally, maybe the Wal-Mart in C'ville or something like that. She also now has a reason to push on making Kris either buy the house, or get out so she can sell it. Kris has been screwing with them on that for some time.

I gotta get my ass moving on the building process, I looked up a lawyer in Louisa yesterday, hope to call him today and find out what I need to do next. Also need to talk with Dr. Burton about getting my taxes done for my business, and how I should structure that.

MCSD

Well, I've started studying for the last test I need to take to get my MCSD.Net certification. I've taken everything but an elective, I've deceided to take the 70-330 exam (Security for VB.Net). I've always had a thing for security, so I thought I'd put it to the test. I did a couple of gigs for Whitlock on penetration testing of web sites; not quite the same as developing secure applications, but I think the same pricipals apply.

Business has slowed down, Derivia seems to be doing stuff themselves, which is ok with me for now, I have a lot to do for RMS, and still getting some work from Harmony Web. I really like the guy I've been doing work for from Harmony Web, seems really nice, and very understanding. Just had his second child about 2 months ago. If I ever go out to Chicago (doubtful), I'll have to drop by for a visit. Still haven't taken any time to try and make more contacts through LinkedIn, I will probably do that once I get a good chunk of RMS done, don't want to run out of work.

Kids are doing well, they have started roller-skating lessons, my parents are taking them on Saturday. This is a good thing, they will be getting some needed exercise. They don't get much chance to go outside now, they only have an hour before it gets dark when they get home from school. I'm going to try to get them involved in some sports this spring, depending on how things go with nTelos, and what hours I'm working, etc. Hopefully I'll be working full time for nTelos, and have pretty flexable about when I work, as long as I get at least 40/week in. Sometimes I wish for times like when I was a kid, and we could wander all over the neighborhood without worrying about getting kidnapped or worse. Times sure have changed. I sound like an old man :P

Voting

Bush won! Yay! I went to vote early in the morning, and noticed that there was really nothing to prevent someone from just walking in and voting. They had the person there checking to see if you were registered, but they didn't give you a ticket to give to the person standing at the polling machine, so all you would have had to do is just get in line. Kinda worrisome.

Almost finished with the calendar and messaging part of RMS web site. I need to look to find a better way of doing role-based security than what I am doing. I am somewhat limited as to what I can do tho, as I am integrating 2 pre-written pieces. Using the roles from YAF message board, and a calendar I got from someone I used to work with. Once I get something out and working for RMS, I'm going to take a look at Microsoft's Authorization and Profile application block to see what I can do with that.

I need to get back on Linked-in and try to get some more customer contacts. I have about 15 people, but none have any work. Not sure how linked-in is going to pan out on stuff like that. I should also pay more attention to the neon guild mailing list to see if there is anything there that might lead to some business.

The nTelos project is going ok, but I have found that we are more behind schedule than I thought we were at the beginning of October. There is a piece at the end of the process that builds a string to send to a middleware product that executes the commands in the string on the mainframe, and I have found that there is a lot that is only stubbed out in the intermediary steps to get to that point. I have learned quite a bit about Microsoft's UIP application block (a MVS implementation), which is good. Seems to be a good framework for anything that needs to follow a series of steps. Will have to look at RMS to see if there will be any part of their site that can use something like that.

Going to be a busy week

Both my freelance projects have deadlines this week, and RMS is supposed to roll out with at least the Calendar and Messaging pieces. I also have to get an import done to bring in all the people from their old system. I am using an open source project for the messaging, which supports roles and such, so I won't have to create role system from scratch, just have to integrate my stuff into it. This is definitely going to be a 1.0 release. Hopefully once it's out I'll have time to go back and do it correctly (heard that a million times). I'm probably going to have to tho, since we are going to be selling the pieces of the system.

My dad's 57th birthday is on Halloween, said he doesn't want presents "We're too old for presents". I'll probably get him at least something small anyway. Also going to talk to Niki about getting me a deal on a car. The metro doesn't like Afton all that much, esp. only running on 2 out of 3 cylinders. Going to try to get something nice for under 3Gs, then I can work on the metro and see if I can fix it, or really break it.

Tried to call the people down the road that own the strip of land between where we are going to build and the road to talk more about buying it, but whoever answered said I had the wrong number. I think he just didn't understand me, cuz it sounded like the guy I had talked to before. I'll try again tonight. I was going to talk about price initially, but I think now I just want to make sure they're still interested in selling and get the process started on surveying it and having the lawyer draw up papers or whatever. Need to get moving on the house, tired of living in a basement.

Met with the guys from BigOak last night on the RMS stuff, they seemed happy with the direction I was heading. I think Shell was a bit concerned about the calendar, as I hadn't really started on it yet, and he thinks that is one of the pieces they really want. Trying to get in touch with Rick to see if the calender he did for CMax was in .Net, if so I'll see if he'll "donate" it to me.

Back Home

Ugh, I think that was the worst vacation I can remember. I was sick most of the week, and at least 2 of the kids were sick at any given time. Riley and Eryn were finally getting over the worst of it at the end of the week. I am over it just in time to get back to work, whooopee.

I ended up not getting squat done for the business during the week, but oh well. I have till Nov. 1 to finish up the RMS intranet, I should be able to get it done, there's not that much left. Just have to put an admin front-end on an open soure forum piece that I am using for their messaging system, and finish up the admin for building custom web pages. The hardest part will probably be managing images they want to upload.

My parents kept Savannah for us while we were on vacation, and offered to keep her now until we have our house build. I took them up on it, I hate having to keep her on a chain. They are probably going to spoil her and make her an inside dog, but at least she will be able to run around all she wants.

Email when I got back to work wasn't bad. I think that's because not many people really know me here yet. That should change soon. I am going to be in the on-call rotation I think starting this week. I guess that depends on how much is left before we can actually let people start testing on the system.

Vacation

We actually left on time Sunday, a first I think for us. Deanna packed a lot less stuff than last year, we didn't pack as many toys and books and stuff for the kids as usual, as they don't end up using them anyway. Sunday went pretty well, Eryn and Riley did very well in the car for 4 hours. We stopped once for lunch at about 1:00, and to let Debra feed the baby. Riley was starting with a cold when we left.

Monday we went to the pool at the rec center, which is right across the street from the house, a nice plus on location there. We stayed about an hour, the little kids pool feels like it's 10 degrees colder than the big pool. Figure that one out. The kids loved it anyway. It took Riley and Eryn a little while to warm up to the pool, but once they did, they didn't want to leave. They ate a good lunch after we bot back, swimming always makes them hungry. After the twins had their nap, we went down to the beach for 45 minutes or so. They played in the sand, collected shells, and chased some seagulls. Eryn went down to the water once, and as I didn't want them getting their clothes wet, I tried to pick her up and almost dropped her back in the surf. I think I scared her a bit doing that, as she didn't go back near the water after that. She'll get over it tho, she loves water. I think the waves put her off a bit too.

The bed is killing my back, and Riley gave me the cold. We gave Riley some cold medicine last night so she could sleep. Deanna ended up getting a migrane during the night, I don't think the bed is agreeing with her either, but she always has trouble sleeping. She took some Maxalt, but that didn't help much. I don't think it turned out to be a migraine, and she took some ibuprofin later and that was helping. Today she is taking Sarah out, along with Debra, Joe, and Elyssa. She is going to take each of the older 3 out by themselves 1 day during the week to shop and spend some time alone with them. I took some cold medicine this morning also, and gave Riley some as well, we were both dragging when we got up. I'm going to try to take the kids to the rec center and let Meagan and Brenna play some arcade games, if Meagan can ever finish her homework. We may go down to walk on the beach after lunch, as I don't expect Deanna back until after that.

I have to get some work done for RMS during the week. The guys at Big Oak are looking to set up a meeting. That will have to be next week, tho I don't know when. I don't get home til 4:30, and it will take me about 30 mins to get over to the Innsbrook area to meet them. I have the messaging part going, and a good part of the classroom web pages set up, just have to finish up the management of them, and the user management. I should be able to get it done before the week is up.

Well, yesterday didn't go too badly as far as working time goes. I did manage to get 8 hours in for nTelos. Meagan had a good time at Jamestown, they saw all the ususal stuff, glass blowing, the old houses, a Native American village, that kind of stuff. She bought a couple of things, an indian charm, a fan that didn't work when she bought it (I advised her to make sure stuff works in the future before she buys it), and she got a piece of glass from the glass blowing area.

Meagan and Brenna both have Odyssey of the Mind tonight. Deanna is a coach for Brenna's team, so I have to go home early to watch the twins and get Sarah off the bus. Don't know what my Mom has planned for them tonight, probably going to dinner with the rest of the family.

Tomorrow is going to be busy, Deanna is going grocery shopping (as normal), and we have a RN coming over to do physical on both of us for the life insurance we just got through MetLife. We bought a Term policy until we deceide who to buy the Universal one through, though it will probably be MetLife.

Our 11th anniversary is also tomorrow. We're not doing anything tomorrow because we will be getting ready for vacation and such, we'll probably go out to dinner Monday or Tuesday night while we're at the beach.

I'll try to post some from the beach, but I don't know if I will have a dial-up line by then. I think DirecWay provides us with an 800 number, but I have to find out what that is. I probably have to go through Joe, because he's the only one that knows his DirecWay login.

More Scheduling fun

Turns out my day gets even more fun. Joe's first flight home was late, so he missed his connecting flight, so He won't be there this afternoon. Deanna has to be at school at 4:00 to pick Meagan up from her field trip, so I have to be home at 3:30, which means I have to leave work at 2:30. So I will be missing about 2 hours away from work (I did work from home about 30 minutes this morning, so I will have about 90 minutes to make up tonight). I was hoping to be able to work from home tomorrow, but I think I need to come in and get some stuff done and make sure I have synchronized everything before I leave on vacation. I have to leave early on Fridays anyway because Meagan and Breanna have Odyssey of the Mind after school, and Deanna is one of the coaches for that. nTelos support people still haven't figured out why my VPN connection isn't working, so I don't know how effective any work I do Friday night/Saturday morning would be, since I wouldn't be able to check it in until after vacation. I'm going to try calling the guy who keeps ignoring my emails about it this afternoon when I get home to try and troubleshoot the thing. Also have to get some stuff done for The Lock Up, and Concourse is having issues with one of their servers so I can't get to their reports. Bleck what a day. The intermediary guy for concourse (the one who writes my checks) is having some kind of email problems, his emails to me seem to be falling into a black hole somewhere, so I'm not getting any information from him. He needs to work that out, it is becoming a real issue. I dunno what the problem is, I have 4 different email accounts, and his stuff isn't getting to any of them. Did I mention I'm really looking forward to vacation?

Well, today will be an interesting day schedule-wise. Debra had to leave at 6 this morning, and my wife has to take my oldest to school early for a field trip. She has to take the Debra's baby with her, because I will have to get the kids ready for school and on the bus. I'll probably be getting to work about 8 this morning, so I will be doing some work from home before and after. Haven't had much time for overtime this week yet, so I am going to try to get a lot of time in today. We'll see what happens, as it's bath night for the kids, and vacation coming up Sunday, blah blah blah. This week hasn't been condusive to getting a lot of work done. I also have to work on Richmond Montessori's intranet, and hopefully my SQL Reporting Server client has provided my with the queries he needs run instead of my trying to guess what they are from data. Also got some new web site work to do for The Lock Up, so it will be a busy end of the week.

Busy Busy Busy

Well, the next couple of days are going to busy for work. Have deadlines coming up at nTelos while I'm on vacation, so I need to be done with all my stuff before that. I am trying to work at least an hour extra a night from home, I may try to put in 2 the rest of this week. Most of it is done, so I don't think it will be a problem. We are having one of the users take a preliminary look at it today, so I guess it depends on what they think.

Back to work

My wife got home about 10 last night, had some interesting things to tell me about the people at the wake and funeral. The wife of one of her grandfathers children had the nerve to complain about the fact that the woman who had been taking care of the grandfather for the past several years had his house in her name. This was at the wake! She had taken care of him for several years, he has either been getting alzheimers or dementia, something where he can't remember recent events, but can remember things that happened a while back. He gave the woman power of attorney for him when he first realized he was going downhill, about 4 years ago, and signed his house over to her. After the wake, one of his grandchildren (the child of the woman who wanted the house) wanted to get his mason's ring and some pins. This man had worn said ring for over 50 years and never taken it off. None of his descendants were masons, so they had no use for it, and he was complaining that he wanted the ring to remember him by, when everyone else wanted him buried in it. He proceeded to throw a fit and leave, so they deceided to bury him with the ring. My wife said she was ashamed to be related to them. Some people are just beyond belief.

Sarah has a cold now, the last of the kids to get it. Hopefully no one will pick up anything else before vacation. Joe had to leave for Ohio this week, but he was a big help with the kids while the wife was gone, watching the twins while I was out at the bus stop with the 3 older ones. Really looking forwared to vacation next week, I haven't been anywhere since last year about this time.

Anyway, back to work today after being at home 4 days strait. Deadlines deadlines. I have lots to do before vacation coming up next week, so I'm off to it, just wanted to take a minute to comment on the goings on.

Jobs

Greetings, I figured I'd start using a real blog instead of where I was posting. I got away from my job at Philip Morris, where I was supposed to be designing a system for them, but ended up doing user requirements gathering and write-ups. Ugh. I am now working at nTelos, with a group of people that know what they are doing! We are writing a sales automation web app, using Microsoft's UIP application block (an implementation of MVC pattern), and several other frameworks. The first place I have worked (and I have a history) to actually reuse code instead of rewriting everything over and over. I am actually enjoying doing the work. I am signed on as 6 month contract to hire, but they may be going through a change of ownership near the end of that, so I may want to extend the contract so I don't end up working tons of overtime for a conversion and not getting paid for it.
I talked with a guy from the Darden graduate school of business at UVa on Friday about doing some part time work for them. I'm not sure I will have the time at this point, as nTelos has deadlines coming up, and I am going on vacation next week. That and they can only pay about half what I charge, but there is the possiblity of getting some good exposure there, so that might make up for the pay. I probably won't be able to work on this project, but the guy said he liked my qualifications, and even if we couldn't work something out on this one, he would definitely like to have me come in on future projects.

I have been slacking on getting the building of my house started. I need to get the ball rolling on purchasing a small piece of land from our neighbors that will sit between our land and the road so we can put our driveway in. Hopefully once that is done we will have the house done in 6 months or so. It will be good to get into our own house again. We have been living with my sister-in-law for the past year so we could save up some money for the house, and while it's not been too bad, I am ready to get back into my own place, and I'm sure the kids are as well (if you don't know, I have 5 girls, age 2-9).

My wife's grandfather passed away this Friday, so she went to WV yesterday and today to go to the funeral. He was 94. I didn't know him all that well, but he was pretty nice from what I did know of him, although he seemed a bit rigid in scheduling of his day (he had to have dinner at 6:00, or he wasn't happy). He was a chemist for someone when he worked, I can't remember who right now. I was also doing a little chemistry work for Albright & Wilson when they were in Ashland before I got my real job :)

Anyway, that's it for now.