Soccer and Junior Bridesmaids

Well, the last games of the season were yesterday. Brenna's team won, 4-0, Sarah's team lost 9-7 (a good game, high scoring, but we lost focus at the end), and Meagan's lost 2-0. Unfortunately Meagan's team didn't win a game all season. Brenna and Sarah's teams got there trophies for the year yesterday, but Meagan's coach was at a tournament, so they will be getting theirs Monday night at Roma's.

Meagan and Brenna had to go get fitted for their Junior Bridesmaids dresses for Chuck and Claire's wedding. They're getting married June 3 2006. Niki has set the date for her wedding, the weekend before Labor day 2006, can't remember if it's Saturday or Sunday. This is the house that they're renting for the relatives to stay in for the week. They're doing a beach wedding, should be neat.
Joe's father passed away on Thursday, he and Debra and Lissa left today to go up to MA. They were going up on Tuesday, so Joe is upset that he didn't get to see him again. Deanna says it's going to be strange without Debra and Lissa around.
Riley is doing really well with potty training, she has been sleeping in "big girl" panties for a while, and has only had a couple of accidents. We're still trying to deal with Eryn's pooping problem, we're giving her 2 doses a day of senokot to soften things up so she can get some control over things. She will pee if you prompt her, but she's been in pull-ups for a while so doesn't worry about it if you don't ask her. Hopefully things will get resolved in the next 2 months.

Soccer Saturday

Both Brenna and Sarah's teams won today. Sarah did a pretty good job, she still has some issues with following the person with the ball instead of kicking it away from them, but she did pretty well anyway. Brenna looked like she was playing some offense today, as was Meagan. Meagan's team was playing one that was undefeated, so the 4-0 loss wasn't too bad for them.
Brenna's coach had a pizza lunch for them, we were late because Brenna changed her mind on whether she wanted to go or not 3 times. I went with the kids and my parents, Deanna and Debra went to Potomic Mills with Lissa to get some Christmas shopping done. We had a good lunch, kids behaved well. Next week is the last soccer game of the season, so I hope Meagan's team wins so they can at least get one win.

Weekend

We had a busy weekend, soccer on saturday, camping in the yard saturday night, and Kings Dominion on sunday.

Breanna's team won, Meagan's and Sarah's both lost, Meagan was 3-1 I think, and Sarah's was 3-2. I saw some of the game before Sarah's, in the same league, the two best teams were playing, it was quite something to watch. They were really good for their age range. Meagan's team didn't play as well as they did last week, but they did ok. I didn't get to watch much of Brenna's game, it started in the middle of Meagan's, and Sarah's started right after it ended, so I had to go help them get ready. Games were late last week, 10:00, 10:30 and 11:30.

Because of the late games, I decided not to try camping at another location, as it was dark before Deanna got back from doing the grocery shopping this was a good plan. We had hamburgers and smores, the kids put the tent up pretty much by themselves, but the air pump broke right before they were done inflating the last air mattress. This was the one Sarah and I were sleeping on. I tried blowing it up, and got it inflated, but they have both a screw-on top and a valve for something, and I think I forgot to plug the valve, either that or it has a hole in it, and it deflated. I don't do well sleeping on the ground, I was waking up every hour or so.

Sunday we went to Kings Dominion, it was the last day of the season, and season passholders only. It was quite a bit less crowded than normal. The twins and lissa got to ride 3 or 4 rides, then we got lunch. After lunch Meagan, Debra, David and I rode the Volcano, then Deanna rode the scrambler with Brenna and Sarah. Meagan and David then went to ride the Rebel Yell and Hypersonic, Deanna and Sarah rode the Triple Spin, and the rest of us rode on the Carosel. The last thing we did was see the Spongebob 3D movie and get ice cream and funnel cake. Everyone had a good time, we had a pretty good weekend.

My mom was finishing up her certifications so she could teach water aerobics, that's why the kids were home, and she finished successfully. Congratulations Mom!

I got a call from my cousin Niki yesterday, she got engaged (I presume over the weekend), and is going to be getting married this summer. I jokingly asked her when the kids were coming (joking since she's always said she's not having any), and she said the were going to probably start trying next winter! Cool! I know Kenny is happy, as his son is also getting married this summer, both kids getting married in the same year. Congratulations Niki!

Happy Birthday Dad!

My Dad had his 58th birthday yesterday on Samhain, happy birthday dad!

Sarah's team played the only undefeated team in her league, they did pretty well considering. They have improved a lot since they started. Sarah has a lot of fun with it, she just needs to work on kicking the ball instead of chasing it. Unfortunately, they won't be having any more practices, as it will be getting dark about the time practice is supposed to start. Brenna's team won 4-3, and she got to play a lot during the game. She still needs work on going after the ball, and on running. Meagan's team played the Stars yet again, I think they have played them 3 out of the last 4 games we've been to. They lost again, but Meagan is continuing to improve every game. She was playing offense this week, and did pretty well, but didn't score. I think Meagan and Brenna would both benefit from running track, maybe Meagan will be able to do that for the middle school next year.

Well, everything is done for the mortgage except for the actual closing itself, for which I need to pick a title agency and give their name to the bank. Once that is done the building will get rolling. I'm about to make the call for that now.

Flock

I just downloaded the Flock browser, based on the source for mozilla firefox. It has blogging built in, and rss aggregator, integration with del.icio.us, and a couple other cool features, but it is currently pre-beta. It seems pretty fast loading web pages, so we'll see how it goes.

Technorati Tags: browser, flock, beta

Eryn and Riley on the beach. 

Vacation photos

Meagan, Brenna, and Sarah on the beach 

Vacation

We got back from vacation last night. We all had a great time, although
the first couple of days weren't too fun for me. The first day I got a
migraine, the second morning around 5am I got a kidney stone. The
doctor there said it is described as "incapacitating" pain, I'd have to
agree with that. The doc is also a pilot, and he said they ground you
for about 6 months if you get them, because you'd be in trouble if you
had a recurrence in the air. Other than that we had a great time. The
water was cool, but not too cold to swim in, so we had a good time body
surfing the waves. We went to Jockey's Ridge, I got some pretty good
pictures there that I'll post later. We played a round of putt-putt,
and went to the pool at the rec center almost every night. The three
oldest girls got to go shopping with Deanna and Debra an afternoon each,
they all enjoyed that. All in all a good vacation, I'll post pictures
in the next couple of days.

Soccer Saturday

Meagan did much, much better playing soccer today. She kept after the
ball, and was paying attention to the game the whole time she was in.
Unfortunately they were playing a team that had them by a good bit in
average age, so they lost despite playing a good game. Meagan took it
better this time, and enjoyed playing, so I think that's good progress
also. Brenna's team tied, but Brenna didn't get to play much, she's not
very fast and doesn't go after the ball. Sarah's team was playing the
second best team in their league, AND evidently completely forgot how to
play between our early practice on Monday and the game. They were
running around the ball instead of kicking it. Ah well, they did have
fun, that's what counts.

After the game we took Riley and Eryn to get their hair cut. The cut
off about 10 inches from each of them, it's around the bottom of their
ears now. It looks really cute on them, I'll post pictures after we get
back from vacation.

Vacation

Well, its off on vacation I go.  Should be having 3 soccer games tomorrow, hopefully Meagan's team will win this one.  After that the 3 older kids are going with my parents for the night, and the rest of us are going to finish getting ready and pack things up to leave in the morning.  I am hoping to get in a night or two of camping while we are down there, as it's supposed to be sunny until next weekend.

Robotic Car

http://www.blog.speculist.com/archives/000478.html
Wouldn't we all like one of these?  I think we are a number of steps closer due to the DARPA Grand Challenge.  I've been following the Virgina Tech Smart Highway project since it got started, it being my alma mater, and me hating driving AND having to drive about 90 minutes a day.  Hopefully that will soon be a thing of the past.   I'd love to be able to get in my car and tell it where to go too, I can think of a lot of things I could get done with an extra 90 minutes a day.  I could probably even get part of my work done, what with wi-fi being offered everywhere.

More Rain

Meagan and Brenna's soccer practice got canceled for the night.  Sarah's coach moved her practice to last night, so she at least got hers in.  It's looking like rain here for the rest of the week, but Saturday looks like it's going to be sunny, so they will get their games in before we go on vacation.  Sarah's team is starting to really understand the game, we've been working on getting them to pass the ball, not get in each others way, and to play defense.
We're going to Corolla on vacation starting Sunday.  I need to get our tent dried out so we can get some camping in during the week.   We have a house directly across the street from one of the recreational centers they have in the communities.  The weather is looking good for the week down there, sunny through next Thursday.
Work is going pretty well.  I'm doing some that is at least more interesting than converting procedures from MSSQL to Oracle.  I am working on converting an application from VB6 to .Net that talks to a DTC (Depository Trust Company) mainframe.  We have two options to talk to it now, using files (basically EDI), or message queuing.  I am, of course, hoping for the latter option, but the odds are currently very much against it, as their data team does mostly file moves, and doesn't know much about message queuing.  You'd think a large company like Wachovia would have people that know about pretty much everything, but I guess not.  I'm trying to read up on security some more in my spare time, I'd really like to get a job in that area until I can move into the bioinformatics or biotechnology fields.

Rain

Well, soccer got rained out on Saturday. On the good side we got to finalize the plans for the house, and it looks like we signed our contract at just the right time, as we avoided being screwed by the cost of materials increases due to everything going to Louisana. I also heard that FEMA has bought up all the used recreational vehicles. Don't even get me started on that. My parents were planning on doing a cross country tour next summer in a used RV, so I don't know if they're going to be able to go that way with it.
I saw a summary of the Kaine vs. Kilgore debate that was on TV, which finally allowed me to make up my mind who I'm voting for. After looking at their web sites and what they have done, it was very difficult to tell a difference between them, fortunately something came out in the debate, Kaine and Warner raised taxes in order to balance the budget, so I'm voting for Kilgore. I'm all for a balanced budget, but I don't think we need to be raising taxes to do it, there are plenty of programs and wasteful spending that can meet with the axe instead of raising taxes.

Parents back from vacation

My parents and one of my cousins got back from vacation last Sunday night.  They spent a week with my great-aunt in Michigan, in the "north woods."  My great-aunt has a cabin on a lake, where they spent the week.  There is no electricty and no phones, they cook with gas or on a grill.  They had a good time, and really like the area.  They went to Mackinaw island and a bunch of small towns in the area, got some really nice pictures.  We are going to go visit them next summer, and maybe stay in the cabin in the woods as well.  

Front picture, from the left, Meagan, Brenna, and Sarah. 

Picutres of the girls soccer uniforms, Meagan's team is the Sharks, Brenna's is the Soccers, and Sarah's team is Spike. 

Soccer Saturday

Kids and I went camping in the back yard last night.  This was the second time, and I think we're ready to go to a campground next time.  We got new sleeping bags for the kids, as they youth ones they had are only good down to 50.  The tent was a bit smaller than I thought, and only 3 of the 4 air mattresses fit in the tent, but we did OK on just the 3.  I cooked hot dogs and hamburgers on a little propane grill while the girls set up the tent.  They did pretty good with it, only couldn't figure out how to get the pieces to hold the front and back flaps up, which even took me a few minutes to figure out how to do.

We had soccer games today, 2 at 9 and 1 at 11:30.  Sarah's team won, but we only had 3 players, and the other coach was a really good sport and gave us 2 of his (he had 7) so we played 5 on 5.  I think one of his players scored as much as the rest of ours, but half of them were for the wrong team.  He would just kick it into any goal whenever the ball got close to one.  It was a really fun game, all the kids had a good time, I don't think they cared if they won or lost, I don't even know if they knew when the game was over, which is how it should be at that age.  Meagan's team is getting better, but they couldn't get the ball into they goal, they lost 2-0, but kept the ball on the other teams side of the field most of the game.  I didn't catch most of the game, I help coach Sarah's team, so I only got the last 15 minutes of Meagan's.  Deanna watched some though, and what I saw was the same, she is still not going after the ball, just walking around most of the time.  Brenna's team played at 11:30, and they were up 2-0 after the first half, but ended up losing 3-2.  Brenna is doing a better job keeping her mind on the game, but she still needs some work on running, that or working on where she needs to be, as I don't think she's ever going to be the fastest player.  She does pretty well on defense, keeping between the ball and the goal most of the time, but once someone gets behind here, she can't catch them.  The coach put her on offense, and she doesn't do so well with that, she's a bit timid when she's playing the game, but not when we practice at home, hopefully that will go away with experience.  They all said they had fun, that's the most important thing, but I do hope Meagan's team wins one soon.

RateMyProfessors

http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,68941,00.html

I love this idea, maybe this will get some of the profs that are just there to do research out of the classrooms, where they stink.  If you're just there to do research, go find a job in industry, academies are for students to learn, not sports, not professors pet projects, not clubs, and not social groups.

Robie believes universities would be better off collecting formal faculty ratings and disclosing them only to students.

Swapceinski, who got the idea to start RateMyProfessors following a bad experience with a professor at San Jose State, doesn't think that's a bad idea. However, he fears students would withhold negative opinions if the university is the one collecting evaluations.

But Robie insists there's a better solution than putting evaluations online for the world to see.

"What other job are your performance records up to public scrutiny?" he asked. "Just because many professors are being paid by taxpayers, does that mean they give up all rights to privacy?"

Absolutely, everyone in private industry has performance reviews where their employer reviews how they are doing, why should that be different if you are employed by taxpayers?  That means that the taxpayers should be able to see how you are doing in your job.  If you are going to take a position serving the public, the public should be able to find out how you are performing in that position.

Space Elevator

http://www.space.com/businesstechnology/050923_spaceelevator_test.html

This looks pretty awesome, once someone actually completes building one, it will dramatically reduce the costs and dangers of getting people and materials into orbit, and once in orbit, you are "Halfway to Anywhere in the Solar System".  I hope to go up one day, and maybe even to mars if the price is right, can't afford that yet though.

Test picture blog

Ok, here is my first picture blog. This should be of an osprey nest I took over the summer while we were at Naylors beach off the Rappahanock river. If this comes out ok I'll be posting more. 

Weekend

Had a busy weekend, soccer Saturday, Sarah's birthday on Saturday, and
we went to the state fair today. The kids did well in soccer, Sarah's
team won 6-3, Brenna's team won 8-0, and Meagan's team lost 5-1. Meagan
got hurt twice, she caught one on her fingers, hyper extending her
wrist. Then she got hit in the eye, and then hit in the head while on
the sidelines. Not her day. Her wrist swelled some, but went down with
some ice. It was still sensitive to move this morning, but I don't
think she needs to go to the doctor. Deanna seems to think otherwise,
but we'll see how she does tomorrow.

The kids had a good time at the fair. We took the twins on the kiddie
rides first, then had some lunch, and then I took Meagan and Sarah to
ride on some big rides, Brenna didn't want to go, she's not big on the
roller-coaster rides. We got in 3 rides, then went back to meet up with
the rest of the group, and then everyone got to pick 1 more ride before
we went home.

My parents left for Michigan right after Sarah's party, they'll be gone
for a week up to the north woods.

I'm signing up for Picasa and Hello, so hopefully I'll be able to get
some pictures up on the blog before long.

Rick's 40th

Just got an evite to Rick's 40th birthday, should be fun!  He's one of my friends from the old Whitlock group, one of the quake gang.  He was the only one that consistantly had a chance to beat me.  Ahh, I miss the good old Quake days.  I added about 10 people to the list on eVite, hope I didn't over do it, but his wife said the more the merrier.

Soccer

Kids all had their first Soccer games yesterday, they all played well, but all lost.  Meagan got bent out of shape over it for a while.  I wouldn't mind if she lost a bunch, she needs to learn how to have fun whether she wins or loses the game.  I think she had fun playing, just got mad that they lost.  Brenna did ok, but she needs some confidence and to learn to go after the ball.  Sarah's team did really well, the other team had a ringer that kept running away with the ball and scoring for them, but we did ok, lost 5-3.  Sarah did good, she knows to go to the ball and which way to kick it.  The whole team needs to learn defense when the other team starts running away with the ball.  They all go running toward the goal, even passing the ball carrier, but don't know to kick it away from them!  We all had a good time, but it was a bit hot, got up to 34, and sunny with no shade.  I'm going to look for a couple goals to practice with them, one the big girls size and one Sarah's size.  I'm going to start leaving at 3:00 again, I was working some overtime to make up for the day I missed, I've made up all but 3 of it, so I can go in 30 mins early for a week and have it done.  Should be able to get in some practice then before we have to come in to let Deanna fix dinner.

RMS, etc.

Well, the RMS portal kinda fell through.  I didn't really have the time necessary to get the parts they wanted working 100%, and BigOak didn't get a chance to review it until the week before they wanted to go live.  RMS decided to keep the calendar part, and I refunded the rest of the money to them.  I'm still going to work on when I have time, but that won't be for a while I think.  Getting the house built is going to take quite a bit of time and attention.  I need to find time to go to dinner with a guy that contacted me middle of August about doing some freelance work.
We got the location for the house marked, and the loan stuff is going through.  The land should be getting percolation tested sometime in the next 2 weeks. I just got in touch with one of the people I used to work with at Albright & Wilson, and one of my friends from Patrick Henry.  They guy from A&W is down in Baton Rouge, LA, they came through the hurricane ok, lots of wind and rain, but they aren't below sea level.
I've been keeping in touch with one of the guys from Amentra that I worked with at NTelos, Rich.  We like to discuss politics, he sends me the dems viewpoint, I send him the reps.  We get into some pretty good discussions.  Haven't talked to the others that much, email once in a while.
I'm going to lunch with the old Dynex gang this Friday, haven't seen them in about a year now, will be good to talk with them again.  I went to lunch with the Suntrust gang when I first moved over to Wachovia, they're still putting up with the same old stuff.  Glad I got out of there, just wish i had done it sooner.
Wachovia is going ok, nothing too exciting at the moment, converting an app from MSSQL to Oracle, and can't use stored procedures, which is somewhat of a headache.  Dunno if they are going to keep me on after this project or not, we'll see.  One of the PM's there is looking to maybe form a startup after his contract is up, and may be looking for .Net people, not sure if I want to do that or not, but if it takes off there may be some money in it.

RMS Portal

Well, RMS work not going so hot. They wanted it to be complete by the time school started this year, but that's not going to happen. They're going to buy the calendar piece that is finished, and maybe the messaging piece that is finished as well. I'm going to keep working on it, I still think it can be sold once it's finished, and maybe they'll buy it in pieces if I can get them done fast enough. Don't know if I can do that though, because the house is starting to take off. I've been working on getting everything worked out for getting that going. We sited where we want the house on the land, and now we just have to look over the contract and sign it and they can start working on it

Been a while

Whew been a while. I've been a little busy since my last blog. I have moved on from nTelos, got the feeling they were jerking me around, were just going to keep me on until the project was done, then let me go. They made an initial offer in May or so, coming in way under what I told them it would take to bring me on permanent before they even brought me on contract. I gave them my counter offer 2 weeks later, after doing some research on what would be fair. I didn't hear anything back. I contacted my contract agency, and they set up a meeting with me and my nTelos supervisor and one of their reps. the supervisor blew off the lunch, thats when I decided not to renew the contract when it was up on June 30th. I didn't tell them until June 29th, since they were so timely in renewing my contract on the day it was up on the prior two times the renewal dates cam e up. Ahh well, bridges burned. I have moved on to a contract at Wachovia for about 20% more than I was getting at nTelos, so I'm not too worried about it.

We've finally made substantial progress on getting the house built. We have the land in our name, we have plans, and once the land is completely marked we can site the house and break ground! One of my cousins works for a construction company and has offered to clear the land for the cost of renting the equipment, so that will save us some initial cost up front. The builder said it should be done in 5-6 months, so hopefully we'll be moving in early next year.

I've signed the three older girls up for fall soccer, I hope they enjoy it. I'm going to try to find a kung-fu school nearby as well.

Moving to OSS

Well, I've successfully made the move to open source software for my email, web browser (I moved that a while ago), calendar, and RSS Reader.  I moved to Mozilla products for everything but the RSS Reader, I'm using Thunderbird for email, Firefox for browser, and Sunbird for calendar and tasks.  I was using Thunderbird's built-in news and RSS reader, but on the last side job I've been working on I've been modifiying RSS Bandit, and it has a great many more features than Thunderbird does, so I've just switched over to that.  I'm looking into moving to Eclipse for my development environment, but I'm going to need a VB.Net plugin for that, and I haven't seen one out there.  There is a C# one, but I do some stuff in VB as well as C#, so I'm going to have to keep VS.Net around for a while longer I think.  I already use NAnt to build, NUnit for unit tests, and I'm looking at NCover for unit test coverage.  The only thing I really miss is the Journal feature in Outlook, I used to use that as a timer for projects I was working on, but I'll find something for that, tho I wish it was built in to Sunbird.  Maybe I'll look into writing a plugin for it.  I was starting a calendar app on sourceforge, but I could never get CVS to work to connect to them.

On the home front we had an un-birthday party for the older 3 kids on the 14th.  We rented a moon-bounce, cotton candy machine, and sno-cone machine.  We had about 20 kids over, they had a great time.  This weekend my Great-Aunt Donna came in from Michigan.  One of her grandchildren is turning 13 and is having his bar-mitzvah today.  We're going to be doing stuff with them tomorrow and Monday.  Brenna got accepted to the TAG program for next year at her school.

I've been negotiating with NTelos about my job requirements, I gave them a deadline of June 6th to either have my offer ready, or to provide a 6 month contract extension at $55/hour.  One of the supervisors at the contracting company I'm working for them through went there on Friday to talk about the contract.  He invited me to go to lunch with them, but I had already planned on taking the day off, so I couldn't go.

Rent A Coder

Got my first bid from Rent-A-Coder last week!  It was pretty easy, setting up an RSS feed for a site that already had their articles being stored in SQL server, so all I had to do is create the query and format the results to XML RSS 2.0.  Didn't make much off of that, but the guy that I did the work for is giving me more work.  Also gave me a 10 rating on RAC, so that should help toward getting more work off the site.  Still have a long way to go in that department though, I think.

Have a deadline for RMS of end of the month, but I am pretty much done with all the back-end work on it.  I have all the security and classroom page stuff set up, just need to get some schematics from the guys at BigOak and put that together and it will be done.  We did add a couple of minor things for the issue of having students in the database.  We're going to allow the parents to add their children to the site if they choose to do so, that way the issue is in their hands on whether or not their kid shows up on the site.

Grrr Blogger

Stupid mail in blogging is really starting to piss me off.  I got back reject messages for every mail I sent in with subject :RMS and Patternfall.com.  So I go to my blog site today, and what to I see?  The stupid thing had posted once for every time I sent it in.  I hope they get the mail thing fixed soon.  On the plus side, I got the host for RMS to create an application out of the directory I needed to get the UIP to work properly.  Also had to somewhat kludge it though, as I now need the bin folder both in that directory and under the root.  No biggie though, doesn’t take up much space, just have to remember now to make sure to update both locations.  The one under the root is almost exclusively for the calendar, at some point I will pare down the dll’s in there to only what it needs.  Now I need to go in and sync up the tables and stored procs that are supporting all this new functionality.  Going to do that tomorrow, my connection from home is just too slow for it.

RMS and Patternfall.com

Well, I had a relatively productive weekend finishing up the development work on Classroom pages.  I now have all functionality completed for them, only piece left is to integrate it with the security model.  All was going well until I deployed it up to the production web server.  For some reason, the UIP doesn’t appear to like the application running out of the root of the web site.  I would get screwy results where it would either send me to http://<path to the view>, or if I put the entire path to the view in the config file, I would get stuck in an endless redirect loop.  Talked to one of the guys at Amentra today, said that it had something to do with the UIP doing a string compare to “/”.   Going to have to go dig through the UIP source to see WTF is up with that.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get it fixed tonight.

 

On a plus note, Patternfall.com domain FINALLY came open to purchase, after it had been expired for about 90 days.  I bought it, then had trouble with DYNDNS already having it in their database under someone else’s account, but they took care of that pretty quickly.  I pointed my MX records over to brinkster (where the website and mail is actually hosted), but am getting an error that it doesn’t relay for that address.  The live-support guy told me to wait a while for servers to update.  I personally don’t think that’s the issue, but we’ll see tomorrow morning.

Whitlock Reunion

I went to a reunion last night of a bunch of people that formerly worked at Whitlock EBS.  It was pretty cool seeing the group again, but a number of people that I wanted to see there didn’t show up.  No great loss for me, cuz I see them semi-regularly anyway.  I may have made a couple of business contacts, so might get a little more side work shortly, don’t know how that will turn out.

 

RMS site is coming along, a little more behind than I’d like, but it’s getting there.  I have the GUI for everything that needs to be done on the classroom pages, now I just need to finish the back end of it, saving to the database and all, and it will be done! J Yay!  Once that is done I will put it up on the site so they can take a look at it.  I’m going to need to work on security in that area, as to who is allowed to edit the site, but I don’t think that will be much problem, I think I just need to limit it to who the group “leader” is (in this case the teachers of the class).

FW: Working Out

I’m trying a different workout this week, based on research that I read saying that spending more time at the gym strength training doesn’t get you additional benefits.  I was doing a 3-set circuit of the gym, I am cutting that to 1-set based on the research, we’ll see how it goes.  I’m using the time saved to do some Yoga in the morning, mostly stretching hamstring and glutes.  Haven’t been following my diet too well this week, did ok Monday and Tuesday, but not so good yesterday.  I seem to have the most difficulty when I’m at home all day, and in the evenings.  I think I’d do better if the food just wasn’t available, but since it’s there, I eat it.  Argh.

 

Haven’t had much time to spend on RMS this week, hopefully I’ll get it done this weekend, but I’ve a feeling that will depend on whether the weather is nice or not.  I don’t think I’ll get a lot done if it is a nice weekend, probably be out with my parents and the kids.

 

One of my cousins from Michigan is coming down (over?) on May 26^th and staying through the 31^st.  She has 3 kids, about the same ages as my oldest 3.  We had a good time with them the last time they came down, met them in PA and spent the day there, went to Hershey park, some garden near there, then headed to my parents.   They are coming down for one of my other cousins child’s Bar Mitzvah.  I didn’t even know they were Jewish, probably because I wasn’t much of a religious person myself, though I am starting to change my mind somewhat in that area, but that could be a book into itself.

Weekend

Well, had a nice weekend, the weather here was perfect, upper 60’s to lower 70’s all weekend (a bit windy on Saturday though).  Went to my parents’ house with the kids Friday night for dinner, then we went to Goochland County Park with them on Saturday and had a picnic lunch.  After that we went to the YMCA to swim for a while.  We got back home around 5:00.  We took a break from outside then and watched Star Wars: The Phantom Menace.  We had watched Episodes IV-VI the prior weekend, and they enjoyed it quite a bit.  Sunday the kids played outside for a couple hours before lunch, then we had lunch on the back deck, then went downstairs to watch a movie while the twins took a nap.  Sarah laid down on the couch next to me and fell asleep for about 2 hours also!

 

I didn’t get to work on RMS over the weekend as I wanted to, but I did something much more productive and fun.  I have about 1/3 of the admin part done for the classroom pages, just need to be able to add new controls and change the ordering of them.  Hopefully I’ll have that done by the weekend, and I can upload it to the production server then.  Once that’s done I’m going to work on getting some documentation put together for RMS, then I’ll work on any reports that they’d like to have.

House, Yay!

Finally starting to get somewhere on the house!  I spent yesterday morning wandering through Louisa, first talking to a real estate attorney so I had some clue as to what needed to be done for the land transfer.  Then I contacted a surveyor to come out and to the survey and make the new plats.  That is supposed to take about 4-6 weeks.  Once that is done we’ll be able to have them start building, so I’d say we’ll be breaking ground mid May to early June.

 

Not much else going on at the moment, getting close to completing the next phase of the RMS project, which will include the customizable pages for each classroom.  I’m shooting for having it done end of this week.

 

Getting a little bit of work from Harmony-Web again, QA work.  The Lockup has been saying that they are getting email errors.  Somebody turned off the error logging feature at some point though, so I had nothing to go on.  I turned it back on, and haven’t seen anything going to the log.

 

Wow, as I said that I checked the log, and lo and behold, there was a sendemail error!  W00t, now I have something to work with.

 

What a weekend

Ugh, last weekend has to be up for one of our worst.  Meagan had stomach flu or something on Thursday, lasted about a day for her, and she felt better on Friday and went to school.  Deanna gets a call about 10:30 from the school that Sarah has thrown up, so goes to get her.  Then another call at 2:30 that Brenna has thrown up, so she picks her and Meagan up, since school is over at that point anyway.  Then Riley and Eryn start with it.  Then Deanna gets it Friday evening.   What a lovely time I had cleaning up after 5 women with diarrhea and vomiting…

 

So I get it Saturday afternoon, thankfully it only lasted maybe 4 hours for me, Deanna was feeling somewhat better by that time, so I got to sleep through it.  Sunday everyone felt somewhat better.  This morning Meagan says she doesn’t feel good again, and then starts vomiting again.  Ugh.

 

So I actually needed to do some work this weekend on RMS, as I have training to do on Wednesday, and I’d like to have at least one of the admin wizards set up and working to show them how it’s going to look.  I think I might still make it, not sure though.  I’m reading through the UIP application block at the moment to get it to work for me.

More RMS

I got the solution completely restructured now, and I have all the layers defined, and a couple of functions working in each layer, right now centered on updating/creating new users for the site.  Now that the base stuff is complete, adding new functionality to it is easy, and I hope to have all the functionality they initially wanted complete by next weekend.  The only issue I can see taking much time is security on the pages, as that isn’t part of the framework that was constructed.  I’m going to have to look at incorporating that into the framework at some point, but right now I have another framework that I can use, it just won’t be as easy to use or maintain at the moment.  I’d go ahead and incorporate it, but that will take considerably more time than the kluge way, and I want to get the initially functionality out there ASAP.  I’ll have time to go back and retrofit it later.  Hopefully it won’t be too much data conversion involved, if any at all.

Still really busy at NTelos during the day, their rollout to production is scheduled for 3/31, and there is quite a bit to go before we’re ready for that, especially considering that we have to leave time for the ICMS (an AS/400 program) people to go through and check to make sure the stuff we’re putting into their databases looks correct, and make that billing cycles run.

School was out on Friday due to snow.  Once it had stopped, we all went out and played in it, the kids loved it, and the snow was just about perfect, just the right amount of wet to make great snowballs and snowmen, but not too wet to get you soaked and freezing.  We stayed out in it for about an hour before they got cold and ready to go in.  That was only the 2^nd real snow we’ve had this year, which is a little low for us.  Don’t get me started on global warming though, the fact that these morons pushing that the earth is warming up just drives me up the wall!  The fact that they have maybe 100 to 150 years worth of data, and the Earth’s climate probably changes in cycles that are at least thousands of years long doesn’t deter them from screaming that people are causing the planet to heat up dramatically.  This kind of politicized “science” drives me up the wall.  Oh well, I have bigger fish to fry than that for now.  Have to choose my battles, or I’ll have no time for any of them.

RMS

I’ve gotten a lot of work done on the RMS project I’ve been working on since June(?).  I have restructured the solution to incorporate all the parts that I purchased/obtained(open source) into something of a whole, still have a little bit of work to do there, but it is coming along quite nicely.  I am incorporating a lot of what I have learned from the Amentra team that has been mentoring the NTelos people.  The framework they have set up is quite nice to work with, and makes things very easy to maintain, and easily extensible.  This should go well with the project, as we are planning on customizing/extending it as necessary for different types of clients we plan on selling it to (schools, churches, sports teams, etc).

 

My contact at Harmony Web has sent me some info on a .Net project he may be getting, supposed to be hearing back from them soon, which would be nice as opposed to the VB6 work he normally has.  The guy from Derivia that I did some report work for sends me this nasty email the other day after I email him 3 different times about the bill that he hasn’t paid that is over 60 days late.  Says the quality of the work was poor.  I felt like writing back that if he actually gave me some requirements, and definitions to work with, and MAYBE if he actually paid his bills, well, then I may have been more inclined to do the work, but I restrained myself.  I just consoled myself by re-depositing the first check he wrote (90 days past due), since it was returned NSF.  In his defense he did send a cashier’s check, but my kids managed to get hold of it somehow, so he had to put a stop payment on it.  Supposedly his bank waits 90 days before they put the funds back.  I waited exactly 90 days from when he said he put the stop payment on it.  That was about 5 days ago, bastard better have the money in the account.  Ah well.

 

I found out about another DUG, this one in Charlottesville.  The organizer is a professor of technology at UVA, Eric Meier.  Mike was going to speak there tonight, but I don’t have time this week.  Hopefully I’ll be able to go to some of these meetings soon and make some contacts, I’d like to get some more contract work going.

untitled

Well, Deanna had a bad day yesterday.  She had a migraine pretty much all day.  Nothing seems to be working for them anymore.  I told her to tell her doctor about it when she goes in for her diabetes test.  She is supposed to call today to get in sometime this week for the test, her blood sugar levels spike whenever she eats something with sugar in it, so she may be pre-diabetic.  She has been doing the low-carb Atkins diet for a while, so that has probably kept it in check.  She also just had her thyroid checked by her gynecologist (although why he would be checking it I don't know), and had blood work done for that, and it checked out normal.  She is also doing a store bought test for pre-menopause, but you're supposed to test twice, about 2 weeks apart, she has another week to wait for that one.  She's trying to figure out why she has been feeling exhausted all the time.  The first test from the pre-menopause kit said she was normal.  I hope something is found soon, the constant exhaustion is driving me up the wall, because it makes her moody and bitchy.  I'm sure it's not pleasant for her either.

 

The three older kids all got their report cards recently, they are all doing excellent in school.  It's been relatively warm here recently, so I've been taking them outside when I get home in the evening.  I need to get a bigger swing-set for them, the one we have only has 3 swings on it, and it is pretty short.  I may do something like my dad did, and put a board up between a couple of trees to hang the swings from.  I want to get them some of the nice playground equipment that parks have, or some of the tube things that are in the fast-food restaurants.  We are planning an un-birthday party for them on May 14^th, we're going to rent an inflatable moon bounce, an snow-cone machine, and a cotton candy machine.  Deanna also bought a bunch of prizes to give out to them.  We're going to let them invite 5 friends each (not including siblings of friends, who can come as well), and any kids from the family that want to come as well, so there will probably be 25-30 kids there.  Hope to get my parents, Kim, and some of the other kids parents to stay and help keep them corralled.  They're going to love it, I'm sure.

 

 

Aging

I just joined the Methuselah 300 group.  Check out the web site: www.mprize.org.  You should also join up, give as much as you can, it's a worthy cause, aging is a disease no one has survived yet. Maybe soon that won't be the case.

 

 

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I have yet to have my meeting with the person at NTelos who is supposed to be hiring me.  My contract is up on the 28th, I hate when people leave something like this until the last minute.  I have a feeling that I'm not going to be particularly happy with what they offer me, but thankfully I have 3 other irons in the fire, so I don't have to take it if I don't want to.  I hope it works out though, I do like it there.  I've been doing a lot of updating of my links this week, I just discovered the virtues RSS news readers, and have been moving a lot of stuff I just had bookmarked into a RSS reader, hopefully that will save me some time reading, as I don't have to visit the sites now to know if there is something new on them.

 

Just got my corporate taxes paid, wasn't too bad, the dates said that corporate taxes weren't due until March 15, but I haven't been paying estimated taxes, so I don't know if I owe late penalties or not.  I'll try to talk to my accountant about it at some point, but I'm not too worried about it, I didn't owe that much anyway.

 

The house is still moving along at a snails pace.  I did find out today that the guy across the street is willing to deed us driveway access through his land to the road, so that will help out.  Now I just have to get the in-laws moving on deeding the piece of land we are going to build the house on to us.  That seems to be the sticking place at this point.

Busy

Whew, been a while since my last blog. Been Reeeeeaaallly busy at my day job, with a deadline last Friday. We almost even made it :P. I'm supposed to talk with the boss there start of Feb. about going full-time with them. I've got an interview process going on at company in Charlottesville as a backup in case they try to screw with me. I hope they don't, I like it there, however I am somewhat concerned about the resources they are going to have available. The full-time team on my project is going to be me and 2 other people, and the PM. One of the other people is still learning OOP, so they aren't going to be a whole lot of good for a while. I talked with the PM from Amentra, he says he's been voicing this concern for a while now, but doesn't get much response to it. They say they're planning on slowing development on the project, but the Amentra PM says they've been getting a ton of enhancement requests on the project already, and doesn't think the customers are going to take slowing down.

I also found out that the jerks who own the little piece of land between the one we're going to build on won't sell, and won't allow us driveway access. They were real jackasses about it too. Not sure why they're acting that way, its less than half an acre, and they don't have anything built on it, and you couldn't really build on it anyway.

The family has been doing well, we all got sick with a cold, and 2 of the kids got ear infections from it, but they did pretty well with it. The 3 oldest are still taking skating lessons, and are enjoying them. I'm glad they're doing that, keeps them somewhat active during the winter. I hope to be in our own house this summer. Would be nice to have a fenced yard that they can all go play in.

I finished up my MCSD.Net certification near the end of December, and I bought a Universal Subscription to MSDN. That one hurt the bank account :P Should come in handy though. Hopefully I'll have the RMS project completed soon, going to try to have all the parents put in the database this week, then get the kids in next weekend. Need to create a couple reports for them, but that shouldn't take long. Then I can start on what Big Oak wants to have done in order to sell the thing, and I can start refactoring to make it easier sell it in pieces and customize it. Also need to start working on a project for SunJester Studios. Haven't done much for Harmony Web lately, have to check in with them and see how things are going. I'd like to see something come out of Linked-In, but I don't know that I ever will. I'm going to have to give Rent-A-Coder another try, see if I can get something going there. I'd really like to be able to stay at home and work. My car is starting to give up the ghost, I'm looking to get something like an Altima, and we need to get a new van also, something that will carry 8 or that the passenger airbag can be turned off.