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.

 

 

---

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.

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 :)