Everything Update For Josh

• Parallels - I installed Parallels the other day on my iMac and I have to say, its a really impressive product. Very fast, clean interface, works great. I have XP running in it for Quicken and eventually .NET development, and its working great. The image files aren't too big either. My only complaint so far is that there isn't an easy way via the interface to create a snapshot of a virtual machine (ie a copy of its current state for backup purposes). I eventually made one by hand by copying the image files but a nice interface would have been nice. My only other glitch, and this is very minor, is that with dual monitors, the transition effects when switching between OSs blinks a bit and isn't smooth. All well ;). Oh, and once you install the Parallels tools in XP, you can move your mouse straight into it and out without clicking or anything and it will send the signals correctly. That plus clipboard integration is pretty nice.
  
• Quicken - I installed this as I said above. Works well, I am still trying to get all my accounts setup correctly but I am happy. It did crash the first time I ran it (being the first program installed in XP, i had to laugh) but it has worked fine since.
  
• SuperDuper - My final installation of the past weekend, this backup software is working out well. I broke down and paid for the "full" version since I really liked it and it unlocked the "smart updates" for your backup partition and in-app scheduling. Now I have it setup to make a smart backup once a week thats fully bootable. A nice bit of insurance.
  
• Game Night - wed night was a Sark Game Night, we played Call of Duty at the Sark office. Fun times. I am pretty sure I was #1 (or 2) in every game so that was cool. With this, plus last week's Sark stuff and some large meetings this week I have gotten several lunches and dinners paid for recently. :-D
  
• Moms weekend - this past weekend my mom and Em's mom made their way into town to visit. Other than some freak snow showers and a whirlwinds weekend, I think everyone had a great time. Some of the highlights were showing the moms JungleJims (they were both pretty much awe struck by the time they made it to the bakery, which is less than half the store), a good but not quite what we expected dinner at the Glendale Pub, some good relaxing and talking, and a great breakfast at the Original Pancake House. I had some GREAT sourdough pancakes BTW.
  
• Em Test - Em took the Praxis this past weekend and thinks she did well. Not much left besides graduation!
  
• Taxes - This weekend I gotta finish up our taxes. While I wouldn't suggest it just for the tax break, spending a ton of money on tuition results in a nice tax credit. Lots of debt, but a nice tax credit.
  
• Broomball double header - Last two weeks we have had broomball double headers. First time we won both games, second time we lost both. 2/4 ain't too bad! :) Another game at 4 this week. Wish me luck.
  
• work - work has been kinda crazy this week. Without going into too much detail, we ended our previous "Sprint" last week and had a large demo of our current progress on Monday that went very well. On Tuesday I had meetings pretty much all day to discuss the things that went well/wrong in the last sprint, figure out what we want to do this sprint and plan for those things. The rest of the week had me working to understand my new integration point (integrating the billing system with the system that stores policy information, which happened to be installed before I was born ;) ) and hashing out the basic design of my parts in conjunction with a coworker. This is looking to be a work filled sprint, but at the end we will have the majority of the system in place which is exciting. Also, we are working to get end-t0-end testing in place for our integration points which may mean I will be able to actually call up the a voice response system and test my code from last sprint which would be cool.
  
• sark conf call - The Sark/Sogeti buyout officially happened on March 1st, so technically I now work for Sogeti US. I have been getting bits and pieces of information and details as they become available but still don't have a complete picture of what this will mean for the future. If I hear anything crazy I will post, don't worry :) We had a national conf. call on wed that was a lot of biz jargon and fluff, but at least gave us some names and the idea that things were moving forward. I should be getting benefit and policy info in the mail sometime this week....hopefully.
  
• go carts, happy hour - last week we had our yearly Sark monthly meeting at the indoor competition racing place. 30+ MPH go-karts == fun even if my side hurt all the next two days from one bad turn into a wall. I did great, except for 4 penalties. But one wasn't my fault I swear! I though I had gotten one so I went into the pit area behind another guy, but when the guy saw me he just looked at me strange and told me to go ahead. Then on my next lap a diff official-guy gave me a penalty for going in the pit without a reason! You believe that crap!? ;)
  
• seega - this project has stalled after its initial momentum, but I am hoping to work on it some this weekend. I have been just too buzy at work. plus...
  
• photessera - I have been working some on this project. I came up with what I think is a more efficient design to keep the memory footprint down, but its hinges on my ability to find/make a PNG encoder that can create a file via streaming input (so that the entire original image need not be in memory). I have been reading the PNG spec and about the DEFLATE algorithm but fear that I will need 2 passes over the data to create the file. I MAY be able to get away with a single pass but I will have to do some creative sampling prior or concede that the compression won't be at its best. I am really considering throwing something together this weekend so that I can run some tests on the tradeoffs of time/memory footprint/number and amount of HD read & writes/complexity/resulting compression. Its actually a very interesting problem.
  
• root beer - I got a new kind of root beer from JJs when we went last weekend. I will post a review whenever I get a chance to upload the pics
• SCDJWS - my studying has been stalled with the above, but its moving along. Actually I have having to pick up a number of the secondary technologies in my current project which should be helpful.
• Pics - I took some decent pics the other day, but haven't put them on the web yet. When I do there will be a post.
• Noah's Arc in our backyard - the other morning I was getting ready and was looking out the window at our porch at the various birds which were enjoying the fresh birdseed I had put out. Your normal bunch of misc small birds flying around. Then I saw our resident squirrel come by, but with a friend, and got to watch him try his best to reach the location of our bird feeder (he eventually did get it, he is quite the acrobat). To go along with the pair of squirrels, we currently have a pair of Red Bellied Woodpeckers, Cardinals, and Blue Jays flying around. I actually got to see all 4 pairs in a half hour time span the other day. It was pretty cool.