Work, Trivia, [bad] Movies

This past week flew by. 3 days of TDD training at work + 2 days helping out a team working on changes for www.sothebyshomes.com. All in all work is going well. The softball team is going to start playing sometime in April and we have a company lunch in a few weeks. Oh, and I finally got to try the massage chairs (iJoys?) which rock! 10 minutes on one of those is a great way to end a day sitting at a computer.

Last night we went to a trivia night with my parents put on by the Kidney Foundation. Our table tied for 8th with 83 points (winning was 89) so we did pretty good. The announcer went too fast, but the questions were a good mix and there were some interesting categories.

Between last weekend and this I also saw two movies: I am Legend and The Mist. My thoughts and maybe some spoilers below.

Some people suggested I am Legend (the book) a while back so I was interested in seeing the movie when I had the chance. While not what I expected, and not for everyone, I thought it was a decent movie with an interesting plot. I was expected and would have liked some more back story about what had happened or how things got the way they did, but it was decent.

Now lets talk about The Mist. First things first: WTF? After seeing trailers for the movie I was expecting a plot that revolved around a group of people who are trapped and scarred out of their minds by some "super natural" situation that none of them understands ... and a movie about how they dealt with fear, leadership, understanding, personal beliefs, finding help, etc.

Check and check ... but then they showed what was in the "mist" = huge scary monsters with large tentacles, big bugs, etc. OK ... I would have left it a mystery, but whatever. The acting was ok and I was still watching but then the ENDING was just screwed up. I will give it to the director/writers that I didn't see it coming and an ending that isn't "happy" is ok in many movies ... but come on. They took it a bit far. At least for what I was expecting and hoping to get from it. Leaving me thinking WTF outloud made me remember watching Pi and Requiem For a Dream in the same night in college .... but at least those crazy plots were at least different.

Dunno about that one. :-(

Floods, Taxes, Easter, and Snow?

The past few days have been kinda crazy.

First was the flooding. The area of Missouri near St. Louis that we live in got a TON of rain in the last few weeks which culminated in the flooding of several smaller rivers near where we live. Luckily we live up on a large hill above the river valley, but its not that far. For those of you who came to our wedding in '05 ... the river that sits less than a mile from the church where we got married crested somewhere near 40' above flood stage (close, if not breaking, the previous record). A new town levee saved most of the businesses but not all and other parts of town near here had major flooding that caused a lot of damage. Close to home, much of the interstate I-44 was closed or limited to one lane for a day or two and highway 141 was completely closed in some areas. Pretty crazy stuff.

Saturday we had a huge meal to celebrate Em's Dad's belated birthday and afterward I finished our taxes. Stupid investments in companies that were bought this past year and earnings in multiple states made the work a bit confusing, but I think its all straightened away now. We will be getting a moderately sized refund which will go into the "buy-a-house-fund". ;-) (Oh and we got our first TD's of the "spring" which was delicious!)

Today was Easter. :-) The day consisted of going to church in the morning, followed by a "brunch" with Em's family (and a much longer than normal drive b/c the flooding closed the only direct route between locals), more food at my aunts/uncles down south and back home to visit with Em's sister before she goes back to school. A good day.

Oh, and to top things off .... this morning we woke up to snow coming down. The weathercasters didn't really mention that we were going to get snow, but there it was. It snowed heavily in small spurts all day ... with sunshine in between. Man I am ready for spring!

Busy Busy

As Josh pointed out today in his post about his new job .... I haven't posted in a while b/c I used to post when I didn't have something to do at work .... and now I do.

Actually, the first few days of my new job have been very interesting and unusual. Firstly I have to say that I am loving it. Its amazing how different you can feel when you work with people who are passionate about what you are and are constantly pushing themselves at it. The first 3 days have been unusual in that I haven't been formally assigned to a project yet b/c they are waiting to see if they are going to start up some new bigger ones in the next week or so ... so I have been bouncing around helping out where I can. Here are a few key points from my first 3 days:

• They weren't kidding when they said "casual dress". Today I wore jeans and a polo tucked in and was more formal than around 80% of the office (including people with a 3 letter title starting with C and ending with O)
• The breadth of technologies that people are working on from day to day is amazing. So far I have done the following work:
• Helped design XML schemas/transformation for transmitting National Sex Offender Registry data between government organizations and did high level design of probably web service based solutions
• Tested a sandbox development installation (VMWare image) for a client that wants to help teach their developers about Java EE and Ruby on Rails development and verified the tutorials for both
• Paired on a few bug fixes and user stories for a large .NET web application supporting a realtor's website
• My coworkers are committed to working hard AND having fun:
• one team one an internal contest and used their winnings to purchase two massage chairs and espresso machine for hte office.
• A group of guys play Halo 3 every day during lunch and sell snacks to keep the equipment up to date
• Softball team will be starting soon
• I got into work at 8:30 today which was before about half the office
• > 15 kinds of soda stocked in the fridge
  
• It seems like everyone has a way fancy laptop that they bring to work (MBP's, top of the line PC's, etc) and/or is using some crazy machine (a number of the higher ups as well as several developers have Mac Pro's at their desks with 30" displays) ... I want a laptop ;-)
  
• This is way better than what I was doing before
• The commute is longer in miles but shorter in time :-)
  

Other than spending time at the new job and getting used to a new schedule and commute, I have been trying to read, workout, and finish out taxes (crazy companies merging makes figuring out investment money crazy).

The other day I finished reading Test Driven Development by Example by Kent Beck. I posted a mini review on my tech blog. I also finally finished a book on house inspections that had a ton of great information about materials, construction techniques and possible problems to look out for. Next up is the second Harry Potter book and Freakonomics (see my reading list here).

Em was up in Chicago this past weekend with her Mom visiting her sister and by all accounts had a blast. I kept myself busy doing stuff around the apartment and catching up on things.

For now, that is all.

Baptisms, Buy.Com, Books, Brainz, and Good Bye

This past weekend was my cousin's twin's baptism. It was the first time I had ever been to one and was a very nice ceremony. The only problem was that my cousin asked me to film the ceremony with their camcorder (a nice Sony model, I would love to get one before a large trip or we have a kid), and thats a fair bit of pressure to be sprung on someone. Oh crap, is the thing on? Is it recording? How can I get a decent shot of babies from where I am sitting? Did I just say that out loud and now its on the tape? Etc. But I digress, it wasn't about me. It was a nice ceremony and it was good to see the family all together.

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Last Friday afternoon I ordered a new monitor for a family member from Buy.com. Sunday night I got an email saying they had "shipped" the item meaning they had informed FedEx to pick it up. Tuesday morning it was delivered. Not too shabby at all. Especially not shabby considering we had done the free bulk-rate shipping option and the original estimates said 1-2 days for processing and 7-9 days for delivery.

In addition to the very fast delivery I have to promote Buy.com and Google Checkout. This is the second time I have ordered something off Buy.com and both times the prices were very good. Both times the shipping was fast. Both times Google Checkout gave me discounts: $10 my first order for signing up with Google Checkout ... and $20 off this order b/c it was my "first order over $100 for select members". Who knew I was a select member, but fast shipping, good prices and $30 off without me having to do anything are all great!

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I have been reading a lot more lately than I did in the past few years and in an effort to keep track of what I have read, what I am reading, and things I want to read in the future ... I have put up this temporary solution. I am still looking for a better solution to help maintain the many lists I have these days (things to read, things to learn, to-do's, gift ideas, project ideas, etc) but this site is working well for the time being.

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A few weeks ago I stumbed upon this article from TUAW about the iEatBrainz application. The MusicBrainz service is a centralized place for people to access and store digital music information. The iEatBrainz application is a great little app that produces a digital "fingerprint" of a song in iTunes and compares the result against the MusicBrainz database. It then presents you with a list of probably matches, sorted by probability, of tag information for your song. With just a couple clicks, you can have the app search thousands of songs in your iTunes library ... find their tag info, and then with another click, go off and update them all. Admittedly, it takes a while to update thousands of songs and isn't perfect (it was very good though, some it couldn't find and other songs that were on multiple albums, it chose a different one than I wanted) but for those of you with iTunes libraries with many missing tags (maybe b/c the mp3's were gathered in a unusual manor ;-) ) it is a great resource. Warning ... the original article says that the service will be going down at some point, so check it out early or not at all.

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This is my last week at my current client and the last week working for my consulting company. On Monday I start work with my new company. Honestly, I am extremely excited and very anxious to see what it is going to be like. Its been hard wrapping up my current work but it will be nice to start on some new things.

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I have new posts at my other blogs as well.

Man .... Snow Man

We built this little guy this evening on our patio. The almost 10 inches of snow helped.

Mother Nature needs to go on intervention

... because she is definitely on something.

This past weekend it was 70+ degrees. Em and I even took in some sites at Forest Park downtown (although it took FOREVER to get there b/c everyone else had the same idea). Today, I came home early b/c after being at work for less than 3 hours there was 6-8 inches of snow on my car and no sign of it slowing up (also I have 3 days of comp. time I was going to lose if I didn't use).

At the moment it is still coming down pretty hard; for St. Louis standards at least.

Not a whole lot has been going on besides the crazy weather. Just work and such. I was going to go to a JUG meeting tonight on Adobe Flex, but it has been canceled. Hopefully the afternoon off will give me a chance to catch up on some of my personal projects that I have been putting off recently.

One thing I have been keeping up with is cooking new things. You can see a few new posts about my adventures in food at my other blog.

The only other thing going on is that tomorrow, March 5th, the next arc of the Dark Tower comic book series by Marvel comes out. I am eagerly awaiting this new set of stories b/c they are completely new and not directly based on anything in the books. The story of what happened after Roland and company left Mejis was only hinted at in several places. :-D While I am not crazy enough, especially given the weather, to venture out at 12:01 AM to pick up a copy, I will have to try and get one tomorrow some time.