The longer you wait

The more you need to post, and the more you have to post, but the less you want to sit down and post. :-/ ;-)

Here is a long needed update going back to the beginning of October:

Josh's Wedding

From josh-wedding

Since most everyone who reads this was there, I will leave out the details and mainly say that Em and I both had a blast. Its always great seeing the old gang together and we will definitely need to find an excuse to do it again real soon. The wedding and reception were great (gotta appreciate all of the hard work Josh and Amanda did). Both Em and I were honored to be in the wedding and be able to celebrate with you guys. You guys are going to do well for eachother.

Regarding the decorating of Josh's car. I think, overall, it went over very well. However, it was over-engineered and under-delivered. I blame myself. Despite our best laid plans (much of which can be found here, and in numerous emails) as well as a random Yahoo Answers post by yours truly ... it didn't quite live up to what I had in my head. Still, as Josh agreed, we get points for using helium (thanks Kevin) and for being different than years past.

From josh-wedding

Oh and thanks to Kevin and Sarah for having us over to their new house and Chaz for driving us around.







Em's Cousin's Wedding

From stl

From stl

This wedding, while not nearly as fun for me, was a good time and by FAR the most over-the-top wedding I have ever been to. Being a family afair rather than a college roomate's lends itself a different dynamic, but they made up for it by far in extravagance.

The wedding took place at the St. Louis Cathedral Bascillica, the largest church in town which is insanely gorgeous. To go along with the beautifully huge church, the wedding party was equally huge and the music was excelent (violinist from the STL Symphony, pro singers, organ, harp).

From stl

The reception that followed that evening was at the StarLight room at the Chase Park Plaza overlooking downtown STL and Forest park. Cocktails and hore-devers were servered prior out on the balcony including a featured drink of the night (mojito) and monogramed napkins. Dinner was high-end (although I actually think I liked Josh's better food wise), great cake, some interesting toasts and a great live band (2 main singers, backup, real DJ, 1/2 guitarists and a drummer). All in all it was pretty crazy and a good time.








Apple Butter

Last weekend we made Apple Butter in our backyard as part of a continuing tradition in Em's family. You can read more about it and see pictures at my food blog.

From stl

From AppleButter2008

Semi-related ... Em and I went to Eckerts the other weekend to pick fresh apples (Fuji) and got ourselves two nice pumpkins from the field.

Jolie

From stl

Jolie is doing well. She was "sick" for a week or two in there but is fine once again. Since we had gotten her, she had developed a bad tendency to pull on our walks (still doing 3-ish miles a day) which we weren't helping. In an attempt to reduce this we considered buying a stronger "harness" collar for her so that she wouldn't hurt herself but on the great advice of one of her friends, didn't. She said that a harness would just allow her to pull harder without knowing it and suggested we get the Gentle Leader instead. Basically its a type of collar that fits a different way, moving the point of attachement to the front under the nose. This means that when she goes too far forward, her head is pulled around. While its not perfect it has made a HUGE difference and I would recommend one to everyone who is having a similar problem.

Attic Insulation

Our house inspector warned us that the insulation in our attic was a little light and that we might want to add some before winter. So, once the cold started to kick in I finally got around to calling a contractor Em's aunt recommended to get an estimate. After taking a look around he said that while he would love the work, that the cost of blowing in another 6" of insulation wouldn't be worth the amount of time it would take to recoup the costs. He said we were indeed a little low but that it would take 7-10 years to recoup the costs. So, we will wait it out and see if the heating is bad or not and then decide ... either way I really appreciated his honesty.

FYI ... his estimates (which I didn't compare to anyone else) were roughly $1k to blow 6" of cellulose covering an 1200 square foot attice given that we have joists 16" off center and a very low roof line (hard to move around in). Rough estimates done by myself at lowes suggested materials by themselves would cost $400 (30+ bags and free blower rental), plus I would need to borrow a ladder and get safety equipment ... AND there would be no telling if I could have blown it in consistently or how long it would have taken me.

Work

Work has been interesting. I finished my brief stint on a large government enterprise architecture project and have moved back to working on a .Net web application with one of my friends.

Last week we had a production push to move ~3 months of work to the live site which resulted in a very long night. We were set to start at 10:30 pm but didn't until closer to 11:30 b/c the other guy's car was over heating on the way downtown. The actual push took a couple hours b/c of a couple stupid issues that were eventually resolved and then the same coworker had car trouble leaving (borrowed car with what turned out to be a bad battery). Nothing to get upshook about, but it resulted in me not getting home until around 2:30. On a bright note, Jolie sounds like one huge pissed off dog at 2am when you wake her up by coming in the front door. Good Dog!

On an interesting and very cool note ... there is a good chance I will be traveling a good amount for work in the next few months. Our company is going to be starting a new phase of a project with a large health care company in California doing Agile mentoring and coaching. Myself and one other guy are the leading candidates for the last spot on the team. It would be 2 weeks a month ~35 minutes outside San Fransico for 6 months (through the begining of the summer). I would be coaching one or more teams, working with their PMs and Scrum Masters to support their agile adoption, provide guidance, help to identify problem areas and work with their developers to do better agile and solid OO work on a dialy basis without feeling the need to have numerous meetings for every little task.

To be honest, I am a fair bit anxious about the idea of being put into such a "coaching" role and of the large amounts of travel .. but I am lucky enough to have a wife who is nothing but supportive and am super excited about the opportunity.

To go along with my normal work, I also gave a Lunch-n-Learn talk a while back on a Ruby GUI tookit called Shoes and have posted a few articles on my tech blog about the LnL, some misc scripts that helped me at work, user acceptance testing with Selenium, and a new side project of mine (List-It).

Thats all for now....

Roller-coaster

Its been a roller coaster couple weeks.

Two weeks ago Em's grandfather passed away. It has been a hard time since then but luckily Em's family was able to all be together and through telling some crazy stories and finding tons of old photos were able to celebrate Peter's life instead of just mourning his death.

............

On some more cheerful notes, Em and I were able to spend a lot of time with her family and ate WAY too much food (if you order food for 50, only 30 end up being there, and the food could have fed 70, you have leftovers).

While Em's brother was in town he was the straw that broke the camel carrying the big screen TV's back ... meaning I finally broke down and got a really nice TV to go with our nice furniture downstairs. Circuit City had a great deal on a 46" Toshiba which when added to their 3-years free financing offer meant I almost had to buy :-). So far I love it and just need to figure out which HD service I am going to get now.

This past week I started work on a new project at Asychrony. We are working on designing and developing a large government organization's "to-be" Enterprise Architecture. I will admit its not work I ever thought I would be doing and I was a fair bit apprehensive at first since its no coding but the project has grown on me a bit. Its an amazing amount of work that our company is doing and will be changing a lot of things. Since me and another guy will only be helping out for about 4 weeks, we have been tasked with designing the metrics with which the next phase of work will evaluated. Not the normal stuff I do day to day and not something I want to make a career of but an interesting month of work.

Yesterday Em and I went out to the St. Louis Art Fair with some friends and had a good time taking in the art work and food from all around St. Louis and the country. Some of the artwork was downright amazing (and equally priced) and others made scratch my head. Unfortunately we didn't pick up anything but I did get re-inspired to do more photography ... if only I could find the time.

Tonight we ate well again. Yesterday we took Em's parents and grandma out to the newest Whole Foods Market and picked up a few things for tonight's dinner. You can read the details of the $31/lb cheese and Dill Marinated Lamb Shish-Kabobs over at my other blog.

Things have been pretty normal otherwise. Jolie is doing well although she is developing a cute/annoying habit of moving random peices of our clothing around the house when we are gone all day. Most of the time its just a sock one of us left out and she carried over to where she was. However, the other day it was a sandle and then a pair of shorts. None are chewed or torn, just moved. Also, and I will admit this is completely my fault, she is getting a little to comfortable on the couch with us. Yes, I am a big softy and let her up on the couch with me which she completely enjoyed. :-)

Static Maps, Euler, and Synergy

I have posted three entries on my tech blog
in the past few weeks.
Check them out here.

Officially Moved

With the help of friends and family, yesterday, Em and I officially moved all of our stuff from our apt to our new house. :-D

Firstly, a huge thank you to everyone who helped. Everything went much smoother and faster than I had anticipated.

That being said, the move went well. The only small hiccups were when we found that a piece of furniture we were picking up from Em's grandparents wouldn't fit in our moving truck standing up, when I found out that the moving-pads I had requested weren't in the truck, and when we got done so fast that my parents had to wait at the apt to give my aunt the couch we were giving her. All in all very minor things.

The house still looks big, but less big now that all of our stuff is in it. We did some minor unpacking the rest of the day but will still be doing it for the next week or so. Last night was our first night in the house and it was really nice waking up there. :-)

I will be sending out an email to those of you who read this and aren't family shortly with the new address.

..............

In other news, this past Friday our company had an all-employee all-day set of meetings off site. As scary as that sounds, the whole thing ended up being very good. Along with the normal status of the company information, sales pipeline presentations, etc, there was a focus on making the company better (however it might be). To that end, two separate sessions of Open Spaces groups were setup, each with arpox 10 simultaneous talks going on where the topics focused on ways we can make hte company better (e.g. ways we can improve our working environments, ways to deliver better software to our clients, ways to document what we feel our core skill sets are and ensure that all of our developers are at certain levels across the board, etc). I sat in on discussions about the core developer skills and training as well as on an idea for a company wide cross-project Testing-festival-day. After that there were several presentations/talks on business and tech topics. It was pretty amazing seeing ~100 people all discussing how they do their jobs and making real efforts to find ways to do them better. It was a long day, but a productive one.

Saturday, along with having our patio set finally delivered late (for a second time) in the middle of a freak rain storm, was the company picnic. They put together a pretty nice one including games, tons of catered food (including cotton candy and snowcones) as well as games and events for the kids. Also, as Em pointed out, you can really tell that the average age of the company is fairly young by the shear number of young children that were running around. Good times.

This week, its unpacking, getting our furniture delivered tomorrow, and finding out where Em unpacked stuff when I wasn't around.

Firefox Download Day (a little late)

Its today until ~1pm CST.
Get out there and start downloading if you haven't already!

Grab Bag and Insurance

Lots of little things have been going on lately

• I won my companies Cardinals tickets again (almost missed out b/c I thought they were for the following week) and went with Em and my parents. It was good time even if they lost.
• Our car is back to normal (and has been since the repairs). No lasting ill effects I am happy to report
• Work has been all over the place: hard at work developing one week, a week of documentation and writing installers for our code, and this week has been waiting on the client and helping out another group while we wait.
• I have been able to muster a small amount of time for some personal tech projects lately (some notes about them and work on my tech blog here)
• Last weekend Em, myself and several members of Em's family partisipated in charity walk at a local park for brain cancer research (a relative of Em's died from it) which was a good time and a great cause.
• I got 3 or 4 recruiters messaging me on LinkedIn in the past two weeks including one from someone who works for LinkedIn about a new team they are starting. Its always good to know you could get a new job if you needed to (and its even better to know you love your current one :-) )
  

I am sure there are other things I am forgetting.

Other than that the only big thing to report is that I have been looking into homeowner's insurance which I will probably be deciding upon tomorrow. Luckily it looks like the company we have our auto insurance through has some decent deals so that will work out well. Its amazing how complex the stuff is, how many options you have, and how its just one more thing to pay for when getting a house :-p

Once I decide I will post some details of what we got, or at least why I got/didn't get things.

Fun stuff!

The Earth Done Quaketh, and stuff

-- thank you Lewis Black

Yep, the other morning (as anyone who has seen/heard the knews in the past 3 days should know) there was an earthquake centered in south eastern Illinoise. While not real close to us in STL, any amount of close when talking about the earth moving violently up and down, is too close. The shaking didn't last long, but did last long enough to wake Em and I from our sleep. I only woke up enough to convince myself that whatever was making the noise wasn't my concern and to tell Em that "no, its not an earthquake, its probably just a train, go back to bed" .... evidently my brain functions when half asleep, just in the completely wrong way.

Other than being the first earthquake I have actually felt ... it wasn't a big deal. Many people I talked to sleep through it. This included my grandma who slept through it but thought she was going crazy when she found her china cabinet and grandfather clock doors open the next morning. She didn't immediately believe a friend she talked to on the phone, but while she was talking we got the first aftershock which quickly opened up her china cabinet doors again ... mystery solved.

The only thing new on the house front to report is that the sellers sent back our inspection report with what they were agreeing to have fixed. They agreed to everything except two things: 1) the plumber they talked to said that the downstairs bath was properly vented to code and would give us a signed letter stating it (fine by me), and 2) they aren't going to pay to have a new circuit run into the garage for the garage door opener (I wish they would, but not a big deal). Since they agreed to have everything else fixed, we went ahead and agreed and sent everything back. Oh, also we locked in our interest rate and got our final "correct" good faith estimate which was less than what we were expecting (yay) but a slight increase on the rate (changes every day, we ended up with 5 and 7/8%). Nothing to do now but secure home owner's insurance (or a letter stating that we CAN be insured), look at more appliances and furniture and start planning the move.

Work has been busy as ever. We finally got a signed SOW for our work with the National Sex Offender Registry so we have started on that (should be aprox a 6 week effort for two of us concluding with installation of web services at two states (TBD) and possibly presenting at a national conference in Baltimore). Its getting exciting, if not scary. I had to remember everything I knew about Java web services and learn a whole bunch of new stuff in a single day.

Also, we had our work's quarterly meeting on Friday (nice lunch and presentation) this past week. It was really nice. They discussed the financials (we are doing well and given the economy, very well over the past 2 years), recently awarded contracts, work in the pipeline, upcoming events, etc. Its amazing how much more ownership and connection you feel in a smaller company and how much you realize your actions actually effect the bottom line when compared to working as a contractor to a large international company. Plus its crazy and cool to find out that of the ~100 employees, we have 5 or 6 PHDs, a MD, the ex-CTO of NASA, and a 3-star General all working for us in various ways.

Last night Em took me out for a early birthday dinner to a Japanese/Asian Fusion restaurant we had never been to before and we had a great dinner (ordered way too much food, but thats an ok problem to have) and tonight she baked me a wonderful pineapple-upside-down cake and had our parents over for gifts (I got a new iPod-FM transmitter, a book on herb gardens, some clothes, and a large enamel-coated cast iron stock pot. ;-) )

Oh, and I went and hit some golf balls today for the first time in a few years. Happily I wasn't as bad as I thought I would be. Sadly, I was still very bad.

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.

Personal Update and Blogger Tip

Personal update ... not a whole lot new has been going on. Monday I had off (really the client had it off and my consulting company's office was close, meaning I get to take vacation time) so the long weekend was nice.

This weekend coming up we are planning on going out and looking at more houses (we are trying to kick this process into gear in the next few weeks, hopefully I will post more about it) as well as probably go and talk to a lender or two to feel them out for current rates, approval amounts, etc. I would like to talk to a few different lenders before we talk to Em's aunt who is a mortgage broker for Wells Fargo. She has been a big help so far and keeps reminding us that she is willing to give us a hand which we both deeply appreciate. My only concern is that I want a better grounding with some of the stuff before I talk to her so that I don't waste her time with "simple questions". I don't have a problem taking up the time of someone I don't know who is trying to sell me something.

Also this weekend Em and I are participating in a local Trivia Night. I can't remember who it is benefiting but it sounds like a good time (my first time going and participating ... should be a good time with some good food .... although I go TO WIN so the others better hold there own :-p).

...........

I have also posted several posts on my tech blog (ajax, mac troubles, etc), food blog (cranberry sauce, and chili) and puzzles (cryptographs) over at Puzzlexor. If you reading this and not those, go check them out now. I will wait ...

... Back? Great.

Now with the Blogger tip: If you click on the "B" Blogger logo at the top left of your blog when your on any non-dashboard page, it takes you to your dashboard. I just found this by accident.

It might not sound like much, but I often write parts of posts and come back later to finish them and from the main page of my blog there isn't any great way to get back to the dashboard to edit a saved post or edit other settings that aren't "customize". I could just click on either "new post" or "customize" but that seems stupid b/c its not what I want. I wish they just had a link to take you to your console for the current blog ... but all well.

New Ear Buds

I forgot to mention in last night's post that I my new ear buds were finally delivered yesterday also.

What new ear buds you might ask? I have wanted a nicer set for a long time now (I, along with many others, never found the ones that came with my iPod very good or comfortable, but wasn't willing to plop down a lot of money for a "better" pair without trying them first) but could never decide on a new pair or felt comfortable paying more than $10-$20 for them (which wouldn't have gotten me a very good pair). Luckily Em's brother got a nice pair from Costco on sale for Christmas and he let me try his and they worked really well. I tried to get a pair right after Christmas but they were sold out. Lucky again, he happened to find the same deal on Amazon.com the next day, so I ordered them.

What did I get? Ultimate Ears' Super.fi 3 in black.

Verdict? Granted I have very little to compare them to, but the sound is good/better than the old ones, the comfort is much better (although the way you put them on/in is a bit tricky at first) and the noise reduction is really nice (especially compared to the ZERO noise reduction that the iPod ones had)

Noise Reduction was one of my main conditions, since I most often wear them at work while listening to music and HATE having to listen to the conversations of anyone and everyone in a cube near me. At the moment I am wearing them and can't hear my keyboard or anything else around me. The only problem I am finding right now is two fold - they are so quiet that I have to turn my iPod down pretty much all the way or it sound really "loud" compared to anything else (not actually a problem) and that when/if someone wants to get my attention they are going to have to touch me on the sholder b/c there is no way I will hear them (probably scare the crap out of me :-p )

You can't beat that considering I purchased them with gift money :)

I'mmm Back!

I have finally finished the assignment portion of the SCEA exam and other than the short essay portion which I am taking Thursday morning, I am done!

Hurray!

I plan to post some of my thoughts about the exam and technical certifications in general on my other blog in the near future, but for now I am done. I don't plan on touching a computer tonight. That was a lot of work to do; partially b/c I wasn't prepared b/c I wasn't expecting to pass the first part, and partially b/c its an assignment with a lot of details that have to be worked out and verified (it easily took up 30-40 hours of brain time over the past couple weeks).

But for now I am done and can hopefully get to some other things I have been putting off such as several posts I want to do, Christmas shopping, finish The Hobit, etc.

I leave you, faithful readers who number in the high single digits (if you include myself), with a link to the Chicken Spedini recipe I used the other night to make a very yummy dinner for Em on her birthday.

Sooo Full

Tons of time with the family +
Thanksgiving +
second Thanksgiving +
leftovers +
lunch at the new Original Pancake house in town +
Em's grandparent's anniversary dinner =
lots of food.

Granted, there are worse things in life than having too much food ;-)

I was able to cross a number of my to-do list items off this week: adding window insulation things, errands, Christmas and birthday shopping, looking at a few more houses, etc.

On my uncle's suggestion, I went to an local IBD user group meeting which was very interesting even if it was way over my head. Its funny .... go sit in a room of people who track the stock market everyday, probable work(ed) in a field related to it, are heavily invested themselves and you find that despite all of there ideas, they still have no idea what the next big thing will be or can keep from losing some money. Granted, they seem to do much better than the average Joe, but not as much as you might think. Its also crazy to think about how despite how much faster a computer can track and analyze pieces of information, they still can't outdo there human counterparts by much when it comes to picking stocks.

Other than doing family stuff and errands I found out some very interesting news. You may remember that a while back I took the SCEA exam offered by Sun b/c they were beta testing a new test and it was free. I knew at the time that I would fail b/c I hadn't studdied and while the material was not very tricky, it involved knowing how and where all of the Sun sanctioned Java technologies fit together. Well, as it turns out, I passed! Yeah, I couldn't believe it either. To make a long story short (which will hopefully be the prompt for a longer discussion of technical certifications on my other blog) I now have the privelage of trying to pass the second and third parts of the certification. Without going into too much detail, the second part is a architecture assignment while the third is an essay regarding your design choices in part 2. Wish me luck! So far, I have even less hope for part deux. :-/

This week I have a ton of work to do while my boss is around trying to get things tied up before the holidays really hit and everyone is gone for weeks at a time. I am also waiting for a shipment from Amazon.com. I while back I asked for suggestions on how to use a $25 gift card I had received. Well, in the end I threw caution to the wind and purchased something on none of my lists. I ordered an immersion blender which I saw had been given high praises on America's Test Kitchen. Some of the other choices were more practical, but I love creamy soups and going back and forth between the pot and the blender is a pain. Not much other than that besides gearing up to watch more Mizzou football next weekend. Last night's game was great (I don't pretend to be anything more than a bandwagon jumper, but hey, its fun to watch teams with a hometown feel do well).

Hodgepodge

Main Entry: hodgepodge
Part of Speech: noun
Definition: mixture
Synonyms: collection, combination, goulash*, hash, jumble, medley, mess, miscellany, mishmash*, mixed
bag, mélange, patchwork, potpourri
>> Taken from Thesaurus.com

In continuing with my companies Employee Appreciation Week I have received the following things:

• Sogeti Frisbee
• Sogeti Mug
• Sogeti Keychain
• Sogeti Monitor-Picture-Frame-Thing
• Sogeti Badge Holder
• Lunch (x2)
• $25 Amazon Gift Card
• CEO talk/webcast w/ information on Sogeti's new employee incentive program starting next year and our YTD fiscals.
• Option to buy/sell PTO - Not going to, but its a nice option. Gotta keep my 21 days for vacations.

:-D All in all, not some bad swag over a few days. Especially the gift card (granted it can't buy you too much, but it buys exactly $25 more than a bag of rocks). The new incentive program is fairly complicated but boils down to a yearly point system where at the end of the year you are ranked against your peers of the same job level and the various top XX% get bonuses. The bonus amounts are pretty reasonable. My only problem would be that I should be promoted in the next few weeks which would mean I would be compared to others who have been in the higher position much longer. But all well, those are the breaks. I have scheduled my meeting with the Promotion Review Board for next week so wish me luck ;-).

One thing I forgot to mention about the NFJS conference from a few weekends ago was that I was lucky enough to win a brand new iPod Nano (new fat video kind). I was hoping for the iPhone but was very happy with the new Nano. It is truly amazing how far they have come in producing these things. My last one was a 2G or 3G 4GB iPod without color or anything and at the time it was amazing. My new on is half as thick (if not more), half the height, holds 4GB of music/video/photos on flash memory and has an exceptional color screen.

This morning I went over to a testing place a took the Sun Certified Enterprise Architect (SCEA) exam. No I didn't pass, nor did I expect to. A corworker found that Sun was beta testing the new exam for free so we signed up. It was interesting to take it without the preasure of passing and without studying. I was happy to find that the areas I hadn't work in I didn't know and the areas I had, I did. I have to wait ~6 weeks for the results but it was a worthwile hour and a half (they give you 4.5!).

On the food related front ... yesterday I had to get 2 fillings from the dentist. Em and I have been making the rounds at the doctors/dentists/optomitrists since we have moved. Getting the novacain from a huge needle wasn't pleasent but wasn't too bad. What was worse was how dry my mouth had to be during the procedure and the 5+ hours half my face was numb afterward.

Also, we were just sent emails about a charity Chili cookoff being held here at Monsanto in a few weeks. $3 for a bottomless bowl and free entry if you want to try and win the prizes. I may just have to make up a batch ;-)

Finally, a few of my college roomates (who also make up >60% of this blog's readers) and I have started up a new blog/website devoted to programming, logic, and math puzzles to keep our brains awake during work. Any and all are encouraged to participate. Check it out here.

Big Work Meeting

I had a rather important meeting with the head of our office today over lunch. Most of you who read this blog probably already knew this, and probably already know how it went, but for those of you who don't ... here are the details.

** To those of you who don't, please don't take offense.
I asked a few people for their advice on the meeting and the rest of you are family **

Today's meeting was centered around a few concerns I had regarding my career growth, my professional growth while on my current assignment, and some questions & comments I had about some office activities.

The meeting went very well. Ideal would have been a raise effective immediately. That didn't happen. But the next best thing did .... I confirmed that I am on track for a promotion around the end of the year that should come with a pay increase that will put me on track with my work, had all of my questions answered, confirmed that I will be helping out with our new college recruitment program and will be able to attend the NoFluffJustStuff conference again this year (this time in STL near the end of Sept.). So thats good. I still have to wait till the end of the year for the reviews to go through, and I have to do a fair bit of prep work and paper work before hand ... but thats the normal process. All in all, it was a good day. :)

New template and new blog

If your not reading this in an RSS reader, you will see that my blog looks different. I was playing around with templates when I realized I hadn't backed up my modified one (like they tell you to do) so I have settled on this one for the time being. I like the color, but still not the fact that all but a couple of the available templates are based on 800x600. I mean who really still uses that resolution!? Or more importantly who that I know who also reads this blog uses that resolution? That would be no one to my knowledge. I mean, my work LCD is a 19 or 20 inch wide screen with a resolution of about a billion x million.

As the title suggests, I also have a new blog to go along with the new template on this blog. Yes I am a follower (of Kevin this time) and have started a tech-centered blog at http://regenmytoolkit.blogspot.com/. For the one of you who gets the joke, Ha! For the rest of you rest assured its a funny one, but you would have to have worked with BillingCenter or ClaimCenter to get it and I am not sure thats worth the laugh.

As I briefly stated on the BForum, I had been toying around with the idea for a while now (as opposed to just tagging my tech related posts differently) but decided to take the plunge this afternoon while I waited for my app to rebuild. My intent is to post more well thought out and descriptive posts about tech related subjects over there (programming languages, iMac stuff, all around nerdy stuff....) and to push myself to really think about it and write out my thoughts. Hopefully some of you will find the stuff interesting and hopefully I will keep it up so that there is stuff to read.

Wish me luck. We all know I am "project prone". :)

Wow its been a long time

Instead of talking about how long its been since my last post, here is what has been going on...

• Emily and I officially moved back to the 'Louie.
• I finished work in Cincinnati on a Friday, started work in STL on Monday.
• Its been a pretty big adjustment being back "home", being close to family, being far away from Ohio, being far away from my home for the last 4+2 years.
• I started working out on a semi-regular basis (averaging 3-4 times a week) at our Apartment complex fitness room.
• We found out that there are a fair number of stupid people living in our apartment complex, but we still like it.
• I am still trying to figure out the best route to and from work .... getting used to STL drivers again .... not enjoying the shutting down of I40 for the next million years.
• I have had a few meetings now with the STL office my company. All in all, many things are different, many are the same, all good people ... I am happy with the transfer.
• I found out that the main (and only other one besides myself) developer on my application at my new client is leaving in 2 weeks; leaving me the sole developer going forward into '08.
• Emily and I spent a weekend in Chicago for our anniversairy. We had a blast hanging out with Katherine, doing all the touristy stuff and just walking around downtown.
• My cousin had twins (a b and a g) the other night!
• I have been reading the Dark Tower comics I posted about earlier (including the latest, thanks Bill) and they were amazing. I can't wait for the next arc? to come out. Oh and according to the great inter-web, Stephen King sold the rights to do a DT movie to the producers who did Lost. Who knows when anything will come of it, but its a cool idea.
• Em and I went out on our first house hunting trip the other weekend (not so much house hunting and information gathering ... what kind of $$ gets you what kind of house in different areas, what areas have houses we like, what is important to each of us in our first house .....) Everything went well, only problem now is that we still have almost a year to wait. ;)
• I had a three day class on Test Driven Development with a great teacher for my client. Really great class. Really interesting topic. I would like to post more of my thoughts about it at some point.
• I have finally gotten into a routine with our finances and feel like I have a better handle on where or money is coming and going. Its only taken me 2+ years, but Quicken is finally getting used. I am happy to report that our net-worth is going up :)
  

Oh, and about a thousand other things. I have a busy couple weeks at work coming up so we shall see with what frequency I will post but I am glad to have gotten that one out of the way.

Hurray For Drug Tests, RSS, Halo, and Steven King!

I get to take a drug test in an hour or two for my next client. Hurray!

Satirical statements aside, here are some random interesting links and articles I have accumulated over the past week or so.

• WiFi Umbrella - From a common sense point of view, this one is pretty ridiculous. If you want to know the forecast but don't have the time to type in http://weather.com, change the TV channel to your local weather stations, and can't spare the time to look outside and think ... maybe you deserve to be wet. From a tech perspective, its kinda cool. The company also offers small dev. chip sets you can embed in your own devices so that they can be internet aware which is kinda cool. Hurray for internet toasters!
• Photo-Mosaic Mirrors - Pretty sweet concept. I have been thinking about my own photo-mosaic project a fair bit lately and may start in on it again soon. Its one I would really like to finish or get to a decent stopping point.
• Wind Powered Lights - I am not 100% I haven't posted about this before but I really like this idea. So much so that I originally had a similar idea back when I was driving back and forth to UD every holiday. I thought that all wind from the cars and trucks driving on t he interstates could probably power lights along the highway. Another miss opportunity ;).
• Coder or Cannibal - This was a fun little test back several months ago. Em got a kick out of it.
• Flip Video Camera - This looks like a great way to be able to take digital video on the cheap. Most digital cameras today can take a limited amount of video but it would be nice to have something that could take longer shots without costing an arm and a leg. Something like this would be great on a vacation assuming you had a laptop to download the video to periodically during the day or at night.
  

I have been using Google Reader for a few months now and love it ... but I have a problem.

Hi, my name is Ben and I am a starred RSS feed addict. [Hi Ben!]

Over that time I read countless articles from all of my subscriptions but ended up starring 600+ more that I wanted to read or thought looked interesting but didn't have the time or interest to read then. Well this past week (while in Cinci without a wife and much else to do but play Halo and work) I have been attempting to go through my many starred articles and turn over a new leaf of only starring articles I truly want to read later ... and actually following through. I have un-starred a couple hundred in that time and have read a large chunk of those ... but there are always more!

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Other than reading articles, lately I have been spending my free time doing a whole lot of nothing productive. Mostly watching TV, talking or playing Halo (we have another company game night next week, I had to refresh my skills ;) ).

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On an up-note, a coworker of mine brought to my attention some very serious news that I was not aware of. Evidently, Steven King has worked with Marvel to bring several stories from his Dark Tower series to life in comic book form - The Dark Tower: The Gunslinger Born. The coworker is a collector of comic books and had read the first 5 (there will be 7) and said that he loved them (despite having not read the books) and that the 6th was coming out on July 4th. Thats not all, he also offered to seek out copies of all the books for me if I would pay him for them. Indeed I would, and indeed I did. I am now the proud owner of the first 6 and I have to say there are great!

The illustrations are fantastic. The majority of the stories are taken right from the book but focus on the early life of Roland. There are some liberties taken on the order of events or exact details as compared to what I remember of the books but its flows well and is a nice addition to the series. From what I have read there is some "new" material in the comic book series but I haven't gotten to anything big new (just a few details that might not have been in the originals but hinted at). Overall I am very pleased. I got through 2 last night (it takes a surprisingly long time to read them and look at all of the pics) hopefully another couple are on tonight's agenda.

AHHHH!

A video I took at the Newport Aquarium which I have been meaning to try and put up on here but my client's web filters block Google Video. I have to say, putting the video online was a piece of cake ... just have to watch out for what you put online :).

I have to say the aquarium was worth going to once. Not the biggest I have been to, but decently laid out and with a good selection. The buy-1-get-1-free ticket we had made it perfect.

Synergized

I finally got a "new" laptop from Sogeti last friday. I say finally b/c all Sogeti employees get a laptop and everyone else at my client had received theirs. Since I am moving to STL and they are slowly ordering all new laptops for all of the ex-Sark employees .... I suggested they give me one of the old ones so that I would get it sooner rather than wait for a newer one. The newer ones which I should get after the move are really nice Dells with 4GB ram, Core 2 Duo processors, decent screens and finger print recognizers. Mine is an older IBM Thinkpad with 2GB ram and a 1.8GHz Pentium M. Definitely workable but not as nice. It is a fair bit smaller and thinner though, which is good.

Upon bringing it into work and plugging it in, I downloaded Synergy first thing. I used it back in college (I am pretty sure one of the roomates, prob nuh8, turned me onto it) and it just works great. Basically, it allows you to use a single keyboard and mouse with two machines that each have their own monitors without a hardware KVM. The result is a seemless connection of desktops so that I can go from one to the other without stopping. Pretty darn impressive. While the interface is still a bit clunky, its better than it used to be.

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Last night we went to JungleJims for the last time for a while. Picked up some random things as always and got my dad some good salami and sausages (at least they sounded/smelled/and looked good ... i have been good and haven't opened them yet).

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Thanks for the comments Josh and Chaz ..... we will miss you all to .... the drivers less so ... but definetly the lack of smoking in public places. To Chaz ..... you can't find a new one .... you only get one in a lifetime and I am it! And don't you forget it! And if/when anyone wants to make the trip over to the Show-Me state let us know. You all are always welcome.

On a related note, I will be sending out an email to everyone I can think of and have email addresses for today or tomorrow with our new address and contact info. Let me know if you don't get something.

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Yesterday, we attempted to play a trick of a coworker but were thwarted by Wikipedia and their speedy-delete system. The coworker in question spends in large percentage of his spare time reading Wikipedia and most of the time knows way more about random subjects than the average person. He also has an uncommon name which we often butcher and therefore jokingly call him Chevy for short.

We wanted to create a disambiguation for Chevy that featured a link to a new article which would describe his first name as having come from the Latin root meaning "one who reads Wikipedia all day" ... and so on. However, while updating the new page and previewing it, evidently we tripped some flag and the article was marked for "speedy-deletion" b/c it was incoherent or a copy or ..... any number of reasons. Before we could add the "we object" flag it was already gone!

As a second attempt we tried just adding the disambiguation with a link the n00b but a real person found that and removed it before we could walk to his desk and have him go to the link. Needless to say, we were both annoyed that our jokes were removed so fast and impressed with how fast work of some dorks was corrected. Pretty impressive.

Big Updates - Big Changes - Big News

It has been a crazy couple weeks. Crazy.

I have been putting in a ton of hours at work trying to get all of my work done for the end of the sprint. The demo was today and I am happy to say that I got 98% of it all done and besides a few minor hiccups right before the demo and during (a last minute redeploy of one of our app's failed b/c the server's logs had filled the virtual HD and the files couldn't be extracted ;) ) everything went really well. All the business people and the really high ups were pleased and I heard that they are taking our team out to a Reds game in a few weeks as a thank you. :)

If there hasn't been enough stress, I also had a rather impromptu meeting last Thursday with a guy from security, my boss, my boss' boss, and his boss. My boss' first words were, "So, Ben, you understand this stuff better than I do and put together the document, why don't you explain it." Needless to say it was unexpected but luckily everything went ok and I knew my stuff.

Finally, to make it all just a bit more exciting ... I took off this past Friday so that Em and I could go back to St. Louis for the weekend. That meant putting in my weeks+ worth of work in 4 days which was a blast let me tell you! Oh, and on Friday, one of our sales staff met with my boss at the client to inform them that I would be transferring in July. Yep, its all official now. I have a 90% sure date in mid July as my end date for my current client. Granted, between now and them I have 2 development sprints worth of work to do, will need to help both the client and my company interview people to fill my position and then train the new person for the last few weeks before I leave. I am stoked. Everything is falling into place.

Why then, did we go back to the good old STL this past weekend? Well for many reasons. Firstly, it was Mother's day and we had some surprises lined up. Em had had the idea to get a new dishwasher for her mom for Mother's day a while back and after finding out that her bro/sis and grandparents wanted to chip in ... we decided to go forward with it. We ended up picking a great Maytag dishwasher for a really good price (Home Depot has WAY better prices on installation than the other major places, plus they had a perfectly timed applicances sale) and had it installed before she got home from work on Friday. We semi-surprised my mom in our coming into town and ended up taking her and my dad out to eat to her favorite restaurant which was super delicious as always.

We also came into town so that I could meet with the VP of the St. Louis office, get some information about the transfer, the climate of the STL office and their clients, etc. The meeting went really well. The VP seems like a great guy who has some good plans on how to grow the office and seemingly the constitution to bring them to fruition. The office (by personnel) is smaller than I was thinking, closer to what the Sark Cinci office was. The VP was especially interested in learning how Sark had done its college recruiting which could be a good opportunity for me. They are primarily a Java shop which is great (I was told most all clients in the area want Java work done, and they just can't find people fast enough). I was impressed with what I heard and he said they were happy to have me whenever I became available ... so that was sweet.

Finally, we were in town to look at apartments. We had done this on our last time out, and had found some decent places and a lot of good info, but nothing perfect yet. Our main problem was finding a good place that was a decent price but as close as possible to the areas of town where most large businesses are (ie our clients). After running around town Friday and Saturday, we actually ended up deciding on a place in a great location for a good price and with some real nice amenities. Its a lot closer to the areas of town where my clients will be than the other places, close to both our families, its actually a fair bit cheaper than our current place (way cheaper than what it was going up to), comes with ceiling fans in all the rooms, new appliances, washer/dryer in the unit, a nice balcony and a nice apt area. We found some other places that were bigger or cheaper but were way far out or a lot older. Very nice.

So yeah ... as of right now, Em will be moving back in the beginning of July and I will be following a few weeks later. Things are happening fast and its pretty crazy, but they are going how we wanted and that is great.

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Other than the above crazy happenings, Em and I have been trying to spend time together the best we can (lots of work, meetings, class, etc is hurting that), I am trying to find time to work out but its not happening, the Kroger that used to be right next to our apt complex is no longer and they are working 7 days a week (loudly) to get the new one setup, now that I am riding the bus I have lots more time to read so I have finished a book on JUnit testing and one on Hibernate. Next up is the Pragmatic Programmer (one I have always heard is a must read) and a few on design patterns and design issues. Other than that, just more work, darts Thursday, big unit meeting tomorrow, dodge ball this weekend and hopefully riding our bikes at some point.

....pics are from our Mother's day dinner,
flowers from my parent's house, the Kroger parking lot,
and a flower at the park a few weekend ago,
in no particular order, other pics can be seen here....