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Wednesday, January 28, 2004

Programming

Stardate 57012.8 (01-28-2004)

AHA! Using the search term “madden family” + xmission will get Google to return my site. It turns up a slight flaw as well. The frames are not available. So I put a link to get to the frame page. This post makes me somewhat glad I don’t get Google hits my web site.  Then, of course, there has to be a person to who thinks of interviewing a search engine.

Been reading up on C#. There is a sizeof operator to give you the number of bytes a data type requires for storage. I find this interesting. Java doesn’t have this because the virtual machine specification says the sizes of data types are fixed and do not change from platform to platform. C# is only available on Windows, although I hear rumors of a Linux version. Of course, the underlying system is supposed to handle memory for you, so I guess they didn’t consider storage size an issue. I did find a bug list that had an entry for GDI handle are not released by C# when windows are closed. This is one of the reasons I object to automatic resource handling at times. It’s probably not a big deal, but when I was doing Win 95 work, there were a limited number of these. Every programming article pounded into you to release them the millisecond they were not needed.

I tried to get Regex Workbench up and going on my work laptop. It won’t work because I have the initial release of .NET. It wants the 1.1 version. I could download it, but Big Brother is watching net traffic. I had to burn it to CD at home and install it from that. Snarl.

GotDotNet moved the blogs, and I found the interesting ones this week. I rearranged things again to list the ones I like to check out every once in a while. I’d use the RSS feeds, but again, BB may not like it.

One of Eric Gunnerson’s blogs gives his view of ROTK, and the siege of Mina Tirith. He is not an LOTR fan, and he didn’t think the defense was done very well. I posted a comment to the effect that that was the point. Denethor considered the war a lost cause, and didn’t put much effort into defending the city. It got me wondering if anyone had put a scenario of the battle of Pelennor fields for Age Of Empires II. One is out there, and others are working on it. The big problem is there are no flying weapons to simulate the Nazgul. WarCraft might be better for this, but I don’t own a copy. Oh, well. There are also scenarios for Helm’s Deep.

The Pelennor scenario is well done, except for some strange mistakes. You command the forces of Kondor instead of Gondor. The wizard is Gandolf instead of Gandalf. The Riders of Rohan swept the Orc assault long before it reached Minas Tirith. These guys were aggressive, to say the least. After dispatching all the Orcs at the city, they went after Mordor all alone. This was good, considering the tactical mistakes I made (the game doesn’t understand that undead are not supposed to die). I lost both Theoden and Eowyn in that game. The first Helm’s Deep scenario I played was not very good. The designer divided the defenders, and you get the Elven archers. The troops from Rohan sit around while the elves are massacred. I think the guys from Rohan ought to be a little more aggressive.

I also noticed a Pirates of the Caribbean scenario. It might be fun to get this, and add the OST Patrick has as the background music. I’m considering looking at the FAQ on the scenario builder. It would also be fun to build a campaign for Belisarius against the Vandals and Goths, or the battle of Agincourt, especially if I can find some good sounds and music. I could spend many late nights as an armchair general on this.

Rachel’s troop is setting up a kiosk to sell cookies in front of Wal-Mart. They've been good about it. It will be interesting to see how it goes.

End of Entry

Sunday, January 25, 2004

Pits

Stardate 57012.5 (01-25-2004)

Friday was the pits, at least as far as work. Things were still busy, and piling up. By mid morning I was getting frustrated with it. I started to think "what's the point, they're going to replace this anyway". Resentment over others in the group working on web and Java projects started to boil. They get to do different things, while I am off on the edge of the 'team', feeling outside of it. One of the business analysts was shocked to learn that I had a software release due out this week, and couldn't do some work for her. She's been working here for years, and didn't have a clue about what I did? I've been working on the same thing for six years now. It's an important part of a profitable product, but it's the same thing day in and day out. I have talked to supervisors and managers over this, and they give me other C based projects. All this combined into black rage. I began to think I just could not work in the language anymore. I like the language, but it would be nice to see something different for a while. The resentment showed, because I received a corporate "Good Move" moral booster e-messages. The guy I carpool with was at my desk, and he mentioned that was the first time he heard anyone acknowledge how much I do.

I was in a foul mood by the time I got home. The hot water had been gradually slowing to a trickle over the last six months. I was sure we needed to replace the water heater. At April's prompting, I asked my carpool buddy about it. Where my weekend projects are to clean the house, get the Christmas lights down, or fix a light bulb, his are retiling a bathroom or building a pool table. He said his father had had the same problem, and bought a new water heater. When he took the old one out, he found a filter that had been completely closed with gunk from the hard water. I noticed that the copper pipes ran into a galvanized fitting, and decided it was worth a try. It took an hour to get the fitting off due to the tight space, but when I did, the inside looked like it had sand all over. I cleaned all of it out, and now we have normal hot water flow. I was much happier by then. I'll trade two hours of work and the feeling of accomplishing something for three to four hundred dollars for a new heater any day. 

Saturday was spent running the kids to basketball, and Patrick to a birthday party for one of the neighbor boys. Patrick was invited to three birthday parties that day. At basketball he managed to get his hands on the ball this time. If it gets warmer I'd like to get some extra practice in for him. Rachel scored twice in her game, once by stealing the ball from the other team, and once on a rebound. Her game was moved from 9 am to 11:15 am. We were almost there at 11 when I got a call on my cell. One of the mothers told me the game had been moved again to 10:30. It started late though, so Rachel played the last half.

This weekend I've tried to stay away from the computer, but I did check out some of the regular blogs. Bruce Eckel wrote a couple of new entries. One is on how sometimes you get so caught up in making an idea or tool work, you don't think about how there could be a simpler solution. He admits to wasting a lot of time trying to get a snazzy new tool up and going when he had a less sophisticated solution. He has worked with collaborative tools like instant messaging and wikis. The word collaborative bounced out at me. I've only been involved with a couple of these, and not for very long. I find instant messaging to be bothersome, and I heard the server was shutdown by IT anyway. Wikis I have never quite understood.  Well, technically, I do, but I don't see what they are for. So collaboration is something I should work toward.

The quote from the jar this week that has relevance is:
"I am proud of what I am. I believe in what I do. Can you say that?" Chekov, The Way to Eden, Stardate 5832.2. Not sure if I want to answer that right now.

End of Entry

Thursday, January 22, 2004

Mistakes

Stardate 57012.2 (01-22-2004)

The week has been a comedy of mistakes and poor planning on my part, plus some strange failures. The testing cycle was messed up because I put the wrong version of the software on the server. This was combined with problems dialing in over the weekend. Monday was the Enterprise Blood Drive. It was not my turn to drive in the carpool, so I was without a car to get up there. It didn't matter anyway, since there were so many issues to deal with at work I could not have made it.  Wednesday I thought I had put $5 in my wallet, but I didn't. No lunch, or any food until I got home. Today things are looking up.

Tuesday morning I drove myself in because my carpool friend couldn't make it. At 2 am that morning, the humidifier leaked on the electronics of his furnace and shorted it out. He spent the day replacing parts, and got it running again late in the afternoon. He said his house got down to 50 degrees. Given how cold it has been lately, fixing it was a big priority. I really need to try and be a better handyman. I do ok, but there are things I just don't know how to do. I do know that having the right tool makes a big difference.

Girl Scout cookie sales started on Saturday. The troop's goal was to sell 600 boxes. Rachel's cookie sales alone have reached 400, and she might top 500. It's kind of embarrassing now when the other girls ask how many she has sold.

Conflicts and schedule changes abound. Rachel's basketball games were moved from 9 am Saturday (right after Patrick's) to 11. I have to find a way to kill 3 hours between games. I heard a rumor that soccer team pictures will be April 17th. I had planned on being in Denver at that time.

We had an introduction to Oracle 10g by a guy who went to one of Oracle's conferences. He's very pumped about it. It is supposed to analyze and make all kind of adjustments and suggestions. I am skeptical about a computer telling me how to run things. I asked if this could be turned off, and I got a confused look. I have visions of a system trying to change what I am doing, despite the fact I know better. Every corporate executive dream is the M-5 that can replace all the employees. Of course, I don't see a reason for the exec anymore.

I've read some criticism of Bush's space program. It's mainly centered on solving the problems on this planet, instead of going to others. Not a bad point, but my rebuttal is that the problems here never go away, they're just exchanged for others. So if you wait on space exploration and concentrate on the planet, you'll never get into space. Next, I think it would be better for my kids to grow up looking to go to the Moon, Mars, and beyond rather than wonder when Osama Bin Laden will be found. The people who say we need to forget space and concentrate on this planet are a little short sighted.

There's more, but I am out of time for now.

End of Entry

Saturday, January 17, 2004

St James Basketball

Stardate 57011.7 (01-17-2004)

It's been cold and foggy. The pollution has reach national records in some places in Utah. Every morning, my throat is dry and scratchy. I'm getting tired of the inversion. I don't mind the cold much, but the air is getting to me.

The week was busy again at work. There were a lot of issues with new regulations out of the states. Thursday one of the primary routers apparently went berserk, and it took out all the routers and the network for about an hour and a half. Earlier in the week the virus scanner on the e-mail server decided the Internet was a virus, and refused to get or send e-mail. The IT guys had to disable it. Even the vendor is not sure what is going on. Friday my carpool mate told me the department had turned over the source for most of the programs used to get data in and out of the system to the company in India. I had a few profane words over that. Not because they are now maintaining it, but because most of it has my name as the author. This means the liaison will be taking up my time answering the why questions.

Rachel and Patrick had basketball games Saturday. Patrick had a lot of fun, although he didn't get the ball much. One of the kids on his team has more skill than the rest, and kind of takes it over. Rachel is on a team with a girl who dominated last year. In the game Saturday she started to do the same, but then another girl started to do the same thing. The girls are older, so there is a lot more team work. Rachel did get the ball and shot at the hoop a couple of times. She is rusty and needs practice, though.









President Bush outlined his plan for the space program. It sounds good, and maybe my wish for manned exploration to resume will happen. He didn't drum up much money for it, and with all the other things going on, I wonder if it will happen.

The ship's web site has had a ton of updates, and there is more to do. As with most web sites, including this one, it's an ongoing task. I did put in links to dummy CSS pages on my site, and wrote a script to extract useful information from that. This will allow me to evaluate the changes to the site, and make it better.

I have started the Enterprise reviews again, but with the number of episodes the sliding menu does not work very well. It's a neat idea, but the flaw with it is that if there is more than five items, it is too slow. I could move the reviews to a table of links, but that just does not appeal to me. I need to look around some more for ideas.

I downloaded Eric Gunnerson's Regex Workbench. It looks like a neat tool to play with regular expressions. As I said in another entry, these are not my forte. I don't know anyone who is adept with these. They are very useful in picking elements out of a stream of data, though. I do a lot of processing on log files and data streams, so this is something that can help out a lot.

Carl Stark gave me a jar of Star Trek quotes at the BBQ. Unfortunately, I left them at Jef's house that night. I finally picked them up at the senior officers meeting Friday. The first one I picked out was from "The Bonding", where Picard tells Jeremy that as long as he is on the Enterprise, he is not alone. This is a good thought to start the year out on. They are popular with Rachel. I let her pick out a few since it is the seventeenth and I need to catch up. She didn't understand the Rules of Acquisition.

April told me that another mother got upset after Thomas went to the bathroom by himself. I guess she was not ready for him to grow older. That emphasizes to me that you need to take time and enjoy kids at the age they are now. This is important since I get caught up in what will happen in the future and forget about right now. Another mother told us a boy her son and Patrick hang out with at school is a troublemaker. He was at Patrick's party, and he seemed ok. Patrick's teacher is of the opinion that they are boys, and a little wild at times. I don't want to tell Patrick he can't play with this boy, but I do try to impress on him that if someone is doing something Patrick knows is wrong, he should not be joining in. He can't go through life avoiding everyone that seems bad.

Finally, Rachel asked me if the Ticonderoga was going to do another Fourth of July parade this year. She had fun last year, and really wants to do it again.

End of Entry

Tuesday, January 13, 2004

Life

Stardate 57011.3 (01-13-2004)

Just when you think reality TV can't get more stupid that A Simple Life, they go and do it. My big, fat, obnoxious fiancé looks like it tops the rest. The adage of you can't go wrong appealing to the fun of humiliated others is alive and well for the networks.

The KC Chiefs continue their long run of not winning a playoff game. They did ok, but it doesn't matter if you can't stop the other team. There is a reason that Peyton Manning is sharing the MVP award, and this shows it. The game between Green Bay and Philadelphia was better. I felt sorry for Brett Favre, but he does have a ring, so I was rooting for the Eagles. The playoffs this year have been good, with three going into overtime. I hope that doesn't mean the Super Bowl will be a blowout.

I'm almost finished with the goal of planning the finances for the year. Last year I didn't get started until July, and gave up after September. I might try a five year plan. I hate doing financial stuff, though. Last week I was pulled into trying to solve a report problem at work for a client. Two amounts that should have been the same were off by about one hundred dollars. They kept trying to tell me my program was to blame. I asked if the two amounts were calculated the same, and was told yes, of course. I dug into the data and after a half an hour came up with the second amount. During all of this, three people are yammering at me to look at this and that. I kind of tuned everyone out and focused on path I was traveling. Most everyone went away after this. Another hour was needed to work backwards to the first amount. The problem and the solution were obvious by then. I called another senior developer, and she confirmed what I had found. Two of the people were happy to have the solution, as they had been working on this for more than a week. The other hasn't said a word to me since then. I have no idea what he expected, but he asked me to look at it, and I did.

Contrast this with the problem I was asked to look at today. A developer was putting together a custom data export for a client using a template I designed in 1995. The application was aborting in a library I wrote to detect memory faults. I showed him the problem (he allocated a 2K buffer, and then stuffed 15K of data into it). Memory faults are supposed to take days or weeks to track, but this was solved in five minutes. I suppose its a point of view, but I don't understand why some things are supposed to be difficult.

I found out this week we have another new CIO. He wants to reorganize so that developers can share talents and technology. I wish him well, but I am pessimistic. The seem to be a number of personality clashes. I am thinking bungee boss.

Patrick had his first basketball practice Monday. He really enjoys it. This is good, because it is a pain. Rachel and Patrick have youth religious ed from 5 to 6 in Layton, and then we rush to get to the practice in North Ogden by 6:30. Rachel's practice is exactly when I did NOT want it to be; Wednesday, 6:30 to 7:30. Thank goodness for VCRs. One of ours began to eat tapes this week, and at that led to a discovery. The plain VCR is almost extinct. No one sells them. You can get a VCR/DVD combo, or a VCR/TV combo, but not just a VCR.

The Admiral's Banquet was fun. Craig Richard Nelson was entertaining, and April said a few people looked almost normal. I couldn't figure out who she was referring to. Maybe they were not members of the group. I was a little concerned about Karrie Buck. She looked very tired. She had surgery the week before, and I was wondering if it was wise for her to come.

If you get the impression from most of this entry that I am feeling a little disgruntled with life, you'd be right.

End of Entry

Saturday, January 10, 2004

Past

Stardate 57011.0 (01-10-2004)

The number of issues I have this month is way up. I have done about 40 this month, when the norm is 15. January is usually busy, but there have been a bunch of new methodologies. I did manage to get some breathing room Friday afternoon.

I read Bruce Eckel's weblog about hiring interns, and what a dismal failure it was. It was interesting that he examined it in the light of being having criticized others of doing similar things. He makes the point about the general Dilbert pointy haired boss. Techies often have the opinion management is there to impede them. Sometimes that is true, but on the whole it is not. I tried managing once, and I didn't do very good. I have learned a lot since then, but I don't think I would try again in the corporate environment.

An old colleague of mine stopped by. He worked with me about seven years ago. He showed me some of the stuff he had been doing. It makes me feel out of date. So I am giving some serious thought to a suggestion Brady made at the BBQ about creating a PDA version of the ship website. The idea has many pitfalls, but it might be fun to research. The biggest obstacle is that I have no idea what the end result would need to be.

Mike Gibby wrote in his blog about comparing yourself to the person you were ten years ago. In 1994, I was single, and pretty much a Total Geek. Now I am a husband and father. A lot has gone on in that time span. I am involved in things such as coaching kids that I would have never dreamed of in '94. The biggest change is that I am more confident and comfortable with who I am. One thing that has not changed is that I still feel the need to learn more. So to answer the question, would the '94 you be pleased with the '04 you, I can say with confidence "Yes!".

I did some rearranging and updates to the menu. I disabled some dead links, and removed the frequent visits page for now. I found that there was only one link on there I was using, and I would go to other options for links. There are still things to change, but I need to get away from the computer and into life for awhile.

End of Entry

Wednesday, January 07, 2004

Cold, Basketball

Stardate 57010.7 (01-07-2004)

The last entry did not show up as a link on the calendar, so I had to fix it. I figured as long as I was doing that, I would fix a few other things that were bothering me about it. It now looks and works better. There is no huge blank space next to it, and the buttons are back. I've added the current books some of us are reading and the music we are currently into to the welcome page. I was thinking it would be of interest to family. April goes through books too fast to put hers up, however. I might add a bit more, but I'll have to decide exactly what.

Patrick's delayed birthday party went well. He liked the laser tag so much we arranged the party there. I think that is a good place to have nine boys in the 5-6 age range. They can run, yell, and create havoc pretty much as they please. Most of them are from what April refers to as Patrick's gang. He's been bullying kids at school for fun, and we are trying to correct that. The first time doing the laser tag they all bunched up in the middle. The second time they were much more relaxed. By the end the parents were anxious to get everyone home (it was a school night, after all). My brother Verne came along, which thrilled Patrick a lot.

Work has been busy. January is usually busy, but this year a few states have implemented some rules based on Medicare. To me, the Medicare system is set up to try and walk through as much twisted logic as the federal government can devise to find which exception to the rule a doctor can qualify for. Why states are basing worker compensation (WC) on this is beyond me. California is leading the way because their WC rates are getting out of hand. They delayed sending out the information, which delayed our release. This gives me a little more time, but I will pay for it in the months to come.

It's been very cold. Tuesday morning was a struggle to get out of a nice, warm bed and deal with it. The fact that I had been up most of the night did not help. I've been having some remnants of a cold keep me awake. Thomas woke up screaming about 3:30 that morning. When I went to see what was wrong, he told me he wanted a Star Trek phaser (specifically, the Enterprise phase pistol). Patrick asked for one last Christmas, and it was my gift to him. Thomas told April later that day that I said he had to give up all his toys to get one. I'm not sure if he dreamed that, or just didn't understand when I told him he had to pick which things he wanted most. He wants just about everything, and I keep telling him he can't get all of it. So all that contributed to staying in bed longer than I should have.

The first practice for Rachel's basketball team was tonight. It went ok. Rachel has some work to do with dribbling and shooting. The bad news is that the coach set the practices on Wednesday night from 6:30 to 7:30. The games go to the first week of March. April is not happy about having to tape Enterprise, either.

I did get to use the snow blower today. It takes about the same amount of time to clear the driveway and walks as to shovel, but it is a lot less effort.

End of Entry

Sunday, January 04, 2004

New Year

Stardate 57010.4 (01-04-2004)

New Years Eve was fun. We have not been to a party in many years. Rachel was on Captain Carl's case, though. She desperately wanted to stump him on something. Brady spent about a half and hour showing me his new toy, a combination cell phone/PDA running Windows CE. It's a pretty cool gadget, but I don't know what I do with it. I'd be on the phone and wanting to check my calendar.

New Year's Day we went to see "The Return of the King". It was a good as all the raves I had read. They left out the romance between Eowyn and Faramir, and the part where Saruman takes over the Shire. I had fun because every time the army of Mordor was shown, Thomas sat up and began to shoot arrows or swing a sword. I guess he is pretending to be Legolas. One thing neither the book or the film touches on is where Gimli and Legolas went after the Aragorn became king. The animated version shows them sailing away with Gandalf, Frodo, and the elves. This makes some sense. There are a couple of other things that bothered me, but that would be giving away the film to anyone who has not seen it or read the book. There were also things the film did better than the book.

Rachel's birthday party on Friday went well. She had five of her friends for a sleepover. April had them do picture frames, and they played games. April was a little surprised when the girls found Rachel's brothers swords and spent about an hour playing pirate. I guess six 7 and 8 year old girls running around with toy swords is not something most people would picture. We gave Patrick the soundtrack to "Pirates of the Caribbean" for his birthday, so they got to play to music. I took the boys to Nickelcade, where they spent most of the night playing Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Later that night we all watched "The Princess Diaries". Rachel had a lot of fun.

My brother Verne has stopped by on his way back to Indianapolis from San Francisco.  He has now retired from United Airlines. He is going to stay for Patrick's birthday party that we postponed from last week. He got our snow blower working again. It just had a bad case of gas, or bad gas from a can I had sitting around for a couple of years. Of course this means it won't snow again for a long time.

Patrick and Rachel start basketball in North Ogden in two weeks. I volunteered to be an assistant coach for Rachel. Patrick's practices are on Mondays at 6:30, which means we need to rush from Youth Religious Education that ends at 6 in Layton to North Ogden. I told the coach we would be late, but he said that was ok. I have not heard from Rachel's coach. I am hoping he will not have practices on Wednesdays on or after 6.

April is happy that her alma mater LSU won the BCS bowl. I actually got a chance to watch the two NFL playoff games on Saturday. I didn't have any favorites with these, but I was glad Dallas lost. The KC Chiefs play next week.

I was surprised tonight on visiting Mike Gibby's site. He made a resolution to update his logs more frequently, and there were three new entries. He's  found a girl, so his life is looking up. One of my resolutions is to get rid of some of the junk that has accumulated. I am getting a large pile of old electronic stuff. You're not supposed to throw it out, but the only other option I have found is to pay some recycling outfit to come and get it. Since they will get more money out of it, I am not happy about that option.

Tomorrow the kids go back to school, and I go back to work, and life gets back to some kind of normal. New episodes of Enterprise start in a week and a half.

End Of Entry