It’s been a while, no?
October 19, 2009 
As you can tell by my lack of posting for the past 3 months, it’s been rather busy around here. With my wife and oldest in school, it’s been a trip to say the least. Add to that the 10 month old and the holidays rapidly approaching, and it’s been a crazy few months.
I’m trying to revive my weekend development time in an effort to keep up with new technologies and continue to expand on some of the software ideas that I have. I’d hate to divulge too much information here, but I do believe there are some areas that could use new eyes and perhaps a fresh solution. More on that later.
As far as my job is concerned, our WPF product has really given me a lot of experience with the .Net 3.5 framework. I also realize that we have barely scratched the surface as far as the built-in functionality of WPF/WCF, which is something I’d like to look into more during my weekend time.
We’ll see. My oldest has one more soccer game for the season, so hopefully after that I can take some time to look into the deeper features of WPF/WCF.
We’re back, but in a new place.
I’m tired of maintaining my own server… I don’t use it for anything more than blogging and serving photos, both of which have numerous free alternatives on the web.
Therefore, I’m in the process of migrating our WordPress blogs to WordPress.com and Dana is starting to post photos to Snapfish or Picasa (we haven’t decided yet). Hopefully, I’ll be posting more regularly when this is all over.
Where to begin…
The past few months have been somewhat of a blur. Our now 4 month old son is still not sleeping completely through the night, although he does get a good 5 to 6 hours in a night. Work has been a gigantic bug fixing festival, so there really hasn’t been a whole lot of innovation as of late (although, stay tuned for a fun post about creating Excel PivotTables in VBScript).
I had gotten bored with my workout regime, and a visit from Dana’s cousins from Atlanta introduces me to something new: CrossFit. It’s essentially a form of circuit training, but they really push me to kick my own butt. They is a huge focus on pullups, which I really can’t do yet, but I’m working towards. For example, today’s workout was the following circuit:
- 5 Pull Ups
- 10 Push Ups
- 15 Squats
Doesn’t sound bad, right? Well, the full workout is Do as many circuits as you can in 20 minutes. I was able to do 9 circuits.. not bad, but I could definitely get to 10 (I did assisted pull ups).
In other random news, Dana and I have been watching the Pens with bated breath as they make another run at the Cup. I have to admit that yesterday’s drubbing of the Caps was a nice change of pace to the one goal overtime games that made up the rest of the series, and I’m glad it went in our favor.
Well, that’s about as much of the last few months as I’m willing to cover. I’m hoping to get back on track here as far as blogging is concerned, as I really do value some of the information I’ve jotted down here over the last few years, and I hope it’s helped some others.
You’re kidding me, right?
I’ve been busy with work and new baby, so my posts have dwindled. I apologize that my first post back is a rant.
This NY Times article really just kind of pisses me off. Granted, I understand that the cost of living in big cities is quite higher than here in good old Western Pennsylvania, but the “expenses” listed in this article are completely extravagant. There are people out there who can’t afford to buy food or there medications, but all Allen Salkin really cares about is whether or not a bank executive can afford his apartment plus a house in the Hamptons, his personal trainer and his wife’s designer dresses.
I will agree that some things on the list may not necessarily be extraneous: bodyguards, for example, may be necessary depending on the persons position.
I guess my issue here is that we have these executives complaining that they are living paycheck to paycheck on a $2 to $3 million a year salary while some people are losing their jobs. Do I think it’s right to cap salaries for executives? Well, if you’re getting taxpayer bailout money, then yes, I think you should. If your company isn’t backed by the government and can afford your salary, then what they do with their money is their business (well, the company and the shareholders). But when you ask for the government to help you out, you’d better be prepared to make cuts. I don’t want to be footing the bill for a bank executive’s personal trainer.
Dreading tomorrow…
I’m dreading work tomorrow. Not because of a fear of getting fired or having to deal with anyone in particular, but having to deal with Installshield.
For our current application, we basically have to create an install that will publish the XBap application to our customers servers. Unfortunately, no documentation I’ve seen allows us to do that easily. I wrote a small .Net application that uses the Mage.exe program to change the configuration files, regenerate the manifests, and re-sign everything. That part works fine.
The part that doesn’t is trying to get that custom application to run as a custom action in Installshield. I have it set up the way I think it should work, unfortunately, that means nothing. I’m getting install errors on that particular step, however, like all errors, they really aren’t helpful. Tomorrow I’m going to have to go in and perform some installs with logging on and then dig through the logs to determine the issue. I have a feeling this will take all day.
I really hate wasting 8 hours on that type of thing, so I hope it doesn’t take that long. But I’ve blocked the whole day (minus a few meetings).
New addition
For those who didn’t know, my wife and I had been expecting. Last Monday, our new son decided to show up a little early (we had scheduled a c-section on the 2nd). So, between the holidays and my son being born, I’ve barely been on the computer, let alone blogging.
I expect some new and exciting things to cross my path in the next 6 months. I’ll be sure to keep everyone informed. Happy New Year, even though it’s a bit late.
Upgrade
So, I upgraded my WordPress install to version 2.7. The admin changes are pretty nice, maybe I’ll back off of scribeFire posting a bit and try the web interface.
I worked pretty much all day preparing a build of our new product. It’s selling now, so we’re going to have to start customer support. That sounds like fun 
. The only good thing is that the initial product is only available as a hosted product by us, so if we find something major, we can drop a fix quickly with minimal user action.
I’m dumb, but I think I can make it work.
My brain is fried. My wife is 36 weeks pregnant, I’m relishing in my new role as bug team leader (and pushing myself to fix an obscene amount of bugs), and I’m trying to play one of Santa’s elves by building a model train table for my son.
A friend asked my wife if I could order and install some memory for his computer. My wife said hard drive, and I forget that to my wife, “hard drive” equals “the box with all the computer stuff.” So I ordered a new 320 GB hard drive. I went to put it in, looked at his current free space (well above 90 GB), and figured out that he really needed RAM.
Luckily, I’m in need of some new RAM, so I’m going to buy 2 GB for myself and give him my 512 MB stick (yes, somehow we have the same RAM type). But I have this random 320 GB disk drive….
So I ordered a USB/FireWire external enclosure. So now I have an external drive for backup purposes. Not bad, not bad at all.
There goes my surround sound budget…
The Canon A80 digital camera that my wife and I bought immediately after we got married kind of died during my sister’s wedding. I say kind of died, because it still takes pictures, but the pictures have these horizontal lines going through them, as does the LCD viewer when you are trying to take a picture.nbsp; It wasn’t the LCD Screen, because the menu and any old photos on the memory card showed up fine.nbsp; Sounds like the CCD, right?
I’m pretty sure we bought the 4 year service plan, but seeing as though my wife and I are coming up on our fifth wedding anniversary, well, that expired. So, we started looking at new cameras.
I really should not say that we JUST started looking at cameras. My wife has been researching digital SLRs ever since she discovered the joys of photo editing. Our Canon has treated us well, and my aunt bought the Canon Rebel Digital XSi and has nothing but positive things to say about it. We both knew that was the camera that we wanted, we were just waiting for a good deal.
Given that our current (and only) digital camera was now going to the dogs, we decided to shop around. Best Buy actually had a “Black Friday” package that included the camera, two lenses, a carrying case, UV filter, and extra battery for under a grand. which was a pretty good deal. So, we bought it.nbsp; But wait, it gets better…
I was curious to see how much it would cost to get our A80 repaired. I figured it would be expensive since it was most likely the CCD, but it couldn’t hurt. So, I went on to Canon’s web site and searched their support section. What did I find but a service notice pertaining to the CCD on our A80. I called them, and they sent me a UPS return slip with which to send my camera back. If it is, indeed, the CCD, I may get my camera repaired for free…. I guess I should have done that first.
Oh well, Dana get’s a nice new camera to play with and we may have an extra one hanging around.
The Storm?
Verizon has their “new every two” plan, which means I can replace my phone every 22 months. I’m due for a new phone in March, and I’m debating the new Blackberry Storm. It seems pretty slick, and I might even be willing to join the 21st century and get a data plan for my phone, but I’m not sure about the no buttons thing.
My wife has a Blackberry 8703e which she uses for work. I’m not sure if the “complete touchscreen” would be good for her because of her usage. I’m hoping to find someone who gets it first and take a hands on approach, otherwise I’ll have to wait until after the holidays and actually go to a Verizon store to check it out (which I hate doing because the sales people tend to be all over me).
