BLAG Ramblings of a crazy old fool

I hate winter.

I love the snow and all, but to hell with getting sick. I've been messed up a bit for a couple weeks now, and yesterday it all just kicked my ass. Ended up taking two days off from work just to sit around on meds to try and clear it up. I hate meds almost as much as I hate being sick. Figures, vicious circle and all that. Well, I've also used these few days to work on a few projects.

In work life, my company is forming a new department, a Web Apps Team, to design, build, and integrate in-house and open source web applications into our existing management infrastructure. Sounds fun right? Well except for the fact that they still haven't figured out what kind of server they're going to give us, sure. I'll post the code to the Transportation thing here in a bit, it's a good example of how to build a basic ASP/MSAccess Database system running on IIS. They've got a few projects in mind for us, so it will be interesting. I haven't heard anything about a pay-raise, but who cares at this point--it's going to look fantastic on my resume: From Desktop Technician to Web Application Developer in less than 5 months? Beautiful.

In the world of IWM Entertainment, the wheels of profit turn slowly. Actually they don't turn at all since I've not done any real work for a while. I had been working with a client for a design piece, but had to drop it because of time constraints. There are currently two projects at IWM that are under some form of development; phpMyBlog which will either be released to soruceforge or sold retail, and phpMyCMS [fuegoCMS]. fCMS is a retail product, and varying versions have been under development for a couple years (I can't seem to stick with the base code and end up rewriting it.) Anyone who wants to help develop on these projects (and thereby split the profits), send an email to admin[AT]intarwebmachine[DOT]com with a resume, or list of skills and sample of your work. We are looking for HTML, CSS designers, experienced PHP/MySQL coders, and platform-level C/C++ developers.

Since I've been physically incapacitated, I figured I'd do some shopping:

• Corel Paint Shop Pro X2 I figured it was about time I upgraded from Jasc PSP7; Nothing wrong with it, but you can always use new software. That and I can't buy a new license for it anywhere.
  Price: $ 49.99 @ BestBuy.com
  
• Lot of 7 Star Wars Books How can I go wrong? $9 for 7 great books, plus shipping. Now at least I'll have something fun to do in my free time aside from loitering around on the Internet.
  Price: $ 9.00 @ eBay.com
• Foxconn G31MX-K Motherboard Cheap board for my new PC. Dunno if its value is any good, but it was only about $70. Supports my Core2Duo 2.6gHz and my Celeron 3.6gHz, whichever I decide to use. More info below.
• LiteOn DH-20A4P-08 DVD Burner Cheap burner for my new PC. More info below.

And that's about it, except that I started playing Counter-Strike: Source again. You can find me on Indy Powerplant's GunGame server if I'm on, or my local Iceworld DeathMatch Box.

Happy Fraggin'.