Farewell Rosewill…Helloooo Acer.
So the 19" Rosewill widescreen monitor I bought in 2002 has finally kicked the bucket. I wrote to the company (and felt 40 years older doing so), complimenting them on a superb product that lasted much longer than expected (I honestly only hoped for 6 months for the price), and to see if they had any more in stock that they could replace/sell. The specific product was discontinued about 6 years ago, so I'm thinking probably not. So far no response, but who knows; time will tell.
So I went to Best Buy (ugh), and proceeded to make the fastest sale in ever. Picked up a 23" Acer LED monitor for $169 (This might actually be less than what the 19" Rosewill cost in 2002). So far, it's fantastic. It's like my eyes have never seen before. And now I'm seeing many mistakes on websites I've worked on that my old monitor just didn't show me.
This has not been one of my best weeks. I'm really loving the new job, but it hardly leaves any time to do anything except work. I love the work, it's much more FUN than what I was doing before. I find I work from home a lot, and regularly put in over 50 hours a week. I'm not sure entirely how I feel about that, but at least it's mostly enjoyable work. Recent transitions in leadership are rather underwhelming; but overall, still a pleasant work experience. It's kinda sad now that I look back on what I've been doing for the last 6 years, compared to now.
Today wasn't too bad, though I was fighting with Drupal for several hours (Goddamn I hate Drupal. Especially the old-ass implementation they have on the current site). Finally got the feature in for the client, and GOT THANKED. There are times when I absolutely love this job. Getting credit and even praised for my work is fantastic. That happened another day last week, and I think it was one of the best days I've had this year. A truly wonderful feeling. But I digress...Did some training for a co-worker, worked on and tackled some weird issues, etc. But it was a long day. Decided to grab a burger and a beer at the pub near our place. That may have been a mistake. Too early to tell.
But now I have a sexy new monitor. And a list of websites to fix. 
Android Apps
For the most part, I'm pretty happy with my new HTC Inspire. As a matter of fact, I'm writing this post on it right now. But the thing that's always bugged me about open-source software is just as prevalent on the Android platform - the software is hard to use, and usually half-asses whatever it is supposed to do.
I've spent the better part of a month trying out text editors with ftp capabilities (touchqode, silveredit and Android Web Editor have been the latest), but none of them get the job done. I can't even find a decent SSH client (hell, the iPhone had that!) that I could use for remote access to nano. And let's be honest - the "job" is either being too lazy to get off the couch to code something, or being stuck away from a real PC. It's the latter that makes sense from a business perspective, though the former is probably more common.
I would settle for a basic text editor that can save/create to an ftp site, but so far I've had no luck. Sure, each app had its benefits (touchqode's code-oriented keyboard layout was nice, though having to enable/disable through the settings menu was a pain, and the syntax highlighting in Android Web Editor was absolutely brilliant), but none of them seem to fit the bill for the coder-on-the-go (or couch).
I've said before, I'd buy a tablet in an instant if there was a good, working Dreamweaver clone for the Android platform, but so far I find myself disappointed. (Honestly though, I'd settle for a notepad/ftp clone with syntax highlighting.) It may be one of those things I just have to sit down and do myself.
Cheese and Beer!
So I'm now living in Madison, WI. After scrambling to clean the old apartment and get everything moved out, I packed my car just about as full as possible, and then some more. Didn't have room for any furniture, but I'm not too worried about that at the moment. Staying at Erin's current place for tonight, then we are supposed to move in to the new apartment tomorrow. Which will be fun packing up all her stuff and renting a U-Haul, but hey. Whatevs.
So last night was decidedly awesome. Erin and I are basically the same person, albeit different genders and careers. But the Star Wars posters and wall of books is just perfect. Last night we had pizza and beer and watched Breakout Kings and Always Sunny. Goood evening. Gotten (most of) my bills paid, and I'm just about to start doing some more job hunting. I might go explore today too, not sure yet. Madison is very pretty (and oh my god there are so many bikes).
HogSong, Mercurial, Best Weekend Ever.
So this was the best weekend in ever. Erin was down here for the week, and stayed over the weekend as well. After work on Friday (not a whole lot got accomplished due to the earthquake/tsunami in Japan), we started playing video games. And we kept playing video games. Until like 5AM. It was fantastic. Erin ragequit Gears of War because she couldn't beat the end guy (I heard he's hard...), played some cartoony RPG on the PS2, I played some DJ Hero (new high score on Kaskade - Move for Me!), and more. Honestly I don't remember the rest, the last few hours are kind of a blur. We totally should have played some old-school N64 Super Smash Brothers, but we forgot D: I missed out raiding with Eminence again, but I call worth it.
I also made Erin watch 2001: A Space Odyssey. She was not impressed. I believe her exact words were YOU BROKE MY MIND, and something about Stanley Kubrick only having 20-minute scenes of nothing important so he could pleasure himself. She rather enjoyed the Intermission though. Lawl. Also watched Gamer again (continuing the bad movie saga), and Tron: Legacy. Which is by far, one of the best movies ever made. She concurs. Finally found a DVD-quality copy of it to show. Definitely going to be the first movie I'll buy on DVD in quite a while. I tried to convince her to watch 2010, but she sadly would have none of that. Oh well! We also watched some Stargate: SG1 (The Fifth Race, one of the all-time best SG1 episodes ever). I also taught her some shell commands on linux! Mostly because she stole my laptop and then realized she couldn't use it ;D
On Sunday, we came up with the greatest idea ever. HOG SONG: The Pigging. For some reason, we have retarded nicknames for each other, and we are going to make them characters in a game. I looked into an XNA Developer subscription, and started up some character modelling in 3DSMAX. (Gotta love those student discounts...lol). I was going to join, but my Dreamspark account appears to have expired, and I'd have to screw around with getting DeVry to verify my student status (Technically, I think I'm on "leave"). Decided to leave that for another day and just get started. We decided on three main characters, Red Pig, Large Pig, and Mexi-Pig. Mexipig has fantastic abilities, like Taco Whirl, Piñata Bomb, Burrito Bash. Large Pig has Truffle Shuffle, Mud Bath, Suspender Bender. Red Pig has Scarlet Hooves, Crimson Squeal, and Blarney Stone. There are sooo many more, but this is just a preview. If I can convince Erin to give up her precious sketch pad and notebook, I'll scan in some of the concept art and throw up an except and some promo images. It is going to be Flantastic. Going for a free action RPG style for the Xbox Live Arcade; if it gets popular (lol), I might look and see what we can do to port it to Windows. This could be the start of something epic.
This morning started off just fantastic; my clocks were set correctly for Daylight Savings Time (RAAAGE), but my alarm was set half an hour too late for some reason. Managed to get a shower and get in just a few minutes late; not too bad. But by the time I had gotten there, I had several new work orders, emails, and voicemail messages waiting already. I set the Dukane system to update the clocks and the bells, and then set the VK system to update the media retrieval clocks and classroom CCMs. Then, my work done, I forgot about it. Turns out, only half the clocks decided to play nice. After messing around with the VK box for a while, I gave up and gave Jason a call about it. It was a pretty epic battle, very Tron-esque. Totally imagined light-cycle battles and such going on while I was fighting with that ancient software. (Which could be because we decided to watch Tron again last night...whatever 
). Eventually we got that fixed for now (Apparently it will break again in a week when the software decides it actually is DST), but the rest of my morning was spent running around putting out fires for kids to take their Acuity tests (Hooray standardized testing?). Grabbed some lunch with Erin and Dani, then back to work. Found out the bell system actually didn't decide to want to work today, so I spent most of the rest of the afternoon dealing with that and scheduling issues from the VK box's morning antics. Longest day ever.
Tried to find some time to work on the site; managed to get mod_rewrite going (hooray!), so the blog now has fancy looking permalinks. Added the option over on the Eminence side, though I'm not quite ready to roll that SEO mod out yet. Need to do a full backup of the site/content, and actually upgrade to the newest phpBB version. Then I have to fix the theme which will undoubtedly break, and update the PHP hacks for the registration form, etc. Then I can try and add something that might break it. Though it would be nice for more of the site to get indexed than just the shoutbox That's another thing I need to work on, I had planned to add some pagination to the shoutbox page and make it a little more friendly to use. And get a mobile version of the site, or at least shoutbox, going. Most of the users pop on using smart phones anyway, if they aren't at home. Would be nice for me and several others to be able to chat on there.
Talked to Parker a bit about Subversion vs Mercurial; apparently a lot of folks are heading the Hg way. Think I might try it out myself; this Mercurial/PHP web interface looks pretty interesting. I've been wanting to get a nice repository solution setup for my projects; I'd tried to get SVN working on here, but never could find a nice front-end to manage it. Granted it can be done from the command-line, but with as many projects as I work on (and random code snippets that should be organized) it would be really nice to have a way to manage it. The topic of Epic came up and he warned me off. Apparently this article was written by a former Software Engineer there, which is the position I will ideally be applying for. Still, I think I want to give it a shot. The Windows Integration position seems interesting as well, and it's pretty close to my current job/experience. I'd love to find a PHP coding job, but so far I haven't found much luck, except at EarthIT. I haven't quite gotten around to applying there yet either. (I seem to be stuck in my ways, can't take that jump, for some reason.) I need to update my resume and start working on cover letters for these positions, see what comes back. I looked at Raven as well, which looks AWESOME, but I don't have the experience for something that isn't entry-level there. And of course, there are no entry-level openings. Erin suggested I might drop them a letter with a resume and see if they might have anything in the works. Worth a shot; I think working in a game design company would be about the coolest job ever. Can definitely see enjoying my work and loving what I do there. (Blizzard: I love you too. But you won't hire me 
)
Oh well. Time to stop procrastinating, I guess. Until next time!
Mmpf
Sick days are always the worst. Especially when they are unpaid. I woke up this morning with the worst migraine I've ever had (I blame Erin and Dani playing ChronoCross all night), and decided I needed to stay home; there's no way I'd make it through the day like this. So now I have the day to myself, but I can't even enjoy it because everything feels like a bad acid trip with a robot elephant standing on my head. Worked a bit on the site, made the media section work sortof; built a dinky foreach/scandir/lightbox dealie for a nice gallery view. Toying with the idea of playing with mod_rewrite today.
Erin and Dani are off to see Dani's therapist; apparently she wanted to meet Erin. Guess I'm just not important enough to want to meet. Whatever. Dunno what I'm gonna do for the next couple hours. I watched the Blizzard 20 year video, and it yet again reaffirms my want to make my business happen. I love video games, and I'd love to work for a video game company. Blizzard, in particular, would be fantastic. I love everything about the company, from it's history and culture, to the games it makes. Perhaps someday.
Blag, NAS, TV
I think the blog is just about where I want it. I still need to figure out how to recompile apache with mod_rewrite support and not break any other sites in the process. I'd like to use the /%year%/%postname% syntax as my rewritten blog post URL, but at the moment POSTFIX just looks ugly. I'll leave it at the default for now. Search engines may ignore it, but I can always add some SEO later. And I need to customize this theme as well. I was thinking I might combine the Eminence v3 look to give it an outer-spacey feel, but I haven't figured that out quite yet. I'd also like to incorporate some of my writings onto new pages, but that's still in the works. At the moment I'm pretty satisfied with them all being imported (except the old Andromeda's Peril and Andariel's Quest shorts I found) into Google Docs, but I really don't want to maintain them in two places. Or make them totally public. On that note, I still need to clean up the directory structure in this subdomain. Most of it is just there behind the scenes as reference for me, some of it is still hotlinked elsewhere. If I can get mod_rewrite going, I should be able to take care of both issues and just redirect the missing stuff to the correct location.
I recently purchased a ZyXEL NSA221, a two-bay networked storage enclosure. It is pretty sweet now that I've gotten used to it, though the transfer speeds are abysmal, even over a gigabit link. Somewhere around 8Mbps transfer. Reading from it is fine, and it has no issues streaming to two PCs and the Xbox at the same time, which is pretty sweet and mostly why I purchased it. I was hoping to get the built-in Bittorrent client working to auto-download from RSS like my desktop currently does, but it only supports 10 active torrents at a time, and isn't nearly as customizable as I'd like. So for the moment, it's just used as storage and a streaming media server. I wrote a batch script to automagically extract torrents as the finish, and move them to the NAS, for instant viewing.
I was originally hoping to use the NAS for my Music, TV shows, Movies, and as a backup solution for my user profile, but I severely under-estimated my space usage. I had purchased two 1TB WD Caviar Blue drives to run in JSON, but after having the first drive fail in under 24 hours, I decided to put them in as Raid-1 mirrored. So 2 2TB drives would have been a better investment, though at the time I thought I would already be getting 2TB of usage, and 4TB seemed a little excessive. As it stands, the NAS has only our TV shows, and is 75% full and climbing. I'm not too worried about it, most of the big TV show packs I have are ripped copies from my DVD box sets; If I have to throw a DVD in instead and delete the rips, that's not a huge deal. For the moment.
Planning ahead, I'd really like to look at getting a 5-bay QNAP NAS, which should give 8TB total storage, with a hot spare in Raid-5. Between all the PCs and the current NAS, we are using about 3TB, so that should give us plenty of space to grow. Having the failure protection will be really nice as well. One of the neat features with both the ZyXEL and the QNAP NAS' is that they can operate not only as a media streaming server, but also generic file storage, iTunes home network sharing, and an endpoint for VPN access. Having access to everything on the go would be fantastic, though not really a necessity at the moment. Jobs in the future may require a bit of travel though, so it could be soon.
An aside: I am a big fan of Newegg. They generally have the best prices on all the hottest electronics. However, my track record with them recently as far as storage is concerned, is not the greatest. Of the last five drives purchased, 3 have failed. Some people I've talked to indicated this could be due to how the drives are stored before shipping, but I have to say: Don't purchase storage from Newegg. You may pay a little more for the same product, but if improper handling is causing an inordinate amount of drive failures, you have to factor that cost in as well. The replacement may be free, but lost data is still costly. Also make sure you don't put your drives vertical, as they could spin too fast and let all the data fall out! ;D
Curves Ahead
So, I'm planning on quitting my current job and moving to Madison, Wisconsin with Dani and Erin. There are so, so many reasons for this, but the most prescient is that I haven't had a raise in three years. And I make less than the janitors do. With the cuts to education over the last couple years, that certainly isn't going to change. I haven't had a whole lot of luck finding an IT job around here, but I haven't been looking that hard either, I suppose. Part of which was due to my not liking change...the stress of this decision is killing me. I hardly have any money after paying the bills; certainly not enough to save up for anything. But I've decided to go through with it.
I don't really dislike my job per se, but I've grown very tired of it. There are days when I just want to quit outright, but there are others that can be rewarding, even enjoyable. Those days, however, are few and far between. Most days, between the drama with my co-workers, and being ridiculously underpaid, it just isn't worth it. I need something new, and something where some sort of advancement is possible. I was told when I first started, that the corporation would be an ideal fit for me; They provided tuition reimbursement, would cover the cost of my certification exams, and I could look forward to advancing within the department; if only laterally. When I first started at BCSC, I was taking courses in Cisco network management through DeVry, and expected to join the network team very soon after starting.
After three years, I am still a desktop technician; basically doing help desk, but I have to move around and go do stuff. I've branched out a bit over the years, doing Webapp development and even having some server responsibilities. After I developed my first application, an ASP/Access hack job to address student transportation tracking concerns, I was asked to develop two more. The first of which was to design and implement a system for managing attendance tracking and management for substitute teachers. The second, which I have not had a chance to work on, was a full-featured management system for Human Resources, including employee time tracking, payroll, and attendance. I was also in charge of designing and building the server currently in use for web applications, including the employee intranet/extranet, main corporation web page, student e-learning software, and various other in-house applications.
My responsibilities as a Desktop Technician have changed over the years as well, to include troubleshooting and support for various software and non-standard hardware packages. I've also learned quite a bit about networking and the switching/routing side of our network. I've helped run networking cabling, terminated patch panels, and even helped deploy and manage our wireless infrastructure. But all of this has been without seeing any benefit to me, aside from the on-the-job experience. Salaries have been frozen for the past two years, and merit-based pay raises are out of the question.
So the biggest opportunity for me with this move, is to move into the IT field proper. My feeling is that the education field will continue to be like this, and all indications are that it will be like this for some time. Don't get me wrong -- I understand that much of what I've done falls under what would be expected in a similar position. But the lack of recognition or change in pay based on additional responsibilities (doing more with less especially, due to turnover attrition in our department) wouldn't continue in the public sector. I'm hoping to find a job that is more suited to me; and that I am more suited for. I like technology, but I didn't plan on working in help desk for the rest of my life. For that matter, I didn't plan to continue working in that position after I left Verizon.
Another opportunity for me is to continue schooling. One of the major factors in picking to work for BCSC over IUPUI/CS was the additional tuition reimbursement. I planned to work here for a few years gaining job relevant work experience, and continue going to school to finish out my bachelor's degree. After working here for a few months, I realized that wasn't a possibility, and changed my school track to an associate's in network management. I managed to maintain a 4.0 GPA in my continuing courses, but was unable to continue attending, due to the cost of the tuition. My pay from BCSC fell far short to continue at DeVry. I am hoping to find a decent, dependable job in Madison, and then start/transfer to UW-Madison.
Since I'm looking at a career change of some sort, I've toyed with the possibility of joining the police. The Madison Police Force looks very nice, but I don't think it is something I can just join out of the blue. Perhaps down the road, with some additional training. I really enjoy programming, much more so than systems/network administration. I'm hoping to find a job either doing web application development (Web Programming), or systems development. With my primary languages being web-based, a C++.NET\C# job is probably out of the question, but I think I could pick it up quickly if I found an internship, or entry-level position. I have some limited experience across the board as well, from ASP/.NET to Perl and AJAX, so a generic web development job might not be outside the realm of possibility. My design skills are just atrocious though, so hopefully I can find something in development and not design.
Since everything else is changing, I might as well take this opportunity to change some things about myself as well. One of the big things I'd like to change, and I know Erin and Dani do too, is to lose a significant amount of weight. This is something I've struggled with for years, but it is something to try to change. I don't see myself being super thin and buff (though it's something to shoot for), but not morbidly obese would be a start.
So changes are coming. I'm super excited about most of it, and insanely stressed about making it happen. If everything goes as planned, Erin will get her job at EPIC, Dani will find one too, and I'll have a bit of a buffer to find one as well. Hopefully, I'll be able to save up about $600 before I leave BCSC, which should cover a month or two of job hunting. I still have some expenses to pay after we leave our current apartment and get rid of the utilities, etc. And I really need to get some clothes that fit and look good on me for interviewing. A haircut and some nice shoes will help too.
Down the road, if all goes as planned, we should be able to afford some nice stuff. And I should be able to take my student loans out of forbearance, and start paying them off. Who knows, in a few years I might even be able to go back to school and get a new(ish) truck. My car is about on its last leg, and I think a one-way trip to Madison might be all that's left in it. Yet another of my stressors.
More later perhaps!
Blag Time!
Well, I'm going to attempt to import my old old OLD blog posts and consolidate them here. You may or may not see the Internets explode over the next few (however long this takes).
I am making no edits, and no alterations. These posts will be preserved as they were in the past, where possible. I'm missing a lot of images from the older posts, but eventually they might be found.
There is a lot of deliciously angsty teen drama to be found, as well as lots of language. Be forewarned!
Looks like the import is mostly complete. Hooray!
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