reatmon

Ok.. the gym thing died off. Hopefully I can ressurect it once life gets unhectic in a few weeks. But now I’m trying to cut back on how much I eat. I realized that I’m never going to stop eating bad food. I just love food too much to become a vegitarian or some nonesense.

What I can control is how much of that bad food I eat. My current philosophy is that if I just cut everything in half that I used to eat, then I’m consuming half the calories and am bound to lose a few pounds. So far it’s going pretty good…

I just watched the pilot of flight 292 make a once in a life time perfect landing. Kudos to the pilot. He deserves a huge bonus for that landing.

I’ve started going to the gym again. I’ve managed to go every weeknight (except one) for almost a week now. I’m trying to work my way up on the amount of time I can spend walking. Part of it is pain and tiredness. That will disappear the more I walk. The other is boredom. I need to find something to “do” while walking. I’d take my iPod, but just listening to music get’s boring and doesn’t really engage my brain. Listening to a book on tape (or mp3) would work though…

My wife woke me up at 5:30 this morning saying, “I smell smoke! Ryan! Get up. I smell smoke!”

I stumbled out of bed and could smell smoke. A quick tour of the house told me that likely it was not our house. I opened the front door and there was a haze outside and sirens in the distance.

I tossed on some clothes and went out looking for it. The house was not in our neighborhood, but it was across the major street a block away.

On my way into work I looked at the roof and there are large charred holes. I try ane imagine what I would do. What would I save? My laptop? My servers? Mainly for the data. Hardware can be replaced.

What memories from the house? Of course my family and dogs. I mean once you are outside and things like that are safe, what else?

Thank you, God. You have blessed my family with health and safety. Please be with that family during their hard time.

So we joined a gym last Wednesday (before Thanksgiving). The gym is really nice. New equipment, flat screen TVs everywhere. The only down side is the personal training staff.

You get a first free meeting to profile you and determine your body age and what you need to work on. (I’m a 30 year old in the body of a 31 year old… but with work I could be in the body of a 21 year old. Whatever that means…) After that meeting they schedule you a one on one with a trainer to go over the equipment and give you a routine to follow. They have like 50 different weight machines alone, so this really needed. First, you need to know how to use the machines, second you need to know how much you need to use them (three sets of 10, etc…)

So Janee and I go in for our appointments. Only, the person I’m with never had me down as a being scheduled. I have a card saying that I’m at 7:00pm with this person, but they had someone else scheduled. Ok… no big deal, I just joined my wife and her trainer. Unfortunatly, that means split time with less one one one.

The next night is Corbin’s turn. I work out while he’s doing his. I never see them go over the weight machines, and the guy has Corbin walk on the tread mill again and sits and talks to him. The guy took Corbin through the profiling phase again. What a waste. Then he schedules Corbin for a 5:00pm one on one (for real this time) for tonight. But when Corbin gets there they trainer did not come into work today. He was getting his wisdom teeth removed. So they are going to call to reschedule Corbin.

We have a 30 day cancellation period. The remaining 21 days had better go smoother. I’m already not happy with the trainers…

At 12:30pm, after having a nice lunch with my wife, I got a call from the alarm company. The alarm was going off, and they wanted to know if I wanted to send the police. I told them I would call them back because my father in law was just five minutes down the road. Only he wasn’t, and he hadn’t taken his cell phone. So in the car I hopped and called the alarm company on the way home to tell them to send the cops.

80mph and 15 minutes later I was home. A false alarm notification on the door, joy. But the best part was what waited inside…

And go see some more photos.

I would seem that the beam just decided it was tired of holding on the ceiling. It commited beam suicide. Of course the fact that some bonehead worker used nails to hold it in place instead of three nice bolts didn’t help.

Total damage: Beam, ceiling fan, pergo flooring, glass coffee table, several glass Christmas trees that my wife collected over the years, a number of candles, a picture, some other Christmas ornaments, and the entertainment center (a little bit).

Why can’t abnormal events like this happen to other people?

There are times that work can be enjoyable, and other times when work is just a pain in the ass.

These past few days have the pain kind. It’s bad enough that we have to take crap from designers, other support groups, and our IT department. But I draw the line at inter-team crap. It’s just ridculous. There is no need for us to have such bad attitudes towards other groups that we take a stand against them and belittle anyone who suggests that we should try to work with them on a project.

That’s what I got hit with Thursday. I suggested that we try to add some value to a program we are working on by having the IT group manage a single file. They control what the file interfaces to already, I just was suggesting that they manage the contents of the file as their part in help us make the designers life a little easier.

Oh well. I removed that feature/requirement from the spec after the roasting I got from my own team. Luckily they came just short of telling me that I was an idiot for suggesting it. Instead they took refuge in glancing at each other while I trying to make a point and rolling their eyes. Very unprofessional in my opinion.

Well, we had a fun time passing out candy to the kiddies. This year I went a little overboard and put up a huge web in our front yard. It took me about 12 hours over a week to finish the web. But it really came alive when I got four flood lights to light it up. Here are some pics.

Next year I add a big scary spider…

Wednesday I came home and sat down at my computer. The monitor comes on. Warms up. The image appears… and is screwed up. Parts of the horizontal range are going nuts. Like it can’t control the beam. I try lots of things to make it stop. Finally I realize that the monitor is dying and is time to replace it… It was a 19″ Sony that I got from work. Replacing that is still like $250-$400. *sigh*

Thursday morning I got out to my car to go to work. One of the windows is busted out and the contents of my glove box and center console are strewn about the front seat. *sigh* Nothing got stolen because, duh, I don’t keep anything in there for them to steal. You would think that before wasting time breaking a window and going through a car that they would try a flashlight and looking in the window. “Hmmm… nothing out in the open… I won’t bother.” Nope, idiots.

So my Thursday was spent waiting for the police, calling the insurance company, waiting on the glass repair people and looking for a new monitor. Luckily there is a place in town that buys old Dell refurbs and returns and sells them cheap. I got a nice black 19″ for only $97.

Finally finished my changes and put the current stuff into production. One of the outstanding requests is to make a tarball of the files for people to pull. I have a few major problems that temas and I found with the new code, but I need to take a look at making a release. That also means we need to start versioning the codebase.

But overall, I’m pleased with the changes. They should (hopefully) make it easier to add new things and fix bugs in the future. Next big rewrite is themes. We have a good start at it, but there is a lot that is still yet to be done.