Story Archive - January 2003

Warmth! (1/26/2003)

It is cold in New Jersey. It is freezing cold in New Jersey. It has been freezing cold in New Jersey for the past 10 days. It's the longer streak where temperatures have not gone above freezing for two decades, and it's not over yet. On a good note, I am no longer there. I have flown myself home to lovely, warm California where I can wear a short-sleeved shirt outside during the day. That global warming needs to move faster.

So, how long am I home for? Unknown, but there's a chance that I will be gone for the last two weeks of February to an undisclosed location to defend our nation's borders. We'll see how that pans out. That means I'll have been on the road for six weeks of the past four months. That's about forty-percent travel. It's too much. So, I'm chatting at work to see if I can that back down again. I really need a nice small standard deviation.

Across the Country (1/18/2003)

CRAP! I'm jumping on a 6:40am flight on Monday to get my ass across the country to New York. I'm training a pair of Engineers on the J2EE model and building web applications. Training is one my favorite activities for work, so it will be good to get out there. Mentoring is my favorite activity, and training is similar. Plus, I'm going to hangout with Chris for a bit during my time in New York. He'll show me all the wonderful sites out there. It's my second time to the big apple. The last time I was there I saw the Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building and looked out on the city from on top of the World Trade Center.

On a good note, in exchange for this little trip, I've gotten another trip on the week of February 3rd cancelled. That trip would have also taken me across the country. That trip was for a workshop. I've never done a workshop at this job, and I'm interesting in doing one, but it should be one that's not across the country and that's got a cool technical component to it that I'm a SME in. This missed both of those categories.

I've been doing a great job at cranking out my new years resolutions this year. My wisdom teeth are out and I just took my car to Midas today to get the muffler fixed. It was more than just the muffler, the exchaust pipe was cracked up near the engine. So they replaced the whole exhaust pipe and the muffler. It took them a while to figure out how to do it. For some strange reason, they couldn't seem to find the parts for the 1991 Nissan 2000 NX. Anyway, the ended up using generic parts and custom bending them to fit. It falls under the same Midas Lifetime Warranty as custom ordering the parts for Nissan, and it's noticable cheaper. Now I just need to get my smog check completed before March 14th.

I only went into the office one day this. I spent the rest of the time working from home. It was really nice. I did a lot of sleeping in until 10am but then working until around 7pm. It all works out in the end. That's a pretty good system. I was a little sickly during the week, so I didn't get a chance to try out my work from Stanford model. Plus, I won't be able to do it next week since I'm out of town.

I've added WIL WHEATON DOT NET to my links page. Based on what we see from his site, he's a good writer. I hope he produces a good book.

Home, Web and More (1/12/2003)

After getting back from Denver I was finally able to come home. I'd spent almost all my time back in Sacramento. That's a not a bad thing, it's certainly better than Denver, but there's something nice about sitting down at my own desk, sleeping in my own bed, and all that other random wonderful stuff. One of my favorite things to do, though a little strange, is to stock the refrigerator. When I'm traveling I can't have any perishable foods in there, so to go shopping for $100+ of groceries is great.

I'm sure you've noticed that I did a few things with the web site! I've finally made the move into a hosted domain. So this site shall always be at http://www.chaosserver.net going forward and I don't have to worry about moving it around from ISP to ISP or having banner ads float around, or any of that junk. It's very nice. I also updated the color scheme to be a "winter" scheme. It's suppose to make you feel cool and refreshed. I was thinking that autumn is clearly red, but what's the difference between the spring and summer color schemes? The both feel like green seasons to me. Luckily, I've got plenty of time to sort this out before the season changes. I also brought the whole Chaos Corporation portion of the site in-line with the style of the rest of it.

I released another program as well. I finished it a few months ago, but it was days before my laptop's hard drive went toasty on me. So I've been waiting all this time to get my laptop back up and in stable condition before getting it released. It's called Jagg (The Directory Analyzer). The point is to quickly root out where all your hard drive space is going. It's especially useful to help me keep under my 50 meg limit on my web page. I can run it and see which directories are hogging up all the space. It's down in the Chaos Corporation, on the Jagg Page.

A Loss of Wisdom (1/5/2003)

After my week off I had two quick days back at the office sitting in the hotel space getting myself back into the framework groove. Then the new year came and I had another great little party with a bunch of friends!

On Thursday, I got all four of my wisdom teeth yanked out. OUCH! I was completely unconscious and they all got moved. My original plan was to head back down home on Sunday night. It should have worked. I'm feeling really good other than a small bit a soarness in one socket. Unfortunately, I have a follow up appointment on Wednesday at 1pm. So I'm going to hang out in Sacramento for two days more than I expected.