Rampidbyter Rampid byter: A byte of my .Net developing life.

Bought some new ram to replace the crappy discount 20$ two one gig strips I bought from Microcenter. I guess discount RAM is still exposed to the same problem of just random luck of getting a bad batch of chips. I ordered some Corsair RAM tonight along with a new 160gig IDE 133 harddrive to add to my old desktop whose main drive went out. I think I’m going to put Windows Server 2008 on the old desktop and set it as a completely dedicated IIS server. Apparently with Server 08 you can configure it similar to what you would a Linux PC where select components can be installed or not installed based on the particular machines uses. At this point I think a good dedicated IIS box would be worth the investment because clearly the new machine is not working to fantastically for reliability, but I’ll give IIS 7 some credit. It’s not as horrible to configure as was/is IIS 6.0, but that’s a whole other story.

I actually owe an apology to Windows Vista, Microsoft Office, and Visual Studio 2008. Apparently my Ram that I purchased within the last few months, at least since mother’s day, was bad and has been causing the brunt of my crashes and hang ups. Thankfully I’ve started the remedy for this and will have it repaired shortly.

Had a nice little mini vacation for at least one day that’s helped to mellow me a little, but it would be nice to have a day to really rest. Like laying around in bed with my pj long pants, a nice computer book, and just relaxing. Mmm, sounds pleasant. That or fishing. I’d like to go fishing sometime but as of late it’s too much work to get up to do something like that.

Also tonight I’ve officially paid off my truck and now own it completely. Only debt left to my name is the school loan that considering the expedite pay off of the truck will be paid back in another year. I plan to buy a home within the next three months in order to offset my current tax rape… er, I mean funding that the government has so quaintly decided I was able to afford. Thank you Mr. new tax bracket that’s forced me to buy a home in order to use as a tax write off. Also for some reason I have three other people, including my father, whom all want to come live with me if I buy a home.

I would also like to crown Clarence the king of burns as his latest antics have actually de-crowned Tavis as having been the most elaborate prank in my history. Bravo, more details will follow but at this point in time it’s sleep central time.

Just got back from Union Township park. I walked three something miles after getting into an argument with someone. I took my iPod and my gimpy leg and started walking. I realized about the quarter mile marker that the last time I was at the park I was running with Matt Maupin training for boot camp. I remember the day pretty vividly it was early August and we were running around together. Well I was jogging winded and Matt was trucking ahead and there was this girl sitting on a bench. I went skimping past and she got up and started to jog with me. It was the strangest thing that’s ever happened to me. After the first mile we’d picked out the china we were going to have at our wedding and I even think the name of the first kid. Her friends were ahead of her training for Amelia’s track team and Matt was still running way up ahead. When he lapped me he noticed I was running around with a hot girl and he later asked me how I did it. I got a weird look from him and he said he never has any girls following him, and I just laughed because he’s a bulky muscle builder and I’m a chubby overly white tall guy. It was pretty funny, and then about three weeks after that I shipped out. That is after I got four wisdom teeth pulled that happened to develop dry socket that I was forced to deal with while at boot camp without any scope or extra time to clean them out. It was a terrible experience to say the least.

I tell yah time flys. That’s probably been five or six years ago probably close to the actual day. Kind of realized that when passing a rock inscribed with his name, and I can’t help but sit and wonder about how life turns out. Oh, and yeah my leg is killing me. A brisk three mile walk and my leg is hard to stand on. I hate my leg.

Man, it’s been one of those weeks you know you get once every few months. I was sick Sunday before last and it stretched into Wednesday of last week. Weirdest thing, I was running on the treadmill for about a mile and a half at 1am because I couldn’t sleep. Probably because I was up so late that weekend helping my cousin put in the new straight six into his old F100 or something like that. I finished running and was exhausted so I fell right to sleep only to wake up an hour later with the most painful gut ache. It was one of those pains so bad it had an effect on my dream. I can still remember the dream of being on the Olympic judging panel filling paperwork for all the events and how mind numbing it was. It’s bad when I start doing paperwork in my head I usually wake up ill.

So I end up finally feeling better that night at 5:30am, took a nap until 6:00am, and got up for work. That was the beginning of the slope that’s resulted in a pretty crappy week and continuing into this new week. I then end up doing a lot of things during the week, mainly reading, and resting from the illness. I start to feel better about Friday and I have to go to my girlfriends grandpas 80^th birthday party. Parties always make me nervous especially around a lot of people that I don’t know very well, and especially around her family because they’re kind of upper class. I never get along very well with higher up people because most have an undeserved sense of entitlement. It’s annoying to say the least.

All in all it wasn’t too bad except only her grandparents talk to me anymore. I rarely get addressed or mentioned, or even waived to. Probably because I’m freaking tall and just avoid all contact when possible because I’m awkward. Her grandpa asked how my work was going at my previous clients, whom he retired from coincidently, and I told him I had a new job. I was asked what I was doing and I told them I was a senior developer with a jewelry company. Next thing I know I hear a gasp and it’s her uncle (works as an IS executive) shocked I was a senior anything, and was asking me the details of my work. He’d thought I was still a consultant and I had to tell him I’d moved on for professional reasons. Long story short probably the longest conversation I’ve had with him in four years, and it was only about two minutes long.

Saturday had great promise but ended up being more toil than spoil. I had planned to venture out with a group of Christians with attitude, just kidding, but they were going out shooting on a farm so that’s rocking right? I woke up at 7:30am and trucked down to my step brothers to help dump 70+ water heater boxes, water heaters, toilets, and cooper to the respective recycling places. This is all with intentions of heading to the shootout at 11am, but wound up doing work all morning and into the afternoon. Took the entire cooper haul to the metal recycler and got a hefty $500, and then came the boxes. This is about 9:30 at this point and we started on the boxes. I stacked them full in the truck bed so they were up past the window. Took three trips to get them all loaded full way to clear them all out and at this point it was past 11:00am so I completely missed going shooting. The whole time we’re trucking around with all this trash in the back of my truck I’ve got two hand guns, ammo, and an assault rifle sitting behind my bench seat. That’d been a pretty bad way to start off the weekend with getting arrested with weapons, and a truck full of cooper. I swear it looked like we knocked off a hardware store at some points.

So Sunday comes floating around. I’m still aggressively attempting to shed some pounds by running at least 15 minutes straight for just over 1.5 miles. I’ve been stretching my running out longer each week. I’m going on 25 minutes this week. I run x minutes per week, and on the Sunday of the week I run the x time one more time, and the following Monday I increase my time by five minutes. I’ve been doing this for four weeks this week. I’m trying very hard not to end up like my parents, and to save my knee. However things keep getting bad to worse. I have found that it’s getting harder and harder to run because my knee constantly feels like a limp pile of flesh. I get on the treadmill and I have to actually thrust my right side of my body forward to swing my leg out. It’s terrible and it’s incredibly frustrating so much so that I actually end up running harder to try to force it to get better. It’s so maddening I actually had to start yelling at myself to keep me running longer because the pain becomes so overbearing I have to start daydreaming while I’m running to force myself to concentrate on something else. I always run and try to stare off into nothing and crank my iPod up to drown out the constant thumping of my feet on the tread. I don’t know what to do really I just need to beat myself until it gets stronger I think but the next morning my leg hurts so bad I can’t really walk well when I get up. I kind of stumple and I’ve nearly fallen down the stairs…. Ugh I can’t write anymore. I wrote three more pages but freaking ass Word keeps crashing and asking to restart. Visual Studio 2008 keeps crashing, windows media player keeps crashing and letting out the most horrible screetching in my stereo, which is lucky because normaly after remoting into the machine I lose my sound card. I’m about to say screw Microsoft operating system and switch to linux or crayons and paper. I may try Server 08 as I’ve heard It’s decent and doesn’t crash every freaking twenty minutes! Man I am having a shit tastic week. My step brother is moving possibly out of country, my knee doesn’t work, and my Vista keeps crashing worse than Lindsey lohan. I’m going to go running…

I finished helping my cousin do an engine swap at 1am last night. The F100 has had it’s carbureted 360 v8 swapped with an early 90’s straight six fuel injected engine with self managed EFI system. What was hilarious it the v8 was huge in dimension but the straight six completely surpassed the old engine in height. There is about a quarter of an inch or less of room between the engine and firewall. It’s insane, but man it’s in and rocking.  

Haven’t posted anything for a while, and my excuse is I’ve been pretty busy. Things are going well over on my side. The new job is proving to be a rush experience, but nothing unmanageable. Things are fast paced, but the environment is very friendly. I work with some nice equipment, and the only complaint so far, other than working with Clarence again, is that my desk faces the corner of the room. I think, given a dunce hat, I’d probably look like a scolded child nestled with my face in the corner, but at least I have two monitors and a computer looking back at me. I need one of those 180 degree mirrors to attach to my monitor so I can see what is going on behind me. I’m totally oblivious to people entering, or exiting the room.

On the personal front a lot of things are happening. Planning for a wedding, my mom had a skin cancer scare, my dad has a problem with his last remaining kidney not to mention just was diagnosed with diabetes, my aunt was in the hospital with a kidney stone, my cousin is building a new engine, and I’m just doing the new job thing.

I started on a new ambitious weight loss regiment that exceeds my haphazard approach previously. It seems to be paying off as I’ve lost 10 pounds this past week and a half. I just changed to diet pop, and I run 1.5 miles per day. My right leg that I had surgery on seems to be hanging in there but it’s still swollen for some reason. Saturday morning was the worst I’ve had to deal with it in a while as I woke up with leg pain. I go up and walked around and found my entire right leg felt like it had no power, and when I stepped down the knee felt like it was draining all of my energy from my body. It was the weirdest and somewhat painful experience I’ve had with it.

The Frisbee golf enthusiasm I’ve shared with others has netted the addition of at least one additional player and another joining next week. I may have even talked my cousin into joining the fun. So our group may be ever increasing, which is great since it’s a lot of fun to whoop their butts. Just kidding, but still I think I’m doing pretty good. I need to get my putting down and my mid range shots to stop overshooting the area.

I’ve been reading a lot of great books recently. Two robotics books, the new ASP.Net 3.5 books, work-flow books, communication foundation, Perl (learning it over), Unix administration (learning my new server), and odds and ends IEEE publications when they come in. I should probably lump the MAKE controller documentation and project into the mix since I’ve been toying with it the last week when I’m not sleeping/running.

I got the MAKE controller recently and it’s pretty neat. It’s not what I expected. No documentation was sent with the board whatsoever, and instructions on setup were hard to find on the community site. There was no step 1, step 2 documents and I didn’t realize you needed to install a ‘helper’ app to actually use it with the system. As a result I was confused and felt like the board was a cheapo pile until I started to get looking deeper into the community pages. It’s a pretty powerful little sucker, and it’s about the same size as my PIC Explorer board minus the more low-level capabilities. It’s worth getting if you ask me and it’s a bit easier to use as an intro to robotics than PIC programming boards, which you basically need a flashlight and PhD to get running right away.

Things are going well other than a few hiccups. The last two weeks working for Lucrum were a giant pain in the ass. Yes, I can freely say that. There was nobody to replace me, and when he was there we got only about 8 hours of actual hands-on training in before I left. My company wanted me to work extra hours to stay after to train him. The guy was in no mood to do anything after hours as he was still just coming off another project that was failing due to unaccounted requirements that slipped under the radar of the guy he had to replace because they too bailed from the company. Wow, what a cluster that had to be for him to come flying into the situation/client I was working at while still having to complete the other. All I can say was he was thrilled to take my spot since the client was one of the few he’s worked for that actually thought we were doing a great job, and was happy to have him coming in. So I’m thankful for that since he’s actually a very nice guy. However I turned down the additional side contract they offered because of the addendum of the 3-year non-compete clause that also included stipulation that if I work for a client/future client within the first year I owe them 30% of my first years total compensation within 30 days of violating the agreement. The agreement didn’t even really guarantee any actual additional work so I felt awfully dumb for almost signing it. I was approached after the company figured out I wasn’t responding to internal emails because my access was denied due to employment termination and I’ve promptly cut all ties. There were some unscrupulous activities by several of the higher-ups that have always left me uncomfortable and it feels good to be with a new company whose direction and leadership seems legitimate and earnest. I won’t go into detail about my points but needless to say I provided a brief overview to management before I left the previous company. I left on good terms, I got the client to accept the new guy replacing me, they were able to place additional work because of the reputation we built there, and I’ll just leave knowing I was very much appreciated by the client with the wonderful send off I received.

That’s about all I’ve got tonight. I’m going to hit the hay and start a new day that’s sure to be full of new problems and hopefully expedite solutions.