Saturday, July 31, 2004

I just have two words to say . . . Bye Bye Nomah! Oh was that three? Oh well, maybe he'll play a little better for Chigaco! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

Friday, July 30, 2004

Just a quick note for Vikki. About 2 months before the Blair Witch Project came out in the theatres years ago, The Sci-Fi Channel released a mock documentary about that too. Yet they advertised like it was real. Stupid me hadn't heard about the movie at the time and watched the documentary and it just about freaked me out. It wasn't until some thinking and media attention that I realized the movie was not the discovered video tapes of the actual incident, ergo making the documentary a HUGE hoax. I wouldn't put it past The Sci-Fi Channel to have done it again. Be forewarned! It's what makes The Sci-Fi Channel so great! That and the fact that they are still making new episodes of Stargate SG-1. Although I must admit I'm not as pleased with the branch off series Stargate Atlantis, but they both have hot chics in them so unless I get some friends around here to hang out with on Friday nights, I'll continue to watch and laugh at now General Jack O'Neill.
I got a little behind in my blogging. It appears that even though I have no parental supervision this week, I still am busier than all get-out (whatever that means). Wednesday I made dinner with Julie for her family. It was really quite good. We made chicken fried with a bread crumb/pecan coating on top of a rosemary leaf salad with a honey/BBQ dressing. The we had a baked bean casserole with a bread crumb/bacon/scallion crispy topping. I fried the chicken and made the back bean topping. Julie did the busy work like cut the onions and the salad. It may have been the best meal I ever cooked. Andy, you'd be proud of me. The recipe came from some cook book that Julie had. I guess the author is some professional chef with some TV show. I had never heard of her before. Maybe I should watch more Food Network.

Yesterday was plant failure day. At 300PM I got a call to replace A plant PC. I hate doing that! Things never go as they should. Well, yesterday, things didn't go as they should. Wound up crashing the brand new PC and had to hurry up and make a new one early this morning. Luckily the second installation went better without any problems. I wasn't too pleased with myself yesterday. But it wasn't really my fault, however no one else was doing the replacement.

If you note the time of this entry it appears that I am writing this on a Friday afternoon. Well, it turns out I am. I'm still on lunch break and decided to catch up since I have laundry to do when I get home today. Now the question is, what shall I make for dinner tonight???

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

So I cut grass like a fiend today. Now if my dad is reading this, you may be a little upset, but don't worry. Since I only cut half the grass on Sunday (I was getting bored half way thru. But it was a good thing because the AVP Hermosa Beach Open came on just as I walked in the house. Hey did you know those volleyball players get paid to wear stick on tattoos to advertise for companies like Gatoraid? You could pay me a couple thousand bucks to don one of those. Although I am no Karch Kiraly, but I've got to be close right? You know that guy is 43 and still playing professional sports? I hope I'm in that good of shape in 20 years. By the way, Misty May is probably the best women's beach volleyball player in the world right now and she has an abdomen injury. The sad fact is she might not be 100% at the games in Athens, but her 80% will easily beat most women's 120%. You should have seen her when she played for UCLA. GOOD NIGHT!) I needed to finish yesterday. But it rained all day yesterday so I finished today. Yes the grass was wet and way too long (there are definitely paths of high grass, sorry I didn't tell you that on the phone tonight Dad) but if I didn't cut it today, it wasn't going to happen tomorrow. I will cut it again this week and it will look better than ever! Then I cut my grandma's grass. Hers was long too, but her walk-behind mower decided to break when I started and the self-propelled wouldn't work anymore. The thing about those self-propelled is that they are heavy. But who cares?! They go by themselves. Not when they break! I was dead tired when I finished! But all the grass is cut and I've got a glass of wine in me so I'm happy!

Monday, July 26, 2004

It was my first day being The Boss! Since Ashley is on vacation this week, I get to be in charge . . . Well of the Automation/IT department anyway, which consists of only Ashley and Me. But hey, it's better than not being in charge. My whole day today was spent troubleshooting down one little problem. When you have different applications running and different databases and data being converted and re-entered into other databases all in one corporation, you're bound to have issues. Today we found out none of the blacktop plants could download the mainframe data (that contains all the trucks, customers and products in the The Workplace's systems). This normally isn't a big deal, but for some reason it was freezing the application. Plants could still run, but they had to pull their network cord out of the wall. It turns out, a hyphen isn't always what it appears to be (or "-" <> "-" in computer lingo). The blacktop application was having problems because it was looking for a regular hyphen while the mainframe data was supplying a syllable hyphen (SYH - whatever that is. It seems to be hexadecimal character CA). Due to the sorting algorithm and a recently entered truck into the mainframe, the glitch finally showed itself. The question is why did it wait until I was alone? Oh well. Finding the problem was today's feat. Fixing it will be tomorrows.

And Vikki. We don't have to go and be all mean about to me. The thing with liking teams like the Mets and the Pirates and the Stillers is that you never have any expectations of them. You're just happy to cheer for them and get lucky and see them win. Perhaps if you were to come to reality and realize your life does not revolve around Boston and their sports teams you will see how silly you have truly been!

Sunday, July 25, 2004

So it appears that a new blogger has stepped forward. To avoid confusion between the different Tims, the newest member to the blogging community will be linked with Hillner. Just so you know Hillner, it's okay to get in disagreements with your fellow bloggers. Andy and Janet have different opinions all the time and who doesn't like to disagree with Vikki? Of course Roman and Amy don't really seem to care too much about blogging anymore, but hey, we hear from them every now and then.

So with that said; Vikki. You know that just because The Sox won one game against the Yankees that isn't going to change the rest of their season. At the rate they're going now, they might not even make the wildcard spot. If you want to ever see The Sox play in the World Series during your life time they need to play to win all 9 innings and not just the first couple. Beating the Yankees is good, but maybe they should work on beating some of the not-so-good teams like Detroit. Come talk to me when you're excited about the games that have been played and not the fights that took place.

Friday, July 23, 2004

So it seems recently people have been complaining about blogs. Now this isn't coming from any of my friends who do blog, but from a person who shall remain nameless (of course you can click this link and find out who I'm talking about). He (though it could be a she, you never really know) states that it is silly to read blogs when you should just talk to the people for real and people only blog because they don't want to talk to others. Now, I'm a busy person. And I enjoy writing every now and then. So, why not get the best of both worlds and allow myself some creativity room to jot down my thoughts in an artistic manner I see fit, while still allowing busy people to catch up on my life and hopefully get a laugh or two in while doing it. Now I don't want to talk to all 6 of my friends (I'm not a loser, I'm only referring to my currently blogging buddies) every day and have them tell me one paragraph worth of day's information. What a waste of time! It's not as though my friends have anything good to say anyway especially those that find it satisfying to put other's down who enjoy expressing themselves (not exposing themselves) all over the internet. I say more power to us and until you take away our internet (or our ability to blog as it appears Roman has once again deserted us) WE WILL FOREVER BLOG! By the way, it's BLOG not GOLB!

Thursday, July 22, 2004

And by the way, if you haven't seen this video yet, you must see it NOW!
I'm not a huge fan of TV. In fact, I try and watch as little as I can . . . well only if sports isn't on, and I did tell Vikki I'd watch this season of Road Rules because her friend from home is in it. Anywho, I was flipping thru the channels the other day just to pass some time and I came across this show called I Love the 90's. Yeah I know you've all heard of it. So had I at that point, but for someone growing up in that time; it's hilarious! I remember most of everything those people talk about, and it has the guy from Ed who is pretty much a comic genius talking about whatever is on his mind. If you haven't seen it yet, I highly recommend it, even if you're one of those people who hate watching trash on TV. Maybe it's just because I'm getting old but it's nice to remember yester-year. Speaking of remembering . . . does anyone remember what my hair looked like back in the 90's . . .

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Thanks to a recent Vikki blog and the unexpected future marriage of Britney Spears, it appears Kirsten Dunst will now be my next target of obsessive obsession. Maybe Vikki can find me a new poster . . .

So some problems at work again today. Luckily The Workplace has me working for them. Someone apparently punched in a little too hard on the touch screen of the new time clock and push the screen off of the touch pad. But, I fixed it. Also I fixed the problem of 100 emails in my inbox this morning (stupid datasets and VB.net). Now all that's left to solve is why the time clock is sending out duplicate emails. When a user swipes, the time clock sends an email to an email address which I will never tell in a million years. That email address is polled by a MS Windows service and data about a swipe is recorded in a database table. There should never ever be a duplicate email so how we are getting them is a big mystery (since time and location are in the email, it is impossible to swipe and punch in/out and then do it again within one second at the same location).

Then I had to fix FuelBoss. That's a VB.net application I had nothing to do with until the fellow that wrote it was fired. Now I'm stuck with uncommented code and a few complaining people. This application sends and receives data to and from the fuel pumps that The Workplace has. I have the solution to their problem (they want to use this application across multiple corps) now tomorrow all I have to do is fix it. I'll tell ya, I'm always on top of things!

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

I'm really getting fed up with my blogger crashing. I can't even copy and paste anymore. If this keeps up, you may just have to call me to find out what I'm up to. This worked fine until their stupid little changes!

Monday, July 19, 2004

I went and saw Spiderman 2 this weekend and I definitely was NOT disappointed. Plenty of action, plenty of drama, and plenty of Kirsten Dunst! Though she did look better in the first one, but still, I'm not complaining.

Though the weekend was fun with my sister, her husband and my friend Kate here, the reality of work-week quickly set in today. Tomorrow I have to be at Ashcom at 545 AM to try out the new time clock yet again. The only good thing I see from this is that I will be leaving around 200PM tomorrow afternoon. Also on the plus side, it's nice to know I can take a break from video games for quite some time, play a round or two with a friend and beat the crap out of 'em!

Friday, July 16, 2004

Apparently the trend this week is to not update your blog. I guess that works for me! Happy Weekend!

Thursday, July 15, 2004

Well aren't you all just so lucky! Due to the fact that it is Thursday night and there is nothing on TV and nothing to do ANYWHERE, I decided to write about what I did earlier before this new blogger thing decided to eat it up.

--Insert previous blog post here--

So if I have to do one more thing with time clocks at work, I just may kill someone! Recently I've been developing a Windows Service to check emails from the various time clocks and send the incoming data to the appropriate database table. If you are unclear about what a Windows Service is, just hit ctrl+shift+esc, then click on the processes tab. Most of those programs you see running are services. Instead of opening up a GUI (graphical user interface), the program just runs in the background, doing its thing without you ever knowing it. Frankly I couldn't tell you what most of the services you are currently looking at now are doing, but I'd advice not to terminate any of them. So with developing this new service, I am becoming quite the VB program guru. I have programmed anything from desktop applications, to Windows services, to web applications. Who knows what I'll do next!? Maybe some PDA applications. Let just stick with where I'm at now for the time being.

On a different note, yesterday evening I ate dinner out at the Italian place in The Big City. It's a micro-brewery meaning they make their own beer. I decided to get a sampler which is six of their best home-made beers. Each sample is 6 oz, but the best part is that the whole sampler set me back only $4.75! Where else can you get 36 oz of beer for less than a Lincoln head? Their 12 oz only costs a buck fifty! Why have I only been to this place once before?!

--End previous blog. If this gets deleted . . . Well you would never really know because you wouldn't be reading this now would you?--

Just for your information, It appears to be the fact that I am using Mozilla and trying to spell check that is crashing my internet. Right now, I would really like the old blogspot back, the spell checker was much friendlier . . .

I hate you new blogger! I just wrote a long two paragraphs and you
thought it would be funny to crash my internet at that point! Well, the
joke is on you because now I refuse to retype all I had written. It's
too bad too because it was rather funny.

Wednesday, July 14, 2004

I'm really get fed up with Time Clock badges. I bet we have thrown out at least 300 cards trying to reposition barcodes, and increase font sizes and whatever the heck else people want. I bet I modified the badge program a dozen times today only to end up with the cards being "on-hold" because we weren't sure what to print on them. If I never see another time clock badge as long as I live, I will be one happy fellow. And if anyone touches that time clock badge template, I swear to will have squirrels devour them ever so slowly and painfully!

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

By the way, have I ever mentioned how much I hate the FOX sports announcers? As if half the AL being made up of Yankees isn't ruining the All-Star Game, I have to put up with What's-His-Name making stupid jokes about Pudge listening to Yanni and what the runner at first base is saying to the first baseman in Spanish. I guess that's what the mute button was made for . . .
Another crazy day at The Workplace! Today was the day we were going to test our first time clock unit. The test unit was placed at Ashcom and we arrived there this morning to show some of the people how to use it. And in standard automation fashion we were set back a few days. The new cards wouldn't swipe on the old time clocks and a color coded badge card theme was also brought to life once we started talking about all the cards. Of course we printed way too many cards and didn't have cards that they wanted to use. However, on the plus side, employees seemed pleased with the new time clocks (just for the record, these time clocks were made entirely in-house, created, designed, and programmed by yours truly and Ashley) and things are looking up. We should have some great test data to work with by the end of this week, provided no one else wants any more changes to the look of the time card . . .

Monday, July 12, 2004

Well, after two very fun filled weeks, I wasn't even near ready to come back home yesterday. Sort of makes me want to be a counselor all year round. I'm sure Andy would love that! But it was nice to come back to place where you are challenged and missed. It was nice to see things stayed the same while I was gone here. Stupid stuff still happened at work and The Cove remained just the same. No real surprises there. It's too bad I couldn't blog while I was in Long Island because there is NO WAY I'm writing about all that happened there. If you want to know, you're just going to have to ask.

By the way, after catching up on blogs for about an hour, I appreciate Roman's and Amy's effort to put in as little effort into their blogs as possible. It saved me another hour of reading.