Archive for October 2006

Last night I had a server who's raid drives got messed up. My data center tech says the data is unrecoverable. Checked the air pressure in my tires and one was at18psi and the others were at 24psi. Max is 44psi so I would consider that low. Filled those puppies up to about 34psi. I think something else in my car is broken since it makes a rattle and feels like I lost a bunch of torque. I'll have to get with Robbie and see if he can identify it. First guess is that I need to replace a throw out bearing or replace the clutch. The clutch feels pretty worn down anyways so I think I would have to replace that soon regardless. My pumpkins are rotting pretty fast. My tooth is still broken so I have to go to the dentist. I don't know what else is broken but it sure seems like everything is. I'm kind of in between projects at work right now so today is pretty relaxing. There was a custom contest but I came into work after lunch so I missed it.

The last day or so I have been working on this side project that crawls the web and finds wordpress blogs. Then I log the URL and form information that you can post comments to. I can use this to create links on a bunch of web pages. I might also try to sell the data. I will probably do a bunch of related projects like this that crawl the internet to find specific data. It's pretty neat when you see how many pages it goes through. The only problem is that it eats up a ton of system resources so I can only run it at night or on my laptop at home while I am at work. I think if I sell the data I should be able to make a few bucks. Also my adsense sites are picking up a little. The last 7 days I've made more money than I did during all of September. Hopefully those sites continue to pick up even more!

Once again the fine art of pumpkin carving season is upon us! Judy did a cat. I did a ghost and trucker girl. Only 4 more days till Halloween! I don't know what I am going to be yet. I think I will just buy candy to give out and scare the little kids. I need to get some more fall decorations for the apartment too because we are seriously slacking in that department. I am going to get a shower now that I am covered in goop. Trick or treat!

Evan (9:35:08 PM): this sql exam doesnt look too hard
Evan (9:42:33 PM): heh
Evan (9:42:43 PM): minimum system requirements for sql 2000 enterprise
Evan (9:42:50 PM): pentium 166 with 64 mb ram
Rush (9:45:49 PM): rofl
Rush (9:46:05 PM): it will take 10 minutes to do a simple select statement with those specs
Evan (9:46:30 PM): hehehe
Evan (9:46:48 PM): select 1 + 1 As Result
Evan (9:46:58 PM): SqlError: Request Timed Out
Evan (9:47:47 PM): System Error: BUY A NEW DATABASE SERVER, IDIOT

At least we are smart. And pretty damn cool if you ask me.

I saw this when it first came out. And then I found one of my friends blogs and was reading his old posts and found this link again so I just had to post it as well. It's so classic!

A geeks guide to rejection

Friday night I went to the pumpkin patch with the girl and we picked out 3 pumpkins. We'll probably carve those babies up sometime this week. I got a book of designs/stencils. It came with a pumpkin scooper tool which I am hoping works well. I am going to find some recipets online for pumpkin pie and attempt to make one. Almost all day Saturday I spent working on this stuff for work. We have to fill out these communications reports (excel spreadsheets) and send them to our boss now which is really annoying. Not only that but our timesheet application sucks. That is why I am writing this application. It should make things a lot easier for us and help keep us organized and our clients up-to-date and happy. Hopefully I will get something extra for puttig in a lot of hard work for it ;-) Sunday I had a soccer game but the other team forfiet. I watched football and did stuff on the computer. I wanted to get my car cleaned today but I ended up going to get a hot dog from Costco with my boss. He asked me how my weekend was.... seems like it was pretty boring. Oh well.

Last night I went out and practiced with a new soccer team. This team is a lot more organized and have more players show up for practice. I got a good workout for once! I'll still finish out the season with my current team and move to this one afterwards. This week seems to be going very slow. I've had a lot to do at work. Yesterday I checked out pictures of the new Camaro on Flickr and I have to say that it is frustrating to look at pictures of such a sweet car and not be able to drive it! This will definately be my next car (unless I can get a Corvette!) My legs are sore but I think when I get home today I will run a few miles. I can't wait for the weekend so I can sleep and DO NOTHING! :-)

On the soccer field that is! Ya I scored a goal in my soccer game today. It was a header off of a free kick and was pretty sweet. At that time my team was down by 2 goals so it kind of sparked the team. We still went on to lost 3-2 however. I felt like I played well. The goals the other team scored were pretty cheap but that was because our goalie was out of town and we had a field player filling his position. Hopefully next week I can create a streak with another good game.

I updated my site this weekend. As you can see there are a bunch of icons at the bottom of every post. I don't think anyone reading this blog would use them but if I use my blog system for something more interresting there are people who would use them. They basically link to a bookmark service like del.icio.us (the first one) which is a way to bookmark a webpage. I also added a feature to add content other than blog posts. I used this to create my wishlist and will put some more things up there as well when I get around to it. I'll have to work on merging this new feature into the site search.

Work is keeping me pretty busy. I am doing well though. I think I can be the go-to guy which is pretty cool. The weather here has been nice lately. It feels like it is actually fall, which is the best time of the year! There is a pumpkin patch close by that I am planning to get a pumpkin at soon. I want to get a bunch of Halloween decorations too. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas... you can't beat the Fall!

Florida has hurricanes, Kansas has tornados, California has earthquakes, and New York has air planes. Nice! Not!

Tuesday during lunch I went fishing in one of the lakes at my work during lunch time. Didn't catch anything but it was the first time I had gone finishing here. I plan on going today or tomorrow as well. Last night I played some basketball with guys from work. I got a big scrape on my arm. Then Judy took me out to eat and we had a good time. Today seems pretty slow because there was no traffic coming to work. Maybe today was no school?

I will be going to Miami on Friday. UM plays FIU this weekend! I am going for UM though because I've never been a fan of the FIU football team.

I had an early soccer game today. We lost 1-0. My team sucks lol. Last weekend was awesome. I had to wake up very early and catch a flight at 6:45 AM. I got to San Jose at noon and met up with Evan at the airport. It was cool to finally meet him after working together and being friends online for 6 years. I got a rental car from Avis. My work gave me some code when I created my account that made me some kind of elite member. The cool thing about this is that when I go to get my car they have my name and a parking space number that I go to. They keys were already in the car and you just show your ID to the toll booth dude before you leave. When you return the car you just get a receipt from a parking attendant and then catch the bus back to the airport. So it was really easy to get a car which started the trip off on the right note. It was about a 15 minute ride to Silicon Valley. I thought it was going to be a real valley with nice landscaping and everything but it was just a street with a bunch of technology compnies on it. My expectations were definately higher than what Silicon Valley actually is. The yahoo campus was neat though. As you can see from my pictures they have a basketball court, sand volleyball, game room, gym, and a big cafeteria. I thought the Yahoo campus was nice overall. Everything was yellow and purple. They had all of this funky furniture around. The first thing Evan and I did was register for Hackday. We got a bunch of gifts including a Hackday t-shirt, 256mb usb flash drive, YPN (Yahoo Publisher Network) thurmus, Hackday branded highlighter, a bunch of stickers, Yahoo branded jelly belly's. I took a picture of all of the stuff once I got home but I haven't posted it yet. Later on O' Reilly put out 200 "Yahoo Hacks" books so I picked up one. Before Hackday actually started there were a bunch of workshops. Evan and I went to the Hackday keynote, something by the creator of PHP, and a workshop on ZoneTag and Upcoming. The ZoneTag one was really cool. This is the technology of uploading pictures from your phone and marking the geolocation based on cell tower information or GPS coordinates.

Ev an and I setup our tents on the lawn in the middle of the 4 yahoo buildings at this point. Hackday starts not too much longer with pizza and beer. Yahoo ordered a bunch of kegs. They just kept bringing them in the entire weekend :-) That first night they must have ordered 200 pizza's. Evan and I bumped into a yahoo database guy while eating. He was telling us about how much data Yahoo has which really is a lot! They had to build their own database because no other commercial database would handle how much data they have. After the pizza there was a concert by Beck. It was neat but at that time it was getting cold. Afterwards I worked on my program all through the night.. I went to be at about 1 or 2 am which is really 3 or 5 am due to the time difference. When I woke up there were probably 200 boxes of Krispy Kreme donuts! I have to say that Yahoo did a really good job of feeding everyone. Not only did they buy this stuff but there were always snacks around, fountain drinks, and coffee. I finished my program Saturday morning. At 3:00 the presentations started. There were some really really cool ones. One of my favorites was the Yahoo Mail - Flickr mashup. It used keywords from your emails and picked out an image from flickr which matched those words. So it was image association which seemed like a cool concept. My presentation went well except that I forgot to tell everyone that they could download it from my website. My program is a wallpaper rotator that uses images from Flickr. A few people came up to me after my presentation to ask me where they could download it but I didn't get the feeling I would win anything - which I did.

Evan's presentation went very well. Everyone was saying "Dont let that guy go home" lol. He did "Search Hack with Dynamic Tagging - Semantic Search using Yahoo Search API for Seed Documents" and it won him 3rd place! The 1st place hack was creative but most of the category winners weren't that great. When it was all over I grabbed an extra shirt for Judy. Then Evan and I packed up our tents and headed to our hotel by the airport. Next day we went home. Overall the trip was cool.

Since I was on a Flickr kick, I integrated it into my site so that I now have an image gallery. :-) The rest of today I am watching football.