A funny thing happened on the way to fixing my cable modem

It seems like every time I go to Ruston I return to Shreveport to find my cable down. I'll have elaborate plans for what I'm gonna look up or do online when I get back, but the cable internet will be down and my plans will be foiled.

Today, in normal, maddening fashion when I returned from Ruston our internet was down. I went batty immediately, grabbing clumps of cables, handfuls at a time, cursing the day we subscribed to time warner. They've done us wrong lately.

After disconnecting and reconnecting most of the wires within 10 feet of the cable modem, I realized that my attempts to fix the problem were doing nothing to help the situation. I still couldn't even get the PC/Activity light to stay on. The lights would blink for a few seconds, I'd even get them all to stay on for a sliver of a second and then as soon as they'd arrived they were gone.

I thought to myself that I'd never seen this before. It's almost like a computer that's gone into standby mode. This same cable modem used to blink it's "online" light when the connection would go down (every second thursday). It was a perplexing mystery as to why in the world this could happen.

I tried hooking up the Xbox... maybe the router wasn't sending a signal to the cable modem to indicate that it was connected. Maybe that's why the standby mode was activated. WHO EVEN NEEDS A STANDBY MODE ON A CABLE MODEM!?

That wasn't the problem either. The Xbox didn't wake the cable modem from its standby slumber. Logical thought was getting me nowhere, so I decided to take a leap of faith and call the support line.

To my knowledge, they never gave a number with the information they left with us. They hooked us up, gave us a packet of information on what sites to visit when you need help and left... wait just a minute here! They gave us this crap packet here that list sites you can go to when you're having problems with your internet? That's like a phone company giving you an 800 number to call in case your phone gets disconnected.

I called Katie to ask her to look up the number. After a bit of searching, she produced the number and I dialed away. The woman I spoke to (At 9 o'clock PM on a Sunday BTW) told me that she saw my cable modem on the network, and said it currently had an IP address.

I tried to explain to her that all I saw was the standby light. She asked if I could press a button. I said I've never seen a button, but I'll look. I looked and to my horror there was a button on top, as far away from the standby light as possible. As soon as I pressed the button, it turned back on.

It turns out that my Mom pressed the button while trying to fiddle with the modem this morning while it threw a short connection tantrum. She had mistakenly pressed the button and I, not knowing that the button even existed, managed to disconnect half my brothers cable equipment/internet crap and make a call to tech support - a crushing blow to the ego of a technologically inclined person like myself.

I'm back on the net now, as you can see, and will now commence my self cleansing ritual having spoken to a tech support person. Oh, and I suppose I'll shoot a nasty letter to Motorola letting them know that the button is too easy to press (since it's on top and isn't marked very well) and that the button should probably be associated with the light that indicates its status.

International Monkey Day: July 30th!

I've gotten to spend the entire weekend with Katie. To celebrate, I declared yesterday International Monkey Day (since I call her Monkey). We got to eat where she wanted to eat, see the movie she wanted to see and I offered to buy her a little something of what she wanted.

She ended up with a new shirt that says "Boys are cute, but Monkeys are cuter!", The Wizard Of Oz DVD along with the original Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on DVD. We finished International Monkey Day in great style, with a pieworks pizza here at the apartment relaxing in front of the TV.

I ended up with a few things I needed, socks, undershirts, and a broadband adapter for the gamecube... all absolute necessities, I assure you. I'm gonna see about installing warp pipe on my computer some time later this week to see about this Double Dash online business. If it's all it's cracked up to be, I should be in for hours of fun racing against other people online.

You know, gamecube really has been a flop in the online gaming area. I might never have stopped playing Donkey Konga if I were able to show off my elitenessity on a world-wide level. Then again I may have been utterly shamed by a 13 yr. old Chinese girl and been forced into hermitage.

I digress...

The weekend was great, and it's taken my mind off of the stress at work. We've got a few hours left and I think we're gonna go to Wal-mart and get Katie some groceries and then head to Chili's for the Ruston Ritual of double monkey fattening.

Katie and Million Dollar Baby

*Warning* I discuss the type of ending Million Dollar Baby has. I don't offer any spoilers, but I do talk about the end in general. So, if you're planning to see the movie, skip this post.***

The Katie doesn't handle sad movies very well. We watched the Notebook a month or two ago and she was sobbing for the rest of the night. Granted , it was one of the most heart wrenching (?) movies that I've seen in a long time, but this movie really affected her mood. There's really nothing I can do to make her feel better, but try to distract her and keep her mind off of sad things.

Tonight we watched Million Dollar Baby and she cried through hugs and comforting for a good 10 minutes after the movie was over. Craziness. Just thought I'd post about that.

There's a part of me that believes everyone needs a good cry every once in a while, so maybe this is therapeutic... Either way, I don't mind it. Just wish I could do something to help more quickly.

The best $250 I've ever spent.

Several weeks ago I made the mistake of buying a sirius satellite receiver. I'd had it for three weeks or so before deciding that my money could be better spent on some other device for my digital music/entertainment needs. Within the week I'd gone and bought a silver iPod mini.

Originally, I had two reasons for avoiding an iPod of any type. First and most importantly, I didn't believe that I'd be allowed to use it at work. We have to be able to hear the phone and visit with other programmers when the need arises. Since my workplace is sometimes strict about certain issues, I assumed it was not allowed. Secondly, I was growing tired of my mp3 collection.

Well, here I am, almost two months (I guess) into owning my iPod and I'm extremely satisfied with my purchase. The iPod has been OK'd at work and I've revamped my mp3 collection. So, now I'm able to spend my day at work, concentrating on my programming without being interrupted by loud conversations in nearby offices.

I've used my iPod (with the iTrip FM transmitter) on trips to Baton Rouge and Austin, at work each day, on the treadmill here at home and in the car at lunch. I'm fortunate enough to have chosen an cd player for my car that has an auxilliary port on the front that I can hook my iPod into directly.

It gets me through the day at work, and made both of those trips bearable. So, if you have the chance to buy one, and an opportunity to make use of your mp3 collection and an iPod... buy one.

Trip to Baton Rouge

Our yearly user meetings took place over the last two days at work. We were scheduled to hold meetings on the 26th in Shreveport at the Holiday Inn with another meeting the next day in Baton Rouge at the Louisiana School for the Deaf.

Yesterday's meeting went well. It was the first time in a year or so that I've spoken in front of a crowd of over 15 people, the last time being a speech class during the last summer of my college career. As far as I know, I did pretty well. I remember most of what I said, I didn't twitch, tremble or stutter, and managed to avoid wetting myself. I suppose those are the most important criteria by which I judge my public speaking occasions.

I only became nervous when, at the conclusion of our meeting, one of our ladies at the back began tremoring. She was diabetic and thought that her sugar was dropping rapidly. We gave her peppermints, orange juice and coke which all seemed to do nothing for the shaking and chills she experienced. She was getting worse, so we called an ambulance and it turned out that her blood sugar hadn't dropped as everyone expected, it had actually spiked. Her blood sugar was 252 when the EMT's arrived and took her blood sugar. I hope to find out tomorrow how she's doing, but I hope she's well.

Today's meeting was to cover the same material as yesterday, with an additional emphasis on the existing features in our software. We were told that a few potential clients would be dropping by to see what our software suite had to offer, but they never materialized. So, we were left with the same old speech we'd (my co-worker and I) given the day before.

Everyone seemed to be excited about the changes we've put in to place, including myself. It caught me off guard a little bit, to be excited by the changes I've been working on for so long. I've never really been able to see how the changes we're implementing would actually affect the users. For that matter, I've never really written anything (software related) that improved the quality of anyone's job. Today, though, I felt good about the changes, especially after the meeting today when a few ladies were telling us how fond they were of the system.

Apart from the business side of the trip, there's little to tell. We rented a Kia Optima which rode nicely, but was pretty much the base model with power windows, locks, but no other frills. I brought the Ipod mini on the trip along with the Griffin iTrip (FM transmitter for the iPod) and my co-worker and I listened to 4 cd's worth of the Order of the Phoenix - Harry Potter book. I suppose the last note of interest was the recliner in my hotel room... I love recliners.

I also saw Daniel, a friend from high school and college, who works for our company servicing clients down south who are outside of our immediate area. It was good to finally have someone there other than Kristina (the aforementioned co-worker) to talk to. It was good to catch up and find out what's been going on with him and his wife... that doesn't sound like correct grammar, but I think it is.

Now, I have my first user meeting out of the way and should be able to work continuously on the finishing our new program in time for my deadline.

Workity work

First, work is getting hectic. I've worked from 7:30 AM to about 6PM most of the last two weeks, and on weekends a more reasonable amount of about 2-3 hours. It's pretty much just like putting in an extra day a week, and it's helping me get things done more quickly. I figure the more time I spend now, the less I'll have to spend in the next two weeks before the deadline comes.

The job has taken much more time than we realized, which is understandable since no one at our company has attempted to redesign an existing program to be part of a real-time transmission system. I didn't have a good understanding of what was going on with the program originally, since I'd only been hired at the onset of this project. We're getting the work done though, and hopefully we'll finish up late this week with some of the trickier, small features we've been waiting to implement.

This week we've got our annual user meeting to let our users throughout the state see the changes that have been made to update our programs to the new DOE system. Kristina and I will have the first meeting in Shreveport on the 26th and the second in Baton Rouge on the 27th. I'm looking forward to getting feedback from the users and getting to meet them.

House Sitting until Sat. Morning.

In a surprising move, Katie's Mom asked me to house sit while she's away to Dallas, beginning tonight and concluding Saturday when Katie comes into town. Sources close to Katie's mother said that while she was reluctant, she had run out of possible house-sitter options and had no choice but to ask me.

More on this story as it develops.

Movable Type 3.2 (beta)

I'm excited about the new release of movable type, version 3.2 (beta). With the new release there have been a number of major improvements, namely in the way the administration page functions. I've only just installed it, and this is my first post using it, so it'll be a while before I'm familiar enough with it to say what's better. However, movable type is posting a series of blog entries titles Our 32 Favorite Features in Movable Type 3.2.

For those of you who may be using a small blogging application, or a custom solution, you may want to give this release a look when 3.2 goes to final release. I originally wrote my own cruddy little blog app, but I was never going to be able to develop a program that was as full-featured as this, or any other commercial blogging suite. So, if you're in the same boat I was, give it up... I think you'll agree later that life's much better with a more full-featured blogging client.

I've never been so happy to be online!

I'm at home... on the internet. I'm happy.

For some reason, yesterday the cable went out again, for the second time in a week. The first time it was down for three days, this time apparently for about 24 hours. The internet, down. The cable, down.

What does this mean for me, you ask? Immediate anxiety. What am I to do? What am I gonna do for entertainment? Read a book...? psh. Groom myself? Who has the time.

The neighbor directly behind us is installing a swimming pool. As with most manual labor projects, a bunch of men huddled around some plans and talked about what needed to be done. The very next item on the agenda was to ignore anything that was vital in those plans and truck ahead with the current task. The vital point they ignored this time was the underground cabling where they were digging.

In their digging they managed to cut our cable (maybe others as well... who knows). So, for three days we were without cable and internet. Yesterday, the day after the man came out to fix our cable by running a new cable to some magical cable box, the cable went out again.

So, to my surprise (and my dad's) I came home and sat down at the computer out of habit. I punched up a website and wham, bam, thank you ma'am, there it was. I didn't even think about how amazing it was until I realized that I wasn't supposed to have internet today.

Here I sit in a state of pure bliss. Katie's coming into town in a few hours and I get to kill time with my other lady friend, my computer, until then. Who could ask for anything better?

Blog problems and Overtime

There haven't been many updates to the blog recently. Two factors have contributed to this.

First, the Intermittent Server 500 error that haunted many Movable Type users is still haunting me... and I can't get my host to act quickly to investigate the problem.

Secondly, My big deadline at work is coming on August 8th and I'm behind in my work. In college this lack of progress would've been due to procrastination and general laziness. However, this time I'm actually trying. I started working on this program overhaul full time a little over three months ago, and it's no small programming task.

I've never had a real need to use the cliche 'The Devil is in the Details' before. Now I feel like I live that cliche every day. My boss believes that conforming to a state issue standard, and overhauling our system to send XML to the state should be a simple issue of slapping some code into a save "routine" (as he calls it) and transmitting XML to the DOE(ducation) from there.

It's difficult to express to someone who's not intimately involved in this project how much work is required to complete it effectively. This is the major issue behind my anxiety and a catalyst for most of the problems I've encountered in my time at work. The boss keeps saying "I expected this to be done by now", and each time my feeling of job security creeps further away. I thought, at first, that I could explain the situation to him (along with my co-project-worker) and he would see that he keeps completely oversimplifying the task. Things just don't work that way... namely because he's paying for our time here I suppose.

Anywho, we're finally getting to the point to where a school district of ours will begin testing our software early next week. The state is also working quickly when I test my XML transmissions against their validator/processing code and find errors(Yes, I'm doing their testing for them for some reason). So, we're inching closer to completion, and my weekends and nights (I've been asked to work both until deadline) are inching away.

I hope I can get back to posting regularly because it's become a nice outlet for me. The project will be done soon and the host I use should be able to figure this issue out (if they're interested in doing so). After those two things are outta the way I can get back to normalicity.

Another funny sign thanks to an auto dealership

I spotted this sign on the way to San Antonio. It cracked me up.

Dooce.com, the blog of hilariment

In my time off today I've been revisiting some of the sites I used to frequent when I had time to enjoy the internet. The site I've gotten the most pleasure from today is Dooce.com, a blog written by a young mother in Mormon country. It's witty, well-written, and I believe that her site led me to liquidweb if I remember correctly.

Anywho, it's a great site. Of the current entries, I came closest to losing control of my bladder while reading her post about her sister coming to pick up her beagle (her sister's beagle).

Voltron got served!

Click, watch, chuckle. Repeat.

Notice the parody of DMX's 'get it on the floor' in the background... Good stuff.

Advanced mIRC Integration Plugin

A few months ago I found the Advanced mIRC Integration Program which allowed me to copy the name of the current song in winamp. Since I wanted to post this info to my blog every once in a while, I set up the program to paste preformatted text each time I press ctrl-alt-z.

In order to format the now playing text in a way that I thought was visially appealling I created a class in my CSS file called "nowplaying" that creates a border, a green background and a monkey image in the background. The plugin automatically pastes this code for me each time I press ctrl-alt-z:

<div class="nowplaying"><b>I'm listening to:</b>
<br/>%name</div>

Note: %name is replaced by the name of the song currently playing in winamp at the time I request the plugin's text.

I had to go and reconfigure everything today because I reinstalled winamp without thinking a few weeks ago and had no record of what program I used to copy the mp3 info to the clipboard. Now, I'm back in action with the "I'm listening to" footer, so expect to see some more of those.

Gallery Remote slow transfer problems and lockups

I've been using Gallery for a while as my photo album on this site and it's done me well. However, I've always had a big issue with the gallery remote program that you can use to upload a big group of photos at once.

When you choose to add photos to your site you can use a form (html form), or a java applet (big or small version). The java applet is called Gallery Remote. This is the version I always choose because it supports uploading in large batches, and I can preview the images I upload... basically it just provides a heck of a lot more features than a simple form-based upload method.

After using it a few times, I realized that most of the uploads would stop after getting about halfway through the list of pictures I'd selected to upload. I never really knew what the problem was, but since I usually post the pics in haste after downloading them from the camera I never really took the time to look into the problem. I would just cancel the stalled upload and start a new upload session where I left off. It was annoying, but functional and I think it was the one thing that I didn't like about Gallery.

Well, today I looked to the Gallery site for answers and realized that the Gallery Remote has a downloadable counterpart. It's still a java-based program, but it has a windows installer and comes with ImageMagick, a program that performs image manipulations. After using this program for a few minutes, I can already tell that it's a much more responsive program. It uploaded about 50 pictures in a matter of a couple minutes... which will of course depend on upload speeds, but the "preparing picture for upload" message wasn't on the screen for very long at all.

So, if you're using Gallery and have had similar problems, download the locally installed version from the Gallery website.

The Austin Pictures are up...

For anyone who's interested, the pictures I took in Austin (or some of the decent ones anyway) are up in the gallery.

I'll try to start going back, for my own benefit, later to add descriptions to each of the pictures while the memories are fresh. There are some pictures that probably won't make any sense later, such as the one with the state trooper leaning over a little girl in the capital.

More pictures will appear later this weekend when I head to Ruston to seize Katie's computer and recover the pictures we unloaded there this weekend. I ended up taking about 250 pictures and a few little movies this weekend, but most are junk... I'm still getting the hang of my camera and remembering what I've learned previously about taking pics with it.

Enjoy.

Intermittent Server code 500 errors.

Thank goodness! Movable type recently posted an entry to their news blog to let their users know that they're aware of an issue I've been having recently.

I've been driving myself crazy for the last few days trying to figure out what's been causing my site to give me errors (premature end of script headers & 500: Internal Server Errors). I even spent some of my vacation time in Austin trying to discover the source of the problem.
I didn't get very far.

It seems that an upgrade to Cpanel has caused some driver issues with those of us using mySQL to store our data. This actually makes more sense to me, since I hadn't modified my installation of MT for a month or so. I didn't think I could have done anything to screw my blog up, but I didn't think that the folks updating Cpanel would introduce a bug either. Anywho, they're on top of the issue and I hope to see a solution soon.

Engagement, Check

Katie and I are officially engaged.

I'd been secretly shopping for rings and pricing different items for a while but when I thought about how I'd like to propose, I decided Austin would be a good place to do it. So, I went and bought a ring but had to wait for it to be sent for resizing and a different setting. Friday I picked up the ring, and Saturday morning we headed out of town to Austin, where we are now.

We were sitting on the porch of the hotel where we're staying, and talking about how nice it is here and how we'd like to have a porch with a swing... and puppies and such. After talking about our future for a bit I told her that I got her something and produced the ring, which I'd been hiding in my pocket all day. I asked her to marry me and she said yes... so it's official. I'll have to post some pics of her, giddy with a ring on her finger.

Anywho, she's not stopped smiling since last night, and I'm elated about the event too. Now, we can get to planning the next step in our lives.

A big fat happy birthday goes out to the Katie today

Katie turns 23 today. Why, I remember when she was just a lass of 14 with braces from ear to ear and barely a scruff of hair on her chin. That's all changed now.

Tonight, we celebrate at Posadas in official faux-Mexican style. The waiters will most likely sing a rousing bout of Felíz cumpleaños.

I couldn't keep a secret, so she already has my present, a Canon S500 digital camera. My parents got her a little somethin' and I'm sure her family will get her some accompanying goodies.

So, if you see her running round Ruston looking just a little bit wiser, tell her happy birthday (and ignore the extra wrinkle).