Losing my tots

Yesterday started a bit unusually. Katie and I went with my parents and Taylor and his Katie to Golden Corral for a breakfast buffet. It had been a while since any of us had been to a buffet style restaurant, and as such we had forgotten how gross the people can be, stuffing themselves with fake eggs and piles of sausage, slathered in cheese sauce. Because of our surroundings, we ate much more than the normal oat meal or biscuit breakfast. I filled my belly with biscuits and gravy, eggs, coffee, bacon and hash browns.

Later, I was actually glad that I'd done a bigger than normal breakfast, because due to a birthday event for Katie's uncle and a friend of ours (Indiana Jones followed by a park party), we didn't end up eating again until 4 (bad news for the sensitive belly here). I did pretty well with the stomach problems, and played some kickball... but I also managed to get overheated, and pull some leg muscles.

It turns out that my leg muscles weren't prepared for my "enhanced" gravitational changes (larger belly). Where they would normally be adequately prepared for gradually slowing my body's kinetic energy while running, they now acted like Honda Civic brakes on a Hummer... they were over worked, slightly damaged and almost useless. I took two or three tumbles, the second to last followed by an attempt at resurfacing, launching me directly into another person.

After kickball, Katie and I came back to our air conditioner and lounged around until we figured out what to do with ourselves for the rest of the night. At 9:15, we had finally decided on renting a movie from Blockbuster and heading to Sonic for some dinner - a blatant violation of my no eating past 8 o'clock rule. I didn't care, though. Two meals in a day is not conducive to the belly I've been cultivating.

So, we ate, watched Les Miserables until after midnight and by 5 o'clock AM this morning I was Les Miserable... hunched over the toilet, losing my tots. I have noone to blame but myself. I ate a big breakfast, ruined my daily food schedule (which is vital to the preventing the Simpson stomach), overexterted myself in the summer heat, ate fatty food well past 8 o'clock and went to bed late. It was the perfect storm.

So, this morning, I spent time on the couch eating cough drops to soothe my newly burned throat, then skipped church to catch up on rest and here I am after a tiny lunch, writing about losing my tots, my quadriceps throbbing from straining to keep my upper body upright while kicking and running. At least I'm still young at heart.

Problem solving

Image by: Liz Henry

Lately I've been doing a lot of coding in my spare time - partly motivated by a desire to make my job easier at work (for applications directed toward job o' mine). Mainly, though, I'm motivated to write code because it's the problem solving domain I know best... and problem solving is probably my favorite mental exercise.

Venturing out of my expertise in coding, my problem solving drive causes me a good bit of grief... for instance, when I think that I should be able to figure out how to knock down a wall in our house and frame another inner wall up in another place. The wife doesn't look kindly on that... or my insistence that with no woodworking skills - only common sense, geometry and tools - I could figure out how to make a basic computer desk. So, to keep the wife (and thus myself) happy I've resorted to writing small, but useful applications.

My latest experiment has been to write a budgeting application. With it I'd like to be able to:

• Import CSV file of Bank Transactions


• Categorize list of transactions


• Intelligently apply previous category choices to newly imported/other transactions


• Draw pie chart for percentage of spending in each category over a date range


• Set budgets for each category

The last item I'd like is to be able to finish the application with a flexible enough design to release it on the internet for others to use... which I've never done.

I've begun coding on the project, and so far have been able to add transactions via a CSV download from my bank, apply categories to those transactions and draw a test pie chart of our spending by category (or lack thereof).

I'm getting to the point of writing the piece where I try to intelligently assign categories to previously uncategorized transactions. I think I may have tried to bite off more than I can chew, but I'm excited by the prospect of trying to solve the problem. There may be a simple solution to identifying patterns, but I think it'll take a good amount of thought to come up with the right solution.

I think I'll break the pie chart out into a separate component (maybe it'll be useful to someone else online). Oh, and one more thing, I'm learning LINQ to SQL, which won't mean much to non-programmers... or even programmers who don't program in Microsoft's .NET environment, but it's pretty exciting for rapid application development. Much of the grunt work related to Data Access Layers is done automatically. Finally, I can get directly to the good programming without the tedious Data Access Components.

Anywho, like I said, I'm looking forward to getting some of these things worked out, and hopefully I'll have enough momentum to carry this project through... something I'm not great at unless being paid to do so. I've already delayed two other projects for this, one of which we (another programmer and I) are going to attempt to market (in a small way).

DirecTV... you almost got me

Katie and I have been talking about cancelling cable for quite some time now. We watch it ocassionally, mostly on Saturday and Sunday mornings when we're just lounging around. I also watch it mainly during lunch when I come home to check on pluto and catch up on sportscenter.

So, today I went online to take a look at our DirecTV account to try to decipher when my two year commitment would be ending. I couldn't find a definite date, so I sent the friendly DirecTV staff an e-mail. "KINDLY LET ME KNOW WHEN YOU ARE GOING TO STOP FORCING ME TO PAY YOU... AND HOW MUCH WILL IT COST TO BREAK UP WITH YOU?". They said that my contract would be up in January of 2010... which was not only a dirty lie, but two months shy of what I thought would've been three years.

I called in and yelled at some folks for a few minutes, and the problem was identified. They tried to sneak in a contract extension on me when I moved... even though this house already had everything hooked up, and I cancelled the direcTV movers (any "professional" installation or hardware upgrade extends a two year contract by a year). We got the problem resolved... and of course I mean that I threatened to smack an indian in the earhole and they put some pep in their problem solving step.

So, we also now know that it'll be 12.50 for each remaining month, which is less than I thought it would be. With the equivalent of two months payment necessary to cancel, I think we're going to make the leap and cancel soon. I've already hooked Katie's laptop up to the TV of Hugeosity® (setting the power mode to stay on with the laptop lid closed). We also have hulu and ABC.com at our disposal as well as sports websites to give us our TV fixes... speaking of which I have to relinquish control of the TV here to Katie and get some exercise

When ducks attack! and more...!

Image by: Martin Cathrae

This weekend was a good one, namely because we had unusual events scheduled for ourselves. All our weekend events provided an escape from slipping into the rut we've made in our weekends, where we rent a few movies, do laundry and yardwork and gripe at each other because of said chores.

Friday night Katie had a girl's night scheduled with the ladies from the church... which meant I was left alone to play. I took off work early from work and took care of getting my oil changed (tangent: I love new cars and only having to change oil every 5000 miles) and picking up some entertainment for myself. Blockbuster was calling my name, and Wii Mario Kart and There Will Be Blood had escaped my grasp for long enough... so I went by and got both (and honestly, had GTA4 been in at blockbuster I would've played it and been ashamed).

Katie and I played a few games of Mario Kart Wii (with the wii wheel, which is not as gimicky as it seems) before she left, after which I played against some other ten year olds in China and elsewhere. I dished out as much beatdown as Mario and I could muster, then switched over to the movie of the night, There Will Be Blood. The movie doesn't merit much of a comment other than to say that Daniel Day Lewis plays an effective psycho, deserved the Oscar... and that I stopped watching after an hour and a half of giving the movie a chance to be likable or having a redeeming quality.

After Katie got back Friday night, I'd had my first substantial amount of caffiene in days during the movie and gaming session, so I decided to make my restlessness useful and clean up the house. I did dishes, picked up Katie's shoes from all over the house, picked up old mail, even took out the trash... drugs are a wonderful thing.

Saturday morning Katie went with Ann to garage sales and to the fancy area on Youree to do some shopping while I took care of some much needed yard work. The front yard got mowed, edged, weed-ate and the back yard got the mowing treatment. I hulked out and broke the handle on pull start mechanism the weed-eater and ended up not being able to start the thing again, so I only mowed the back... leaving weeds around... providing the possibility for the day's next adventure for pluto and me.

An hour or so after finishing up, Pluto was getting restless. Actually, he's only got two modes of operation: tuckered out and nuclear-powered energized mini-pony. So, I took him out back to "play ball" as I call it. I threw his red ball for him, and as he reached the half way point in our back yard a duck (that's right, a full size, live duck) flies out of a bush we've recently trimmed down to a nub, that's now overgrown with weeds.

Pluto sees the duck, and goes into criminally insane mini-pony mode - a mentality that not even Cesar Milan could've predicted. The duck tries his best to hop skip and jump to start to fly out of the back part of the yard directly toward me, and pluto is right on his tail. Our little ninja duck friend made a narrow escape over the chainlink fence and hopped around a bit on the other side of the fence... probably time enough just to thank his lucky ducky stars... then got a bit of a running start before flying over the neighbors fence out of sight.

In retrospect, I see that:
1) Getting pluto realistic animal toys (especially shaped like animals he might encounter) is probably not the best idea.
2) Ducks are scary (*mouseover)
3) I need to dispose of the shorts I was wearing

The remainder of the day wasn't as exciting. Katie and I settled in to watch another movie - Death At a Funeral... which was decent, but not worth paying to rent.

Today was filled up with Church, a baptism service out in Greenwood on the property of some of our congregation's members and a potluck directly afterwards. The property out there is pretty amazing, with a house built at least 80 years ago on a man made lake with horses, cows and a goat.

Directly after, Katie dropped me off at the movie theater in town to see Iron Man with Taylor and Sami. That, in contrast to the other movies of the weekend was worth the money. I don't know that I would've enjoyed it as much without seeing it in theaters, but it was another comic book movie done right.

That's the extent of our weekend... more exciting than normal but definitely good due to mixing things up and still allowing myself some alone time for video games and quiet.